The Flood, fossils, & the geologic evidence

Here is a little test for you, to see how you deal with evidence:There is an archaeological site in southern Alaska called On Your Knees Cave. From that cave a human skeleton was removed. It was radiocarbon dated to 10,300 years ago. A tooth was submitted for mtDNA testing, and it was found to have an unusual haplotype, now referred to as D4h3. That haplotype is known from 46 living individuals stretching from southern California to the tip of South America.I have an example from my own archaeological research spanning nearly 5,300 years, again connected to living individuals in the same area.Biblical scholars place the global flood at about 4,350 years ago.If there was actually a global flood at the appointed time, these examples of mtDNA lineages could not have spanned that event; the people would have been killed and the mtDNA replaced by that of Noah's female kin.Just one more bit of evidence, added to an already overwhelming collection of evidence, that the purported global flood did not occur as described.So the test: are you going to address this evidence in a serious manner, with evidence of your own that contradicts it, or are you going to just ignore it, or hand-wave it away, as has been your pattern on these threads?

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

The evidence I presented directly contradicts the evidence you presented. Deal with it before you post a lot more nonsense because if you can't adequately deal with this one small example your entire case falls apart. D4h3 is the haplotype, a classification of a particular configuration of the mtDNA. It is not something that is radiocarbon dated. Totally off the subject. The dating of the skeleton was done via radiocarbon dating, not via mutation rates.You don't know the difference between these two methods, do you? Nonsense. Typical creationist nonsense. And that has nothing to do with this particular case in any event. That's just a typical creationist "what if" story. "What if the dating is wrong?" No evidence to suggest it is, just a vague, "What if..."You haven't made a dent in the evidence I presented. Your case for a global flood is busted until you can come up with something that deals directly with my evidence. So far you're batting zero.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Another "What if..." This is not evidence that this particular date is in error. Two problems with this. First, the time of the split (as has been already pointed out by others) is meaningless to the date of the On Your Knees Cave specimen.Second, your source is wrong. Look up the Kemp et al. article titled "Genetic analysis of early holocene skeletal remains from Alaska and its implications for the settlement of the Americas" (American Journal of Physical Anthropology 132:605-621, 2007). Not all of the D4h3 specimens live in South America--there are some examples among the Chumash of southern California.And this doesn't matter in any case! What matters is that we have a connection between a 10,300 year old skeleton and living descendants. Or, in the case of my own data, also from the west coast, a 5,300 year old connection (forgive me if I don't post a reference). And these are just two of many such examples, any one of which renders the flood story inaccurate in one or more particulars. Lets accept the radiocarbon date unless there is evidence to contradict it. (There isn't.) It is confirmed by archaeological and paleontological data as well. You have a problem all right; if the dating is accurate your flood myth is debunked.So far you have shown no evidence to the contrary. Your doubts and "What ifs..." do not constitute evidence.And don't bother posting any more pretty pictures--they are all superfluous until this particular issue is dealt with.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

There is a thread already up an running for radiocarbon dating problems.See you there, as that is off-topic here.And be aware that several of us here are pretty well-versed in the subject, ranging from the archaeological, laboratory, and technical to the theoretical ends of things. But bring real evidence, not creationist nonsense.Edited by Coyote, : Formatting

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

This was not a fossil. It was an archaeological specimen in a cave, and was found with a variety of artifacts and other materials, many of which were more recent. No layers which would have represented a global flood were reported in any of the reports I have seen.Biblical scholars place the flood at about 4,350 years ago. If you don't accept that date you better talk to them, not me. Noah's female kin (I believe there were four) would have been the only sources for mtDNA, as males cannot pass this on to their offspring; it is passed entirely from mother to daughter. As kin I include daughters-in-law. They would all have had middle eastern mtDNA patterns, while Haplotype D is restricted to the Americas. The assumptions are not false. We have a genetic record for mtDNA distributions in the Americas, and mtDNA from the eastern Mediterranean and middle east are not represented until after historic contact.The conclusion remains: Native American mtDNA lineages survived from before the purported date of the flood right up to living individuals. They were not wiped out by this flood because the global flood never happened.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

I don't know why you're still talking mud when you lost the battle back on my post #6.Nothing you have posted since has rebutted any of what I posted. The global flood about 4,350 years ago is a tribal myth, and nothing more than regional folklore.You're rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.Epic FAIL!

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Or perhaps the "global flood" is a myth, and these bones are the result of some other process. Certainly nothing you've posted suggests otherwise.Personal incredulity is not evidence of anything.What do the archaeologists or paleontologists who actually did the investigations say about these bones? I didn't see you posting what the experts who know the most about these finds actually said.(Must have slipped your mind, eh?)

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

The article I have is "Genetic Analysis of Early Holocene Skeletal Remains From Alaska and its Implications for the Settlement of the Americas" by Kemp et al., American Journal of Physical Anthropology vol. 132 (2007). I don't have the exact page numbers as I have a pdf preprint sent to me by one of the authors. Google "On Your Knees Cave" and you will find a lot of summaries of this find on the web.And it is very common to find materials of different ages in archaeological sites. Suitable living sites are used over and over--its a normal human pattern. You doubt the radiocarbon dating method because you don't like the results; you have no scientific basis for challenging the method.And as I mentioned, it is common to have archaeological sites that span many thousands of years. My last large excavation spanned 7150 years, but with 31 radiocarbon dates and a variety of other methods for dealing with multiple components it was possible to figure out the sequence of habitation and characterize each component.(Oh, and that site had no evidence of a massive flood 4,350 years ago either.)Edited by Coyote, : formatting

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

The majority of biblical scholars place the flood at about 4,350 years ago.At that age you are dealing with sediments (dirt), not rocks.Why do creationist continue to come up with geological nonsense (such as the Cambrian, which is over 500 million years old), when they should be looking in sediments for the remains of the flood?One of the first things I learned in archaeology: if you want to find a 10,000 year old site, look in 10,000 year old dirt!Applying that to the flood question, when we look in dirt about 4,350 years old what do we find? No flood!But I guess when you deal with belief instead of evidence none of this matters, eh?

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

I'm still waiting for a satisfactory answer to my post #6 concerning mtDNA from before and after the date of the supposed global flood (about 4,350 years ago).I think you said you would agree with the mtDNA analysis but that you contested the dating--but you have offered no details of why the radiocarbon dates should be in error.All you brought to the table was the vague and unsubstantiated claim that sometimes different labs come up with different dates for the same specimen. But you provided no details or citations, nor did you provide any reason to believe that this type of error occurred in the case of On Your Knees Cave or the second example, which is my own work.(You are probably not aware of this, but it is a common practice for both archaeologists and dating professionals to send pieces of the same specimen to two or more different labs to see how closely they agree, or as a test of the inter-comparability of different types of equipment.)So until you can come up (on a different thread) with some concrete details of why radiocarbon dating is not valid you have failed to make your case for a global flood.By the way: the commonly accepted date of the flood among biblical scholars is about 4,350 years ago, so forget fossils and dinosaurs and geology and all the rest. At 4,350 years ago you're dealing with just plain dirt.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

There has been a reasonably good sequence worked out for worldwide mtDNA. One recent paper on the American side is:Achilli et al. (2008), The Phylogeny of the Four Pan-American MtDNA Haplogroups. ...That is available online at PLOS One. I can't get the link to work as it wants to put a smiley in the middle of it! Do a google for the title.There are other papers on the Asian/African side, but I don't have a quick reference (I'm not in the office today).

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Of course there is!Now, if I had just remembered that...(Thanks!)

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

I presented some concrete evidence against the flood in post #6 of this thread.Can you deal with that evidence? Or will you just try to "hand wave" it away somehow?

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Sorry, it does disprove the global flood at the time the biblical scholars place it, that is, about 4,350 years ago. If you want to try and move the date of the flood then you need to argue with those biblical scholars, not with scientists. Your understanding is not correct. I deal with radiocarbon dating all the time, and have had to learn quite a bit about the subject. In fact, I have written on the subject for professional journals.It is easy to find carbon in things, such as diamonds and fossils, that are millions of years old--that is way past the limits of the technique! When dealing with such tiny amounts of C14 contamination and machine error become large factors. The diamond studies are a good example--one of those studies was done by the UC Riverside radiocarbon laboratory to test the limits of the equipment. The diamonds had no C14 in them--the C14 found was residual C14 within the equipment itself! Fine. It should be easy to produce some bones then. We routinely find bones of mammoths and mastodons and other creatures that have been extinct for 10,000 or more years. So where are the dinosaur bones (note that I said "bones" not "fossils"). Hint: dinosaur bones have never been found because dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago, leaving only fossils. What you believe is not relevant. It is what the evidence shows that counts. And the evidence, including the evidence I posted in #6, above, shows that there was no global flood within the last 10,000 years--the precise time when biblical scholars place it.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Let me know when you learn enough about radiocarbon dating to debate the issue.For now you are simply parroting what the creationist websites claim, and they tend to lie and misrepresent the facts when dealing with those fields of science that contradict their religious beliefs.Here is an article that discusses the diamond C14 findings. RATE’s Radiocarbon: Intrinsic or Contamination?A couple of relevant paragraphs:

Taylor and Southon have also measured unprocessed diamond, finding a similar range of 0.005 to 0.03 pMC without background subtraction. They interpret this result as their instrument background, primarily due to ion source memory. Their ion source current varied, unintentionally, over about a factor of two, perhaps due to crystal face orientation or to conductivity differences between samples. The oldest 14C age equivalents were measured on natural diamonds which exhibited the highest current yields [4]. This important observation provides evidence about the source of the radiocarbon.

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If the radiocarbon were intrinsic to the sample, there would be no change in the radiocarbon ratio with sample current. The 14C, 13C, and 12C would change in unison. However, if the radiocarbon were coming from ion source memory or elsewhere in the accelerator, it should give a count rate independent of ion source current. Normalizing the radiocarbon count rate to the ion source current, which is predominantly 12C, would result in higher radiocarbon content for lower source currents, as observed. This data provides clear evidence that at least a significant fraction of the radiocarbon detected by Taylor and Southon in diamond measurements did not come from the diamonds themselves and thus could not be intrinsic radiocarbon.

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The lower values for unprocessed diamond and the current-dependent behavior find no explanation in Baumgardner’s intrinsic radiocarbon model. But these results fit well with the Taylor and Southon evidence that instrument background (specifically ion source memory) is material-dependent, with diamond exhibiting significantly less ion source memory than graphite. The radiocarbon detected in natural, unprocessed diamond measurements seems to be nothing more than instrument background.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.