World's Oldest Human Footprints

Gorbie writes "An article on Yahoo tells about the discovery of 350,000 year old human footprints found in Italy."

How old are they?

[young-earth]

The age is an interesting question. First is the comment from one of the researchers

someone made an imprint on a surface, walking in a way you'd expect to see someone in these same conditions walk today

So from the footprints themselves, there is no reason they could not be 100 or 500 or 1500 years old. They appear, according to experts, to be indistinguishable from modern footprints.

So why are they considered to be 325000 to 385000 years old? From volcanic dating. Now how accurate is volcanic dating. That's where this gets interesting. Evolutionists hate to have this brought up, but Steve Austin, a geologist with a PhD from Penn State, did an interesting test a while ago. He picked up some rocks inside the crater of Mt. St. Helens from the lava dome. These rocks were definitely formed less than ten years before he picked them up. He sent them to be radiometrically dated, and the results of K-Ar dating of one "whole rock" sample was 345000 to 355000 years. Another was 334000 to 346000.

So what we have here is two known-age (less than ten years) rocks were given dates comparable to the footprint rocks. What scientific basis is there for believing the footprints are any more accurately dated than the known-age rocks? None, since there is no known-age rock from thousands or millions of years ago, no one put one in a time vault with a label on it.

The standard answer by evolutionists and long-age defenders to this set of facts is that Steve Austin is incompetent (note they include no references from his PhD committee defending that point of view) and that he made mistakes selecting the rocks. Even if that were the case, the same mistakes could have been made in the footprint rock selections, yet since the dates come out to be in the same range, no one would think twice about questioning the methodology involved.

Bottom line: science is about doing repeatable experiments to determine things. Radiometric dating is not science, since given known-age rocks, the best labs around return wildly wrong results. If a supposedly scientific method produces known false results, it's not scientific and should be rejected.