Mastodons.

AMERICANS TEN TIMES OLDER, according to reports in Nature News and Science (AAAS) News and ScienceDaily 26 April 2017, and Nature, 2017; 544 (7651): 479 doi: 10.1038/nature22065. 

In 1992 palaeontologists found bones, teeth and tusks from a Mastodon buried in a fine silt layer that was exposed during a road construction project in California. Many of the bones were broken in a pattern that was characteristic of being pounded with stone hammer. They also found some large cobbles with the characteristic shapes of stone hammers and anvils. The researchers suggested the bones had been deliberately broken by ancient people in order to extract the marrow, or to use the bones to make bone tools. To test their theory they tried breaking elephant bones using stone tools and produced the same fracture pattern found in the mastodon bones. If this was a site of human activity archaeologists wanted to know how old it was. However, as the Nature Editor’s summary puts it, “Dating the site has been problematic because the bones preserved too little collagen for radiocarbon dating, and optically stimulated luminescence dating put the age at over 60,000–70,000 years”. The oldest dates for people in North America are believed to be around 14,000 years, so scientists looked for another way to date the site. A Uranium/Thorium radiometric dating study has now been done, but given an even older date – 130.7 ± 9.4 thousand years. The Nature Editor’s Summary goes on to say “If confirmed, this would extend tenfold the time that human beings are known to have been present in the Americas and predate the time that modern humans are thought to have first left Africa. The identity of the hominin species – if any – remains unknown”. By the evolutionary timetable of human origins this date precedes the time when modern humans left Africa, let alone got all the way across Asia and into North America via Bering Strait. According to Nature News the study “raises the possibility that another hominin species, such as Neanderthals or a group known as Denisovans, somehow made it from Asia to North America before that and flourished”. Pontus Skoglund, a Harvard University geneticist who works on ancient DNA suggested dating the site by establishing the evolutionary relationship of the mastodon with other mastodons. If the dates are confirmed he commented it “would be one of the most Earth-shattering revisions of our view of the peopling of the world”.
Links: Nature, Science, ScienceDaily

ED. COM. Did you notice the difference between the two methods of dating – 60 to 70 thousand years versus 130 thousand years. This is a discrepancy of 100%. In any other scientific endeavour such a difference in results would be a dire warning that something was wrong with the methods, or with the interpretation of the results, and would mean any results using these methods were not considered valid until more research was done into the methods and the assumptions used to interpret the results. Remember this whenever you see the proponents of an old earth claiming that radioactive and other physical dating methods prove their case. If scientists really want an Earth-shattering revision of their view of the peopling of the world they should take notice of the record left by the Creator who made human beings in the first place, told them to spread out and fill the earth after Noah’s Flood, and later, at the Tower of Babel, sent them on their way. This meant that North America was settled by real people, not some unknown hominins and less than 4000 years ago. Creation Research.