Sad what Bible Inerrancy can do to a mind!

Painted, I regret to inform Mr Wieland, about 30,000 years ago. :-)

I had the wrong cave - the Lascaux drawings are about 17,000 years old - Chauvet has the 31,000 year old ones. Google up either for lots of sites: the official French sites have some great pictures.

I can do that! They leave out much more science than they include. There's a lake in Japan called Lake Suigetsu. In 1998, Kitigawa and van der Plicht published a paper (Science, vol 279, pp 1187- 1190) with the results of a study on 250-foot cores from the bottom of the lake. The sediments have alternating dark clay layers (winter) and light diatom layers (spring and summer). They counted about 40,000 of these, and ran 14C dates on 250(!) pieces of leaf, insect wings, and the like. Then they plotted counted age vs 14C age for the whole set, and got a amazingly nice line - it has wiggles, yes, but only wiggles, no reversals. It also matches up very well indeed with the same sort of plot for German tree rings, and with 14C and uranium-thorium dates from coral in Barbados and New Guinea.
Their data also matches up very nicely with data from counting of ice layers in Antarctica, Greenland, the Andes, and Mount Kilimanjaro.
You can access this paper for free by registering at
Science | AAAS - they have free access from 1996 to early 2002 now. There is a LOT of good stuff there, with none of those messy AiG statements of belief before you get published. [This message has been edited by Coragyps, 04-08-2003]

Sure, why not? How many seasons do you want in a year right after the Big Flood? Twenty-four? Each with about as much sediment (or snowfall, for the ice cores) as a full-length season that we have now? Why not? Why not 44 seasons every year? It'd be simpler to have the Devil put all those layers there to deceive mankind, but hey, let's keep it "scientific," shall we?
Sure, it could be "hot and cold" - like winter and summer.

Are you seriously telling me, Drum, that you're here debating this stuff and have never so much as read an 8th-grade Earth Science book, or watched Nova on TV? You've yet to hear of plate tectonics, or the term "geology?" Great googley-moogley, man! I am astounded.

Percy hit my point dead on in the post above. I was being unnecessarily testy when I wrote that, and I apologize.