You have to be very cautious when searching for scientific evidence of dating on the internet as there are many biased religious views which try and dress their medieval religious beliefs up with inappropriate references to scientific methodology.
Some churches pay search engines to promote their anti-evolution and anti-Darwin sites as science, without a shred of respect for scientific methodology and no desire to find the real answers to questions.
Most of the articles referenced in this page are from reliable sources, except where indicated, only as examples of religious misinformation against scientific answers to questions the bible can never answer. What is the real Age of the Earth? What are the real planetry orbits? Religious views have been and still are factually wrong on such basic questions. Many egocentric religious beliefs accepted that the entire universe revolved around the earth, this view was disproved long ago by the Comets of 1572 which burned in the sky for two years, disproving the earth centered crystal sphere theory. Science accepts it when research results are wrong, but religion does not accept any experimentation or change. Religion has tried to impede scientific progress ever since Nicholas Copernicus. With some assistance of the meticulous stellar observations of Tycho Brahe, Copernicus proved that the earth orbits the sun!
Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for his heretical beliefs.
Science requires experimentation, the replication of results and peer-review, not a literal adherence to faith and religious beliefs. A progressive monarch prepared to advance education in Islamic cultures, King Abdullah is making a great effort to bring Islamic education into the 21th Century. Very little is being done in Christian cultures to advance scientific education. Only 3% of primary school time is spent on science. King Abdullah invests in Saudi education. Science requires the truth and the real answers to such questions as, How Old is the Earth?.
Non serviam! False religious beliefs impeding science.
Many respectable university sites provide reliable information untainted with Biblical bias. When searching for keywords and related sites, it is disappointing to find such little support from the scientific community and the proliferation of Religious Creation views dressed up as science. Without standards in education, we may as well all well revert to worshipping Thor, the God of Thunder, instead of consulting meteorologists.
Scientific Dating Methods
Potassium-40 isotopes decays into Argon 40 at low temperatures: The relative amounts in rocks confirms the date of the last volcanic upheaval of hot lava and its subsequent cooling.
The higher the proportion of Argon-40 to Potassium-40 the older a rock strata is.
Many biblical creationists misrepresent science to support the biblical creation story that the earth is only a few thousand years old. Caveat. This next weblink is merely an example of pseudo-scientific, biased religious dogma, "Christian Science".
One of the problems with relativity is that the speed of light is always assumed
to be an immutable scientific constant of 186,283 miles per second. A recent report from the NEC Research Institute in Prinston New Jersey
is another serious challenge to the scientific constant argument. Lijun Wang was reported in the Sunday Age June 25 as having sent a pulse of light
through excited Cesium atoms where the pulse travelled across a chamber before the pulse had finished entering the chamber.
Maybe we can see into the future sometimes? We await peer review and replication with baited breath, but suspect that this is
not another cold fusion hoax and c2 in Einstein's formula E (Energy) = M(Mass) ×c2 (Speed of light squared) is finally being questioned as the longhaired one has demanded for many years.
The Tired light theory offers an alternative explanation for the background radiation. That the light tires from the length of its
journey. Wallace (1993) calculated that light lost 5% to 7% of its energy for every 109 light years travelled. Light that has travelled
a great distance slips down through the electromagnetic spectrum to become the cosmic background radiation observed.
Radio waves travel faster than infrared and infrared travels faster than light.
Anti-evolution literature often uses the examples of complex biological systems to argue for a conscious designer theory.
Those of you who see complexity as an argument for a conscious designer would benefit from reading The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins which
demonstrates the gradual development of sophisticated vision from light sensitive skin cell eyes, the evolution of lungs from air
gulping fish and the development of complex biological systems from step by step cumulative transformations. There is also a computer
life forms simulator "Biomorphs" which Dawkins (used to demonstrate how, in a simple digital model where the human is the selecting
factor for life or death rather than the environment) of a line of development, life forms diverge very quickly within a few
generations to more complex forms unimaginable from the beginning model.
There are some people descended from survivors of the plague, perhaps 10% of Europeans, who might never catch AIDS, because their ancestors conferred on them a genetic immunity
by surviving the plague; 700 hundreds years ago, they have some immunological protection through having the CCR5 Delta 32- mutation. This genetic immunity only occurs in people
with an ancestor from a population devastated by the Bubonic plague. The incidence of this mutation is only 2% in central Asia. The mutation is completely absent among East Asians, Africans, and American Indians.
In the Hebrew tradition, the world was created exactly as it was described in the Biblical book of Genesis. In the New Testament, Jesus being Jewish usually deferred to the authority of the old testament. Both Jews and Christians believed that the world was only around six thousand years old, that the Hebrew Old Testament and the Christian Bible described the entire history of the earth and man.
The challenge to this argument in the Scopes trial showed how impossible it was to reconcile archeological evidence of human history with the calculation of Ussher which became standard Christian belief for hundreds of years. Some "Creation scientists" still cling to this extreme creation date of 4004 BC, complete with Noah's ark, two of each animal and descent from Adam and Eve, no matter what the proof is against it.
One argument the church used was that, that each creation day is but a day to GOD which could be many of our years, but that does not tally with the Biblical chronological record of the ages achieved by, for example Methusalah who the Bible stated lived to be 969 years old.
Another argument creation scientists use is that their measurements of the speed of light since 1870 show that it is slowing down, but that it would have been infinite around about 4004 B.C; and therefore other atomic constants
such as carbon decay also can't be trusted.
Special thanks go to Ian Plimmer who challenged a claim by a Mr Robert's that he had found Noah's Ark (actually a geological formation).
Ian invested his time and money in a case that such claims were misleading and deceptive under the Australian Trade Practices Act.
Unfortunately Ian lost the case and probably his house to stop the gullible being prey to religious fundamentalism.
Perhaps they don't merit such effort. A recent survey of Australian first year university biology students reported in 21st Century ,
Issue 7, pp. 20, showed 20% believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis,
41% believe in evolution guided by God, and the rest had some knowledge of evolution.
3.9 billion years ago Bacteria, algae and single celled life developed in hostile environments.
543 million years ago there was a dramatic increase in the number of larger hard bodied seeing animals (Vision).
There were many forms of multicelled animals around 100 million years before the Cambrian period, but they are not well represented in the fossil record as they only had soft bodies. Fossils from Pre-Cambrian times could be microscopic or preserved with few details. There were jellyfish and relatives of the Portuguese man-of-war.
All phylia of animals suddenly developed their hard parts between 543 and 538 million years ago! Andrew Parker, In the Blink of an eye. found that the earth's physical environmental conditions were not the cause of the development of animal hard parts such as the spiny or protective shells of Trilobites.
One very important reason that animals might have developed hard protective body parts and exo-skeletons was related to the development of EYES, sight and vision. As well as having a hard spiny shell, the ability to see the 360° world gave an animal a survival advantage, the first eyes in animals.
There are many different early types of eyes and ways of seeing the world; as predator, or prey. Where an animal is in the food chain can determine the survival of that line of sight development. There were blind pre or proto-trilobites who did not have eyes, who died out, Trilobites not from the line which developed sight died out.
Two basic types of eyes emerged from the Cambrian period, simple eye and compound eyes. Simple eyes are the camera type of eye that human and mammals have and compund eyes are the basic type of insect eyes made of many different sections. There are many variations within each type of eye. Early eye types of the Trilobites were of the compound variety.
Another living example of air breathing fish is the Lungfish our closest relative without legs. The 400 million year oldcoelacanth thought extinct for
50 million years and discovered alive in the Indian Ocean in 1938. It has legs, but only an oil filled bladder for buoyancy not for breathing air and is more closely related to frogs. An example of convergent evolution of legs.
The earth's landmass was locked up in the super continent Gondwanaland.
The solar system had become relatively stable until the collision of two giant asteroids 160 million years doubled the number of impact craters on the earth and moon around this time. This could have cause extinctions of dinosaurs, parts of it produced the 180 kilometre wide Chicxulub crater in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.
Parts of the same asteroid is thought to have also created the 85 kilometre Tycho crater on the moon, 108 million years ago.
Hopefully there will not be another collision of large asteroids located between Mars and Jupiter in our time!
The site, where the Ornithopods were found provided other fossil finds, including lungfish teeth and a mammal jaw. The Cape Otway fossil site is about 10 million years younger than the Inverloch site, this is considered an important find as it may provide clues about how mammals evolved over that time.
Ornithopods in Victoria
Mammals lacking full RGB vision, like mice and dogs have a better sense of smell with 80% of their olfactory receptor genes working.
It seems during this period, some mammals developed better vision and less reliance on smell than mammals with more limited colour vision.
Richard Dawkins has demonstrated many different varieties of eye that have evolved, the Howler monkey, which is unrelated to other RGB colour visioned humans, apes or old world monkeys seems to
have evolved colour vision about 16 million years ago, independently of others. Convergent evolution. The howler monkey as expected also had about 31% of its olfactory receptor genes not working, while all its relatives
who have only green and blue vision, but a better functioning sense of smell.
Siamang Gibbon
The Gibbons are also called lesser apes, and differ from great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and humans) in being smaller and resemble monkeys more than the great apes do. The species include the Siamang, the Lar Gibbon or White-Handed Gibbon, and the Hoolock Gibbon. The Siamang, is the largest.
Many mammals have become extinct, you can help save remote and distant relatives like Orangutans, who are endangered. Would modern Homo sapiens let the Flores hobbit or Neanderthals go extinct if they existed today, probably, perhaps, help save magnificent Orangutans.
On a morphological argument we have more in common with and are closer relatives with Ourangutans
The taxonomy of animal classification is a long established science, that pre-dates genetic analysis.
A distant human relative being driven to extinction by the logging of old forests in Borneo. Black future for Orangutans.
The complex behaviour of orang-utans suggests that human culture had started to develop by 14 million years ago.
1n 1995 in the northern desert of Chad, remains were found of an early ancestor of humans. The fossil's nickname is Toumai, the formal name is Sahelanthropus chadensis.
Toumai was not a chimp or a human, but had characteristics of both. Toumai lived about 230,000 generations ago, an ancient bi-pedal ancestor of humans Sahelanthropus chadensis. Before the discovery of Toumai, the earliest authenticated member of the human line was Ardipithecus ramidus, 4.4 million years old, from Ethiopia.
If Sahelanthropus is also a member of the human line, then it pushes back the date that our ancestors split from chimpanzees by at least 2 million years!
Norm Chompsky argued that language was developed only by humans, Homo spaiens.
Handedness. The right hand is dominant in many animals from Precambrian times, teeth indentations on Trilobytes show that there was a preference for right sided dominance. Physiologically the human and monkey brain, is like two brains encased like a walnut shell in two major halves, a left and right hemisphere. The distinct hemispheres join up in a bundle of fibres called the corpus callosum.
The way the brain connects to the body reverses the sides so that the right side of the brain controls the left side physically. The left side of the brain controls the right side and the right arm which may have been used with originally gutteral sounds with gestures. Language in the majority of humans who are right handed is located in the left side of the brain.
Some theories of language acquisition postulate that gestures may have led to speech, that actions such as pointing preceeded speech and may have led to language.
Monkeys and apes are not physically able to make some human sounds. Following Norm Chompsky's language acquisition theory, a rudimentary random sentence generator as a shockwave movie.
The most basic unit of language is to be able to name things, nouns. Different nouns can do different verb actions. An inaminate object, a passive noun like "rock" can only be, exist or be acted on. Nouns can be made into a noun hierarchy of related verb actions for animated life and humans.
A human can do most of the verb actions of other animals with exceptions like flight. At the top of a noun animacy hierarchy I put humans who can communicate complex ideas as well as more sophisticated emotional actions, laugh, cry calculate etc.
Nouns with an animacy rating doing appropriate verb actions can have embelishments like adverbs of: time, place, direction and manner, providing a basic English grammar with uncertain endings to show the tense of irregular verbs. Only about one sentence in ten has the correct English syntax and grammar.
It is not langauge acquisition if a monkey like a parrot imitates or copies the sound of human language without understanding the meaning. There have been many attempts to teach chimpanzees language.
David Premack in The Mind of an Ape described his training of a chimpanzee "Sarah" starting in 1962. Sarah could understand 150 different signs and make rudimentary Englsh sentences from them.
It appears that there are many individual difference in chimpanzees to learn language some chimps could not learn a single word and other were very clever, there are differences in the population in ability to learn language. Once acquired it is easily passed on to the children of speaking parents, even without training young chimps have learnt signs they overheard being taught to their mother.
Primate Use of Language. Washoe was another clever chimpanzee who could use 240 signs and make sentences. The Bonobo chimpanzee Kanzi acquired a vocabulary of 200 words and was able to construct sentences by combining words with gestures.
Richard Wrangham Medicine may be over 6,000,000 years old and have a non-human origin. African apes used the leaves of Aspilia not for food, but to fight viral infections and parasites such as the nematode worms. Chimps also use the leaves of a fig to kill worms, Ugandan chimps eat Rubia cordifolia, Brazilian female Muriquis monkeys can reportedly trigger ovulation by eating certain plants and Tanzanian chimps eat the pith of Veronia which contains terpines.
If the rest of the monkey family knew so much about medicinal plants, how much more did humans know? Animals unlike humans do not seem to eat anything for the effect of heightening their awareness that we can discern, there is no beer, dope or LSD in the animal world. The religious origins of hallucinogenic use and divination.
Humans and chimps diverged with humans beginning to walk upright in response to moving between vegetation on the ground or walking
erect to forage for food. Australopithecus ramidus the most ape-like ancestor of modern humans who lived about 4.5 million years ago
was only one minor species of monkey which seems to have stayed in the forests for protection from predators such as hyenas, big cats, and large bears; as most skeletal remains of ramidus have been found crushed with indentations of teeth marks. Whether or not ramidus
could walk upright is uncertain from the fossil remains, what is certain is that the immediate descendant of ramidus, Australopithecus
Afarensis did venture out in to the open which implies they were able to
control the predators which had lived on their ancestors.
Crude stone tools were in common usage and with the development of stone axes indicates that Homo erectus had become free as a carnivore
to exploit many different sources of meat in their diet and were then able to begin exploring out of Africa.
Bonobos an African ape from the Congo river area evolved apart from chimpanzees.
Great apes - chimpanzees, bonobos, orang-utan and gorillas share with humans the ability to use and understand Gestures to communicate. When apes gesture, they use their right hand, which is controlled by the left side of the brain - the same side as the language control centre in the human brain.
Homo habilis the handyman, became larger in brain and body size and by 1 million years ago had explored Java and Peking. Also around two million years ago it is suggested that fire was first used as teeth sizes seem to have shrunk as well as females gaining in body size. The first cooks.
H. habilis and H. erectus lived side-by-side in the same park of Kenya for nearly half-a-million years.
They were not so different to us, convergent evolution of another distinct species to a roughly similar level of adaptation to Homo sapiens 30,000 years ago.
They used fire, made clothes and used weapons to hunt prey.
Neanderthal was taller and stockier than Homo sapiens, they had bigger faces and noses, receding chins and low foreheads. The bone above the eye is more protruding and stronger, but the forehead slopes back more sharply, they only posessed a smaller brain, but they probably had basic language skills to survive in groups.
Recent pioneering work has allowed scientists to study DNA from Neanderthal bones. Red or blond hair is thought to be the an evolutionary development or adaptation to cope with lower levels of sunlight present and still be able to receive enought vitamin D from sunlight. This suggests that red and blond hair may have developed in areas further from the equator such as Europe which receive less sunlight.
At least some of the Neanderthals had a gene for red hair. Though they are not thought to be related to modern humans they may have been a more diverse species than we formally thought. The gene for red hair may also be an ancient one posessed by some monkeys such as Orangutan.
The skull shape looks very similar to humans, but it has thicker and higher ridges above the eyes and the skull slopes back more sharply with a much smaller frontal lobe than human who have a higher forehead. The frontal lobe in human is thought to be the most recently developed brain structure which controls personality and orientation in the world.
Humans with a damaged frontal lobe can suffer from a variety of personality problems, they tend to be more disinhibited and prone to inappropriate outbursts.
The last Neanderthals died out by about 30,000 years ago. Studies of ice cores from Greenland show from 70,000 to 20,000 years ago the world's climate was much colder than now, around -10 Degrees C in winter. The pattern of remains found shows Neanderthals
retreating south to warmer climates and co-existing with humans for thousands of years.
20 to 30 thousand years ago CroMagnons, modern Europeans introduced superior technology such as spears, fishing nets and sewn clothing and they could survive the cold much better.
With a much smaller brain size of only 380 cubic cm they existed on an Indonesian Island Flora for at least 80,000 years until about 13,000 years ago.
At first it was argued that the hobbit was a human with a disease of microcephaly, a dwarfed human with a small brain, but since then other skeletons have been found confirming the existence of the hobbits.
The hobbits wrist bones were more adapted to knuckle walking and hanging from trees and were more primitive than human wrist bones, much more like apes and older human ancestors and not like modern humans wrist bones at all.
Matheww Tosheri from difference and similarities in the wrist bones concluded that...
Hobbits are like a second cousin to humans.
The Chimpanzee is like a third cousin to humans.
This is a new type of human, not another monkey. A smaller proportioned human. Upright walking, tool using, fire making hunters. Even Chimpanzees are known to hunt using spears, Gorillas also use tools. The Hobbits had more sophisticated stone tools and must have made boats at some stage to cross seas to reach the islands.
The had smaller brains, perhaps with denser neural connections, especially in the frontal lobe, the area of the brain associated with actions and planning, the most recently developed brain structure! Most monkeys have a flat head falling away from the eyebrow ridges. Hobbits, humans and Homo erectus have a forehead with frontal lobes. The frontal lobes of Hobbits have ridges on either side of the left and right frontal hemisphere protruding much more than in other monkeys with a forehead. Did hobbits ever meet Neanderthals or Erectus and interbred?
Comparisons of brain shape, indicate that the Hobbits are related to Homo erectus. Perhaps when Homo erectus travelled to the islands of Indonesia, after thousands of years, their body size became much smaller.
It appears that localised environmental pressures, like those on islands can produce new species from isolated and/or stressed populations. Just as Darwin discovered with changes in isolated bird populations of Finches, monkeys and mammals can also change, even downsizing in response to environmental conditions on an island. There may be other isolated populations of human or monkey relatives who changed into something different in isolated areas!
It is likely that we will find other human relatives or monkeys who are not that much different to us.
What a diverse species monkeys and humans really are, we are not uniquely gifted with intelligence, the use of tools or even language. There is nothing so special about us over other forms of life, no special creation by a God.
Around 500 BC, Xenophanes of Colophon thought that man made God in his own image. He ridiculed the human nature of the Greek Olympian Gods stating that, "If cattle could draw, they would make their own Gods in the likeness of cattle". I wonder if Neanderthals and Hobbits made Gods in their own image.
If they can retrieve DNA from a Hobbit, we could have a party with distant relatives. The DNA separation would be more distant, back alongside Homo erectus.
In the last 30,000 years there have been many human and monkey species, not just Homo sapien. The monkey and human family tree has been very diverse, we are not so special after all.
Charles Darwin wondered if Gorillas were brutish humans or if we were sophisticated apes. The difference is one of degree.
Jane Goodall's study showed them as having complex social lives more like ours.
Monkey Sub-groups. More distant human relatives
Chimpanzee
Sulawesi macaques
African Apes
Asian apes - 8 to 12 million years ago branched off
Old world Monkeys
Bonobos
Humans closer Relatives
Homo habilis - Handy man Approx 2 million years ago branched off into erectus
Homo erectus - Upright man Approx 400,000 - 200,000 years ago branched off into sapiens and floresiensis
Homo sapien neanderthalensis - 130,000 to 30,000 years ago.
Homo floresiensis - An erectus relative became extinct about 13,000 years ago.
Homo sapien sapien - Wise man appears about 400,000 years ago.
CroMagnon - Modern europeans 35,000 years ago
Very Closely related Humans sub-groups
Negroid
Caucasoid
Mongoloids
Australian Aborigines
South African Bushmen
See The Seven Daughters of Eve for information on the Clan mothers. The clan mothers were discovered by an analysis of human mitochondrial DNA which is inheirited through the mother only. An analysis of mitochondrial DNA reveals only seven major sub-groups of humans.
In the Hebrew tradition, the world was created exactly as it was described in the Biblical book of Genesis. In the New Testament, Jesus being Jewish usually deferred to the authority of the old testament. Both Jews and Christians believed that the world was only around six thousand years old, that the Hebrew Old Testament and the Christian Bible described the entire history of the earth and man.
All phylia of animals suddenly developed their hard parts between 543 and 538 million years ago! Andrew Parker, 
There are many different early types of eyes and ways of seeing the world; as predator, or prey. Where an animal is in the food chain can determine the survival of that line of sight development. There were blind pre or proto-trilobites who did not have eyes, who died out, Trilobites not from the line which developed sight died out.
The site, where the Ornithopods were found provided other fossil finds, including lungfish teeth and a mammal jaw. The Cape Otway fossil site is about 10 million years younger than the Inverloch site, this is considered an important find as it may provide clues about how mammals evolved over that time.
The skull shape looks very similar to humans, but it has thicker and higher ridges above the eyes and the skull slopes back more sharply with a much smaller frontal lobe than human who have a higher forehead. The frontal lobe in human is thought to be the most recently developed brain structure which controls personality and orientation in the world. 
