Mageth

So i'm supposed to trust my entire world view to people who say, they are not completely modern, but close enough, and dating was less then complete and poorly dated? Talk about ambiguity.

Well, you trust your world view to some "poorly dated" books by long-dead, ambiguous authors now.

Next they'll be saying, oh we saw this posssible reptile fossil with a large tail, so its close enough to a dinosaur to call it one.

Or maybe "It's a talking snake! And a magic fruit!"

Writer@Large

Credit where credit's due ... their take on it is pretty standard.

--W@L

Magus55

How do we know they are more accurately and completely dated? If they got the previous fossils wrong, what makes you think the new ones are right?

Valentine Pontifex

Re: Fox News

Look carefully, it is an AP story. ;-)

Magus55

what makes these more precisely dated than the previous ones that were "poorly" dated?

Magus55

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

Lmarka

(Sigh). Here it goes AGAIN:

"In contrast, the newly revealed skulls have precise dates thanks to the fragments of volcanic rocks found with the fossils. When rocks cool, they begin to accumulate argon gas from the decay of a potassium isotope. Analysing the gas gives the rock's age, in this case 154,000 to 160,000 years old."

It was clear enough the first time it was quoted here. What part exactly did you not get?

Valentine Pontifex

Actually I don't see anything here to use against the creationists.

1) We are hardly going to impress any creationist with fossils of Homo sapiens. And if any minor differences between those skulls and the people we see today will be dismissed as "microevolution." Ironically, if Tim White is right about these being members of our own species then it is microevolution even by the common definition of evolution below the species level.

2) One might point to the age, but the OECs will accept that and the YECs don't believe in Ar-Ar dates anyways.

So I don't see much relevence for the creation/evolution controversy other than the obvious facts that there will arguments between the science and anti-science camps. If one want to argue with the creationists on fossil hominids then I think it will be much more productive to discuss stuff like Turkana Boy and the Australopithicines.

Of course the real significance is simply more date to use in figuring out the biological history of humans and closely related fossil forms.

Coragyps

I haven't seen the papers, but I'll bet it has a lot to do with the standard deviations calculated for these samples as compared to the previous ones. People actually do statistical analysis on these figures - every time. And report the analysis - every time.

Valentine Pontifex

I am a bit surprised by the name of the subspecies which new fossils where attributed to: Homo sapiens idàltu.

I don't ever recall a scientific name with an accent mark before. Are the nominclature rules being relaxed?

(Of course many here will recall that when Australopithecus was named it was in violation of the then-established rules since it used a Greek root. This caused a bit of a flap at the time. The Latin-only rule now has been long scrapped though the names are generally altered to resemble Latin.)