As you know, RAZD, a major obstacle to understanding evolution is the profound difficulty of apprehending deep (geologic) time. We are such transient creatures, and at our native temporal scale it is difficult to understand the enormity of deep time. Of course, for a young earth creationist, that understanding is blocked completely.
Your posts in this thread put me in mind of a similar block to understanding the nature of science itself: you could call it deep thought, for the enormous number of work/years spent quantifying and analyzing a find of this caliber; the scale must enlarge to encompass the years required just to educate and train the scientists involved, and inflate again to accommodate the millennia of training and work/years by generations of previous scientists. It has been a Herculean labor.
The effort and rigor demanded by such a volume of data amaze me, especially when directed at better understanding our origins for the sake of understanding, a search for self-understanding that in other contexts would be thought spiritual. Yet this dig is just one bead on a long string of projects stretching back centuries.
It is the grandest of adventures, bridging time and space to see just what we are. The time scale is merely human, but the project is gloriously human. Communicating that to an inattentive public is an essential challenge. I remember when there was a popular sense of involvement with this intellectual adventure. I hope we can see that again; spreading the word about the amazing effort, and the accessibility of the knowledge, may help.
Thanks for doing the yeoman's work in hauling all that data here and contributing explications and connections. I find it inspiring, and I'll be studying it for some time--which is what I've done today between other posts.
"If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."
Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.
-Terence