"New 14C is formed from background radiation, such as radioactivity in the surrounding rocks. In some cases, 14C from the atmosphere can contaminate a sample. A few processes that can add "modern" 14C to coal are:
Sulfur bacteria, which commonly grow in coal.
Secondary carbonates from groundwater that form on fracture surfaces.
Whewellite, a carbon-containing mineral, that often forms as coal weathers.
Minute amounts of contamination from these sources can cause apparent ages around 50,000 years, which is near the limit of the maximum age that carbon dating can measure."
Here again, Humphrey makes an assertion based upon his own predetermined assumptions and then ignores reality.
The fact that there any remains at all is actually remarkable. The stone age cultures that actually buried their dead and tossed in artifacts seem to represent a relative minority sampling of human burial customs from that time.
Consider the "stone age" North American Indian cultures. Where are their graves? This was a stone age culture right up to the time that Columbus landed, yet grave sites can't and absolutely don't represent to real populations at the time.
Here is a reconstruction of the famous Cahokia Mounds site:
I tried to find the exact number - but it seems that the total number of graves at this site is just seven individuals. Does Humphrey want us to believe that just seven people did all of this? What happened to all of the other bodies?
Again, this was a "stone age" civilization and a relatively recent one - up to about 1300 AD. You'd think there'd be more bodies around if Humphrey and the YEC assumptions are any where near correct.
(If anyone has more information about the numbers of remains found at Cahokia, please let me know).
Here, Humphrey compounds his error from the previous item (#12 "I don't see enough dead people!") and offers no evidence to support his desires at all. He also seems to associate "agriculture" with "knowing that plants grow seeds." Such an over simplification would have gotten you kicked right off the farm I grew up on. Or, more likely, starved off.
Agriculture requires the close cooperation of increasingly larger numbers of people. As the available soil is worn out and river channels move, the need to fertilize and to construct irrigation works becomes even more necessary.
The earliest agriculturalist were most likely "wandering gardeners." They didn't stay in one place long enough to wear out the soil. I'm fairly certain the first human to bite into an apple or better yet, a peach, soon understood the presence of seeds in his or her meal. But to go from that to the huge public works projects that we see in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus River Valley and the Huang Ho certainly took time.
Also, agriculture requires the cooperation of the weather and climate patterns. It's no coincidence that the earliest agricultural sites coincided with the retreat of the glaciers. During the Ice Ages, the earth was relatively drier and had less rainfall. Desert regions were more extensive than otherwise unless they were buried beneath a mile thick ice sheet.
The Ice began to retreat about 14,000 to 12,000 years ago. This seems to have led to a growth in the global human population. But then, about 11,000 years ago a period known as the Younger Dryas began which saw a dramatic decrease in rainfall.
Having already been lured out of the hunter-gatherer routine by the retreat of the Ice, human populations now had to contend with drought. The answer to this would, of course, be to move to river valleys where fresh water was more available for irrigation.
The climatic event known as the Younger Dryas is often cited as being the push that started the Neolithic Revolution.
Hah! Not to hear undergraduate history students tell it.
The "recorded" part is the real nub here. And, who's to say what's "too short?" And again, "why?"
This one really relies upon the ignorance of the YEC audience in order to get by. Humphrey says: "Prehistoric man built megalithic monuments, made beautiful cave paintings, and kept records of lunar phases." But, these activities don't require a sophisticated writing system at. Simple runes and notches in sticks would be sufficient. Coincidently, we find simple runes and notched sticks around Stonehenge and other Neolithic monument sites.
Cave paintings such as at Lascaux are incredible:
This one is dated at around 16,000 years old, with a considerable amount of reliability. One wonders why a YEC didn't dynamite the cave entrance. It actually destroys their argument.
One of the oldest examples of alphabetic writing is found at Wadi el-Hol in Egypt. These two "lines of text" appear to be intended to say the same thing. Comparing it to other graffiti in the region it seems to match up closely with the ancient Canaanite word for "celebration:" hilul. This is the root for our own Hallelujah.
A tracing of the Wadi el-Hol graffiti:
But I wanted to draw your attention to second glyph from the very bottom. This is clearly a "proto-aleph" - the first letter of the Hebrew and Phoenician alphabets.
Now, go back to the first picture from the cave at Lascaux and tell me what it "says." Then tell me what the difference is between the information carried by the cave painting and the "proto-aleph" at Wadi el-Hol. What we see is the evolution of culture here. The development of written language from drawings to glyphs, to heiroglyphs to an actual alphabet. You'll find no alphabet at Lascaux.
Essentially, the human beings who created both works were on a par when it came to intelligence. However, the writer at Wadi el-Hol had the advantage of thousands of years of cultural evolution, just like I benefit from yet another few thousand years of the same thing.
This is one thing that Humphrey ignores. He wants to overlap the Wadi el-Hol graffiti with the word processing software that I'm using right now and say, "It's the same thing..." He feels justified because he can overlap Lascaux with Frederic Remington, but the comparisons don't fit. One is art, the other is a writing system that developed from art.
Another example I thought of is that red blood cells have been found in dinosaur fossils supposedly millions of years old. http://www.icr.org/article/2032/
This was also mentioned by Humphrey in his "decay of biological material..." but I kind of held off on that point in anticipation of this one.
Here's a picture of what we're talking about:
This claim is related to a number of falsehoods. Carl Weiland of AiG, for example claims the microfossils are not fossils at all, but actual blood vessels and red blood cells. Humphreys and Orthodoxy follow along with this deception. This is of course, ridiculous. The scientist (Schweitzer) who discovered these microfossils made a huge splash years ago when she announced this. Since then she seems to be a bit more reticent and careful with how she says things. At no point did she ever say she found actual hemoglobin and tissues.
"Response:
Schweitzer et al. did not find hemoglobin or red blood cells. Rather, they found evidence of degraded hemoglobin fragments and structures that might represent altered blood remnants. They emphasizd repeatedly that even those results were tentative, that the chemicals and structures may be from geological processes and contamination (Schweitzer and Horner 1999; Schweitzer and Staedter 1997; Schweitzer et al. 1997a, 1997b). The bone is exceptionally well preserved, so much so that it may contain some organic material from the original dinosaur, but the preservation should not be exaggerated.
The bone that Schweitzer and her colleagues studied was fossilized, but it was not altered by "permineralization or other diagenetic effects" (Schweitzer et al. 1997b). Permineralization is the filling of the bone's open parts with minerals; diagenetic effects include alterations like cracking. Schweitzer commented that the bone was "not completely fossilized" (Schweitzer and Staedter 1997, 35), but lack of permineralization does not mean unfossilized.
An ancient age of the bone is supported by the (nonradiometric) amino racemization dating technique.
Soft tissues have been found on fossils tens of thousands of years old, and DNA has been recovered from samples more than 300,000 years old (Stokstad 2003; Willerslev et al. 2003). If dinosaur fossils were as young as creationists claim, recovering DNA and non-bone tissues from them should be routine enough that it would not be news. " http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC371.html
Basically, when they say the molecular components of the "red stains" in the picture above are hemoglobin - they are lying. There seems to be the remnants of decayed and fossilized organic material - but this is hardly surprising since these microfossils were found inside of a fossil bone.
There is no DNA present, there is no cellular nucleus intact at all. There's just a microscopic stain caused in all likelihood by the iron that was once present in the blood. It is now no longer "blood." It isn't even visible to the naked eye.
Well, for some reason I'm having a feeling that orthodoxy isn't going to post anything more on this thread...
Ya know Pel, if you didn't start with the big guns and atom bombs everytime, some of these guys might stick around on these YEC threads a little bit longer
Well, for some reason I'm having a feeling that orthodoxy isn't going to post anything more on this thread...
Ya know Pel, if you didn't start with the big guns and atom bombs everytime, some of these guys might stick around on these YEC threads a little bit longer
Hold your horses, Frog....I'm not leaving just yet. Sorry!
But it may be later on tomorrow before I can post again (work and school constraints).
Well, for some reason I'm having a feeling that orthodoxy isn't going to post anything more on this thread...
Ya know Pel, if you didn't start with the big guns and atom bombs everytime, some of these guys might stick around on these YEC threads a little bit longer
I think you are wrong. Orthodoxy will come back and say, "I am right, and you are wrong, becasue I said so, so there" (j/k)
". 
Linear Mode
