The Dating Game
Answers in Genesis (AIG) has a chapter from Marvin Lubenow's book "Bones of Contention". The chapter deals with a particular case of dating a hominid fossil from Kenya, and shows clearly how plastic the dating methods that are being used really are. Essentially the history goes something like this.

1) Skull KNM-ER 1470, a very modern looking skull is found and dated at 2.9 million years old

2) This caused a conflict of having a modern looking skull dated so old

3) A Volcanic Tuff provided strong maximum and minimum ages for fossils around it. Specifically many australopithecine fossils and human artifacts, and mammals had been found below the Tuff.

4) The tuff was dated at 212-230 Million years old (mya), far to old for the fossils around it and so an ad hoc explanation was given to explain away this age.

5) After selecting 'fresher' samples, a new date of 2.61 mya was found for the tuff and agreed closely with the 2.7-3.0 mya given for the fossil. A seemingly rock solid (pun intended) proof of how two independent methods give similar ages. However, the researchers dating the fossil also made the following comment...

The correlations shown in Figure 4 are not fully independent, and rely partly upon K.Ar and faunal evidence as well as upon the basic polarity data.

The starting point for the correlation is the age of 2.61 ± 0.26 Myr obtained by Fitch and Miller from selected sanidine crystals from pumice specimens from the KBS Tuff.

So in essence, they started with the 2.61 mya and went from there....hardly independent.

6) because of the problem of having an 2.9mya homo skull, more investigation happened. Another researcher dated the tuff at 1.6 and 1.8 mya. And then yet another two studies came out with of roughly 2.4 mya.

7) Another two studies concluded that the age of the tuff was 1.87 and 1.89 mya

8) Ultimately, the dating argument was decided by pig fossils close to the find. Which, using similar dating games elsewhere, helped them to select the 1.8 mya figures as 'correct'. Of course, this ignored the elephant fossil's also close to the find which favored an older date. Why was the pig date chosen? Because it matched the evolutionists expectations (given evolution is true and that their idea of how things evolved in what sequence is correct) better.

Read the whole thing, and notice how many 'discordant' dates were rejected even in coming through this somewhat contrived process. This the 'science' that evolutionists continue to lament as being undone when creationists put forward their ideas. Well, if this is the quality of science under evolution, I say it needs to be undone.
- posted by Alan Grey @ Friday, August 18, 2006