57,000 Years Is Too Old for a Young Puppy

Inflated age is not the only questionable claim about a frozen wolf pup found buried in permafrost.

Another frozen puppy has been found in Arctic permafrost. This one is even more complete than the one reported last year (3 Dec 2019). Except for its eyes, the entire body was found intact. Last year’s wolf pup from Siberia was said to be 18,000 years old. The scientists are claiming that this one from the Yukon territory in Canada is over three times as old – 57,000 years. Is that credible?

Ancient wolf pup mummy in Yukon permafrost from 57,000 years ago (Science Daily). A miner came upon a surprise.

While water blasting at a wall of frozen mud in Yukon, Canada, a gold miner made an extraordinary discovery: a perfectly preserved wolf pup that had been locked in permafrost for 57,000 years. The remarkable condition of the pup, named Zhùr by the local Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in people, gave researchers a wealth of insights about her age, lifestyle, and relationship to modern wolves. The findings appear December 21 in the journal Current Biology….

One of the most important questions about Zhùr that the researchers sought to answer was how she ended up preserved in permafrost to begin with. It takes a unique combination of circumstances to produce a permafrost mummy.

Since a specimen like this required rapid burial, the researchers came up with a story that the pup was left behind in its den when the den collapsed. But how could its mother dig a den in permafrost? If it was not permafrost at the time, how did this warm-blooded mammal become frozen so quickly, and stay frozen for 57,000 years? It looks just like the other puppy from Siberia that they say was a third of this one’s age. Is something wrong with the dating methods? Could these two have been entombed in the same event? If so, it was not a “uniformitarian” event, but something highly unusual and unique, since many large mammoths are also found buried in permafrost.

57,000-year-old mummified wolf pup discovered in Canadian permafrost (New Scientist). This article says that the mummy was found in 2016, but turned over to scientists at Des Moine University for analysis. It tells how scientists came up with the age:

The researchers used DNA analysis and carbon dating to determine that the pup lived around 57,000 years ago, during the Last Glacial Period, a time when polar and mountain ice sheets were extensive across Earth. Meachen says wolves in this period would typically eat musk oxen and caribou, but when the researchers analysed Zhùr’s diet, they found it mostly consisted of fish, particulalyr [sic] salmon. This suggests the pup and her mother were hunting in rivers during her short life, a behaviour still seen in modern wolves in that area during the summer months.

Both articles try to drag evolutionary theory into the story, talking about how this pup seems to be descended from the “common ancestor” of gray wolves, but there doesn’t seem to be any essential difference. Since most canids can interbreed readily, they must be in the same genus. If they behaved the same way and ate the same food as modern wolves, who is to say they were not the same basic species? And if this pup was eating fish, indicating it was summertime when it died, how did permafrost form fast enough to preserve the body in such detail without any decay?

Both articles also tried to drag “climate change” into the report.

Questioning Age Claims

Radiocarbon dating is useful for centuries or a few millennia as long as they can be cross-checked by written records, but the results become more dubious farther back. One of CEH’s contributing scientists, Dr Henry Richter, ran experiments with radiocarbon dating at Caltech when it was a fairly new method. He describes what he learned about it in his new autobiography My Life (Oct 2020, p. 35). In one experiment to calibrate the equipment, he took recently plucked persimmon leaves into a concrete tunnel where the radioactive counter could be shielded from cosmic rays (which might have modified the results). The radiocarbon age should have been zero, because any C14 in the leaves would not have had time to decay.

See our biography of Dr Henry Richter by clicking the photo.

So, an interesting thing happened to the persimmon leaves. When I did the age calculation, it came up with a number of -1500 years!  It took a little while to come up with the explanation of a negative time since death of the leaves. In the early 1950’s America was doing nuclear testing in Nevada, with atmospheric tests. A couple times I remember reports of some minor nuclear fall-out in the Los Angeles area from the Nevada tests. All we could think of was that some radioactive material landed on the persimmon leaves, and ended up in the carbon dioxide gas that I was measuring. This made the gas higher in the 14-to-12 ratio than the normal atmosphere, hence the opposite of radioactive decay. So, it made me a bit suspicious of the results of radio carbon dating of ancient items.

Today, the anomaly from nuclear tests is a well-known correction that radiocarbon labs take into account, but is it a uniform correction world-wide? How trustworthy is the correction factor as time goes on? Radiocarbon experts publish a calibration curve from time to time that labs use to date things, but the curve only corrects for known anomalies like the one that surprised Richter and his thesis advisor. Dr Richter continues writing about other causes for suspicion of published dates:

In ch. 7, Richter explains the magnetic field decrease problem.

But I later decided that there are other things that could affect radio carbon dating. The primary one is that one must assume that when the object died, that the 14-to-12 ratio is the same as it is now. We do not have samples of the air from previous times. My study of the history of the earths’ magnetic field has revealed that the magnetic field is slowly decreasing, about 5% per century. If that is true, thousands of years ago the magnetic field would be much stronger than it is today. A stronger magnetic field would reduce the number of energetic particles that enter our atmosphere. So, there would be fewer of these formed, hence a lower natural ratio of 14-to-12, giving the appearance of a loss or decay of the carbon-14, hence an apparent older age.

It is something to think about, he concludes, when hearing scientists announce ages of ancient objects: “they may not be as old as the method implies.”

The other method used on the Yukon pup – DNA analysis – is even more fraught with error. Scientists make assumptions about how fast DNA would decay in 57,000 years, but such estimates are dependent on temperature and other environmental factors. And if any damage were detected, how can DNA survive in some dinosaur fossils, which are thought to be over a thousand times older? If by DNA analysis they mean the “molecular clock hypothesis,” that would depend on assumptions of evolutionary rates. Those, however, can differ drastically depending on assumptions of mutation rates and divergence rates.

The real driving force behind dating estimates for things older than human history is the geologic column. All dates must fit the scheme, so that Darwin has the time to evolve brains from bacteria. Geologists have this all worked out with strata divided into eras, epochs and periods, and evolutionists fit their timeline into the scheme. By consensus, the Pleistocene Epoch goes from 2.6 million Darwin Years to 11,700 years ago. Within each epoch, strata are subdivided into finer labels. Inductees into the Darwin Party [i.e., students] memorize these kinds of boundary dates to pass the tests for graduation into the Party. But who ever questions the assumptions and their underlying evolutionary worldview?

The geologic-column scheme is for memorizing, not for questioning. To students trained in the scheme, it becomes second nature, a framework into which every observation must be fitted. The classification of the layer in which the puppies were found gives the scientists the “official” date for announcing through the lapdog media. Most science reporters wouldn’t know how to ask questions about these numbers. Those who do know how to ask questions have learned to keep their mouths shut.

So even if two identical-looking puppies in permafrost are said to have died 39,000 years apart, and if the “older” one expired ten times as far back as all recorded human history, the consensus just yawns and doesn’t even think about it. Evolutionary scientists couldn’t think outside the box if their lives depended on it. They are scientists, and all outside their peer group are pseudoscientists or morons, like the despised creationists. Communication is one-way in Darwin’s totalitarian dictatorship, from the Party to the peons. They will tell you, the public, what is truth. It’s blasphemous to ask questions. Just believe.