Whoops; Tooth Date Is at Least 750% Off

It’s amazing  how wrong evolutionists can be without batting an eye. Errors this large should be a firing offense.

Retesting of ancient teeth found in China shows they are 16,000 years old—not 120,000 (Phys.org). Suppose an employee walks into the boss’s office and says, “Hi boss; little accounting error here. Remember the new projects fund I told you has $120,000 in it? Actually, it only has $16,000.” Wouldn’t the boss want to know how such a massive mistake was made? Wouldn’t he or she want those who goofed to be held accountable?” If the mistake was inexcusable, “You’re fired!” should be the expected response. How about in the case of this dating error about ancient teeth?

Most archeologists agree that modern humans evolved approximately 500,000 to 315,000 years ago, and they migrated out of Africa approximately 65,000 to 45,000 years ago into parts of Eurasia—other non-modern-human hominins made the trek much earlier, but all went extinct. This timeline was called into question back in 2015 when a team of archeologists found fossilized teeth in five caves in a southern part of China, and claimed they were approximately 120,000 years old. In this new effort, the researchers have reexamined the teeth and have found the original researchers were in error—their testing showed the teeth are just 16,000 years old.

That’s an error of 750%. The erroneous estimate of 120,000 years came from inexcusable carelessness. The original researchers did not even date the teeth! They used proxies like “sediment and capping flowstones found in the vicinity of the teeth.” Those methods are highly dependent on assumptions about flowstone accumulation rates. It almost seems as if they were looking for dates that would confirm their preconceptions about human evolution and migration timelines.

The teeth themselves had not been tested. In the new effort, the researchers found small bits of mitochondrial DNA in some of the teeth (and some nearby charcoal) and tested them using carbon-14 dating. Their results showed the teeth belonged to modern humans living in the area during the Holocene. The researchers also found that the DNA from one of the tested samples matched people living in modern Tibet and Burma…. They also suggest that other researchers carrying out similar research efforts always directly test samples they find using carbon-14 dating to ensure accuracy.

No mention is made of anybody being held accountable for publishing dates that misled researchers for at least five years. Evolutionary theory is one of the few fields where careless work can be published without consequences.

Update 2/18/2021: Another fossil has been re-dated at far younger than earlier claims. Live Science writes in Tontological form, “‘Ice age’ horse skeleton found in Utah backyard isn’t what we thought” – that’s an understatement.

The skeletal remains of a “wild” female horse found buried in a big ancient lake in Utah and thought to date back 16,000 years to the last ice age are actually no older than 340 years old, a new study finds.

That’s an error of 4,700% – a huge error. Why was it so far off? “The mix-up happened because Indigenous people buried the horse in a pit surrounded by lake sediments dating to 14,000 to 16,000 years ago.” The original investigators made the mistake of assuming that the surrounding geological strata indicated the date of the bones – a common assumption used when dating alleged human ancestors in Africa, too.

Scientists who re-evaluated the bones saw evidence that the horse had been ridden by humans. It was a horse from recent history, not a relic from an ice age. It was “raised and tended locally … near where it was found,” the article says. The article does not indicate any consequences for the first team who made the error.

Even 16,000 years is way off. The teeth in the China cave look like those of living people nearby. Carbon-14 dating becomes more unreliable the farther back it goes. Any date incapable of being corroborated by independent evidence, particularly beyond written records, becomes more and more theory laden. If there had been a global Flood a few thousand years ago, it would have thrown off the calibration curve trusted by secular dating methods, making dates appear older than they really were.