Re: I'd like a better understanding of the debate

Tom McDonald wrote:
tsquare21 wrote:
Robert Carnegie wrote:

<snip>

However, he called on /you/ to "discover any evidence of man roaming
this earth longer then 10000 years" in order to settle the question,
either to your satisfaction or to his - I'm choosing to interpret it as
his, since he lays down the rule about "no [radio]carbon dating". From
this I infer that he is dismissing any archaeological evidence that has
been obtained up to now. Justification for this is up to him; I
suspect he doesn't have any.

Excuse me but RADIO or any CHEMICAL dating is not archaeological
evidence and is not confirmable. As your Statement above so
elouquently proclamed only something that has been there is acceptable.

Exactly. The carbon in archaeological remains *was* there in the things
once living at a site at a particular time. The 14C carbon ceased being
taken up at the death of the living thing. 14C dating techniques now
can determine when that death occurred (for samples adequately
collected, recorded, handled and tested) with a very high level of
certainty to within a relatively narrow range of dates.

Psst, Tom... I don't think tsquare got that I was talking about
radioactivity. Okay, maybe that was my fault for putting parenthesis
around the part of the word that he left out and I added in. No it
wasn't. He's dumb.

I am anxious that you exposed so many other dating techniques to his
analytical criticism, although I'm pleased to see that he hasn't raised
any challenge to oxidative phosphorylation - although actually I was
hoping that he would do that, but get it wrong ;-)

As for the rest... sometimes someone posts a post here that doesn't
need to be criticised for its deficiencies to be clearly evident. I
think this was one of those days. And an explicit rebuttal is liable
to bring another redundant reply, so it may be better to let stinking
fish lie.

.