Coragyps

Free access is available, maybe to White's paper, even, at Nature's website.

Valentine Pontifex

That is not the issue here at all. It is not a case of previous dates being wrong.

Radiometric dating is not merely sending some rock to the lab and getting some magic result.

Most radioactive dating techniques do not date sedimentary rocks which the fossil is in. Rather they date volcanic layers above and below them. This were a bit of luck comes in: say the area which to rock was formed went a million years without an eruption then one is not going to be able to get a very precise date via normal radiometric methods. Also not all volcanic rocks can be dated as easily as others: the uncertainty can vary. So on and so forth.

Valentine Pontifex

The "News and View" commentary article is here and is free. The actual technical papers require a subscription or a payment.

There is also a "Nature Science Update" (which is for the public and is not part of the journal) on the find here.

Doubting Didymus

And how do you know that the source is outside of the natural world, exactly?

Duvenoy

It has shown uo at Tweb, posted by 'boxer'. Not much action on it as yet, and I'm too lazy to comment tonight.

doov

Spaz

Shh! Don't ruin Magus' perfect world!

It seems to me Magus that you've gone the very common route of confusing the words precision and accuracy (Which my chemistry teacher drilled into our heads ). The measurements are very accurate, but not very precise. They are correct to the best of our knowledge, but that accuracy is in a range of a couple thousand years because there's no way to date it to an exact year. The dates for the newer bones are more precise because the volcanic rock around it can be measured a bit more exactly than before (notice the 30,000 year range for before, and the 6,000 year range for these). Being imprecise is far from being wrong. (And you can't twist imprecise into meaning the fossils are younger, because that would be inaccurate ) I hope that wasn't confusing.

EDIT: I love how they have precision as a definiton for accuracy on dictionary.com , but really, there is a difference...

Viti

Could this be considered an additional transitional given they are "nearly human"? That would help with the YECers over at Christian Forums. It's been posted but nobody is responding.

Doubting Didymus

It's only a transitional in the sense that all fossils are. It was once a different thing, and is on its way to being something else. As far as I can see, it doesn't represent a population that is the common ancestor of any two species, extant or otherwise, which is how transitional fossil is sometimes defined. As for creationists, who knows what they think transitional means.

Hedwig

Your source is a bunch of Bronze Age fables that are hopelessly outdated and even contradict basic laws of nature.

Mageth

Originally posted by Magus55
Except my source is outside of the natural world, where those things can happen.

Except those things supposedly happened in the natural world.