Footprints in the Quicksands of Deep Time

The human footprints are real.
Deep time is not.

Deep time is not the solution to scientific problems. Deep time is the problem.

Look at two reports that force observations against their will into Darwin fantasyland.

Footprints in the Quicksands of Deep Time

90,000-year-old human footprints found on a Moroccan beach are some of the oldest and best preserved in the world (Live Science, 29 Jan 2024). Yes, human footprints were found on a beach on the North African coast. That part is science. But they were made 90,000 years ago? Hurry, the scientists think: we have to study them before the ocean erodes them away!

However, the researchers remain uncertain about what the ice age group was doing on the beach, and future analysis of the site could reveal that information. But they’ll have to act quickly, as “the ongoing collapse of the rocky shore platform … could lead to its eventual demise,” including of the tracks preserved on it, the team wrote in the study.

According to this tale, published in Nature‘s open-access journal Scientific Reports, the prints must have been made by “hominins” (evolutionary parlance for anything on the ape-to-human march of progress). Elsewhere, they call them Homo sapiens and “modern humans.” There is nothing about the prints that looks evolutionary or old. So why the 90,000 years?

The authors dated the stratum on which the prints appear using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), “a technique that determines when specific minerals on or near an artifact were last exposed to heat or sunlight.” This method, though, like its twin thermoluminescence, depends on many assumptions, Tas Walker wrote in “The Dating Game” (CMI, 2003).

Unfortunately, there are many unknowns and many assumptions need to be made, including the amount of radiation ‘stored’ in the mineral at a certain time in the past, that the change in radiation has only been affected by the radiation in the environment, that the radiation in the environment has remained constant, and that the sensitivity of the crystal to radiation has not changed. All these factors can be affected by water, heat, sunlight, the accumulation or leaching of minerals in the environment, and many other causes.

No dating method like OSL can be calibrated to 90,000 years. And so on what basis, other than belief in Deep Time and evolution, is an observer supposed to agree with the claim that these are “hominin” footprints that are that many tens of thousands of years old? The footprints look modern. They are on the verge of being eroded away. Were these scientists just lucky to find them in the last 1/450th of 1% of the time span between 90,000 years and now? Were there no tsunamis, storm surges, extreme high tides or other weather events in 900 centuries capable of destroying the prints? This claim depends on sheer dumb luck. The authors say,

The protection of the Larache site from intense marine erosion until now has enabled the intact preservation of the traces. However, the ongoing collapse of the rocky shore platform in the northern zone of the site could lead to its eventual demise, and that of the tracks it has preserved thus far.

There are other strata nearby on top of the layer where the prints were made, which the authors show in a diagram. But that doesn’t mean all those strata formed after the people walked on the beach. Clay soil can harden in far less time, or be covered by sand and more clay, in modern times. The nearby superimposed layers could have been formed before people walked on the spot. Many beaches in California today abut cliffs that are older than footprints made by beachgoers.

The reckless imagination of these scientists is revealed in their next-to-last paragraph, where they sound like they were smoking a hallucinogenic substance in a Darwin worship service. Their perhapsimaybecouldness index skyrockets to the clouds.

A key question when studying footprints is what the individuals were doing at the site. Since no occupation structures were found, this site may correspond to a passage and/or foraging site. While Pleistocene Homo sapiens were hunter-gatherers, individuals likely left the Larache footprints while probably searching for resources. Numerous archaeological discoveries, particularly in Morocco and notably in the Rabat-Temara region, have shown the importance of coastal areas for access to resources, whether raw materials, prey or even plants. In this context, the preferential orientation of the Larache footprints towards the offshore could maybe indicate the search for marine resources. The presence of young children, in Larache, possibly contributing to the search for these resources, could provide unique information on the social behaviour of Pleistocene Homo sapiens populations. However, further studies will be needed to validate this hypothesis.

Since these Homo sapiens lived so many Darwin Years ago, they speculate, their tracks couldn’t represent a family playing on a beach, maybe Hannibal’s wife and kids having a little vacation. No; the track-makers had to be hunting or gathering to survive in the struggle for existence. These speculations depend on their belief in Deep Time. They just cannot bring themselves to believe they are recent tracks.

Remember the Laetoli footprints? They look modern, too, but because of their position on the Darwin timeline (using Darwinist dating methods), scientists had to insist they were made by apes with human feet (22 March 2010). And more recently, bird tracks in Africa were too modern-looking to fit the timeline, so evolutionists told us they were made by dinosaurs with birdlike feet (1 Dec 2023). Darwin’s deep-time narrative drives the data. In science, data are supposed to drive the conclusions. That’s another reason why Darwinian materialism is destroying science (24 Jan 2024).

Walk This Way… Bearded Buddha Temple Straight Ahead

How Did Humans Learn to Walk? New Evolutionary Study Offers an Earful (New York University, 29 Jan 2024). These evolutionists weave a tale of footprint-makers out of hollow spots in bony skulls. Those cavities in the skull of an extinct Chinese ape named Lufengpithecus (ape from Lufeng) are all they needed to offer sacrifice to the Bearded Buddha. Those hollow cavities, they tell their idol, represent where the balance organs resided—the ape’s semicircular canals. Using divination on those pockets of air within bones, they continue in their incantation. The worshipers envisioned apes descending from the trees over millions of Darwin Years and walking upright—an innovation that led directly to their own walk into their research labs at NYU.

“The semicircular canals, located in the skull between our brains and the external ear, are critical to providing our sense of balance and position when we move, and they provide a fundamental component of our locomotion that most people are probably unaware of,” explains Yinan Zhang, a doctoral student at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IVPP) and the lead author of the paper, which appears in the journal the Innovation. “The size and shape of the semicircular canals correlate with how mammals, including apes and humans, move around their environment. Using modern imaging technologies, we were able to visualize the internal structure of fossil skulls and study the anatomical details of the semicircular canals to reveal how extinct mammals moved.”

“Our study points to a three-step evolution of human bipedalism,” adds Terry Harrison, a New York University anthropologist and one of the paper’s co-authors. “First, the earliest apes moved in the trees in a style that was most similar to aspects of the way that gibbons in Asia do today. Second, the last common ancestor of apes and humans was similar in its locomotor repertoire to Lufengpithecus, using a combination of climbing and clambering, forelimb suspension, arboreal bipedalism, and terrestrial quadrupedalism. It is from this broad ancestral locomotor repertoire that human bipedalism evolved.”

The idol doesn’t change its expression. Leaving their research at its feet, they vow that they will try harder next time. But all is not lost. They still got paid for their time by their enablers in Big Science, the temple prostitutes and the bouncers standing by to eject critics. The worshipers at the Bearded Buddha temple even got a bonus for visualizing climate change as a driver in human evolution!

By studying the rate of evolutionary change in the bony labyrinth, the international team proposed that climate change may have been an important environmental catalyst in promoting the locomotor diversification of apes and humans.

The buddha appears to give a faint grin.

Gaze at nature until Darwin’s face appears to give you insight and understanding.