When scientists later dated the skull to million years old, the same age to when Homo habilis lived, the scientific community thought KNM-ER must then.
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The scientists who did the dating decided the rock they had tested must have been contaminated. So Leakey sent more samples. From these the scientists chose crystals that seemed fresher than others, and they came up with an age of 2. They later adjusted this to 2. But dating work on the rock did not stop there.
More tests were done. Results this time ranged from , years up to Now that we have figured out that there is a new member of the genus Homo, the fact that creationists keep using this 40 year old argument, goes back to the fact that they don't listen As the archeology info site states emphasis mine:. The specimen was originally thought to be around 2. This inaccuracy was caused by contamination of older material, and the tuff is now know to be much younger.
The specimen is now thought to date to approximately 1. Though this date is now generally accepted for the specimen, the geologists who orignally dated the KBS tuff continue to argue for a later date for the specimen. While they admit the dating of the volcanic tuff was inaccurate,. This page doesn't quote anything after , and the paper with Leakey et al does figure out the problem with the Tuff.
One other problem that many people ignorant of human evolution fail to understand is that it's not a linear path. As a previous link mentions, several hominid species co-existed. Some became extinct, and some didn't. This is where Leakey actually made a great new discovery. Again, it's all part of the self correcting mechanism of science. Something was off, and at first they didn't know. Further investigation and scientific methodologies actually gave them clues, and then they had to revise what they thought they knew.
This is the accepted scientific method, not blindly accepting the first thought that may come to one's mind. A paper that details a better understanding of the family tree was published by Bernard Wood one of the men that help assemble the skull with Leakey:. Discussing the radiometric dating as it was understood in the s compared to the s and beyond, Dr Groves of Tufts university relays some information on KNM-ER that may be relevant:. White et al wrote of Aramis: The date was also, at one point, queried by Kappelman and Fleagle , Nature, They then go on to explain in some detail why Kappelman et al.
The paper was illustrated by slides of the site and some of the fossil material. The site is flat, stony and arid; the fossils are scattered over the landscape, friable in the extreme, and difficult to collect, let alone to preserve.
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It is true that remains of at least 50 specimens ascribed to A. For Lubenow, this seems to be an attempt to make the radiometric dates fit the faunal analysis, which reminds him of the polemic over the date of the famous skull KNM-ER , from Lake Turkana in Kenya. There was, he claims, such disagreement between radiometric and other dating techniques that it was finally dated by "biochronological comparisons", in this case the stages of evolution of pigs in East Africa.
Surely he is not making a tacit admission that pigs did evolve! Elephants, incidentally, did the same thing, and their remains are likewise sufficiently numerous that their evolution can be tracked in great detail between about 4 and 1 million Ma. Again, this Taphonomy is a delicate science that may require decades to fully understand how something happened. And initial mistakes are remembered, while the correct answer seems to go ignored.
Of course, this is nothing new from creationists. If you need to get a Christian perspective, this individual takes a biblical approach, and still has to conclude that radiometric dating works and is accurate. A telling bit in that paper states:. Other creationists have focused on instances in which radiometric dating seems to yield incorrect results.
In most instances, these efforts are flawed because the authors have misunderstood or misrepresented the data they attempt to analyze.
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Nothing but misunderstanding and misrepresentation. No, Leakey was not correct when he said, "Either we toss out this skull or we toss out our theories on early man.
When he made this statement, Leakey had been placing higher confidence in the age of the large hominin skull he had found than his contemporaries did. This was not altogether unreasonable, since the various methods of paleomagnetism, fission track dating, and geochronology had already been used to check the 2.
But after a "devastating" study about pig geochronology was published by Basil Cooke, scientists made several trips back to Africa to get additional data and came back with a younger estimate of this skull's age. This effort was still ongoing in , when Ian McDougall published findings using the same nominal methods as was done in and gave the community a much more satisfying 1. Having thrown out the problematic old date, the community allowed homo habilis later renamed Homo rudolfensis , after the body of alkaline water formerly known as Lake Rudolf to keep its place after the australopithecines, such as "Lucy", whose remains were found just one year after Leakey's June proclamation in National Geographic Magazine.
Incidentally, this controversy immediately served as a "lesson learned" to other paleoanthropologists.
Problems with Lucy and Skull
After discovering "Lucy" in , Donald Johanson went to the trouble of bringing a specialist to Africa before publishing so that the rocks that he would be using would be regarded as reliable the first time. I was also acutely aware of a controversy that had been ballooning over the age of the KBS tuff at Koobi Fora. Although Richard Leakey still staunchly defended the date of 2.
Fitch and Jack Miller, rumblings about it were growing louder and louder. A few months before, Basil Cooke had published a devastating paper on pig evolution. With a six-hundred-thousand-year discrepancy, there was something wrong, either with Cooke's pig analysis or with the Fitch-Miller potassium-argon date. Since Cooke knew how rigorous a collector Clark Howell was and how precise the dating at Omo was because of its many clear volcanic marker tuffs, he stood by his pigs.
Leakey stood by Fitch and Miller. I had begun to suspect that Leakey might be wrong, and was acutely aware of the enormously complex rearrangements that he would have to make in his thinking about hominid evolution if it turned out that he was indeed wrong. On the strength of the 2.
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Leakey therefore, and following his father's belief, had logically anchored himself in the view that australopithecines were collateral relatives, and that the Homo ancestor, when discovered, would turn out to be more Homo -like and less australopithecine-like than any fossil found so far. To rearrange all that in his mind on the basis of some pig fossils would be shockingly difficult.
It simply fits no previous model of human beginnings. I was determined not to get into dating dilemmas; the Hadar figures would have to be rock-solid. I began to fret about the samples that had been sent to Aronson for potassium-argon dating; maybe they were bad samples. I realized that the only way I could reassure myself on that was to get Aronson to collect his own.
Skull KNM-ER 1470
I asked Taieb if he thought it would be a good idea to get Aronson to come to Hadar. He said he would arrive in December , toward the end of the second field season. Another aspect of this controversy that is easy to overlook in textbooks and encyclopedia articles is the competitive nature of research in human evolution, and the superstar status that society places on researchers who make winning discoveries. My first public description of the knee joint was at a meeting of anthropologists held early in in New York by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, an organization founded by a Swedish industrialist to further anthropological research.
Everyone asked what on earth it was. I said I was not sure. All I could tell them was that it was bipedal and extremely small; if it was an australopithecine, it was smaller than any collected so far.
I thought I had been convincing; but when I was having lunch afterward with Mary Leakey, she said "I can't tell you who, but there are a couple of people at this conference who are saying those are monkey bones. You know it; I know it. But it's always the way when you find something new. All those anatomists think they're so smart. They don't want to admit that somebody has found something different.
But you stick to your guns. You know what you've found. Snickering away, saying, 'We'll wait until he publishes; then we'll carve him up. On a stopover in Paris I had to go through Customs again. UR , the Plio-Pleistocene hominid from Malawi. Analysis of the microanatomy of the enamel.
