Dating Hominids Based on What the Animals at the Sites Ate

ScienceDaily has a story on how to date fossil hominid sites based on the dental remains of the animals that lived around them. As the story relates:

Florent Rivals is the main author and a researcher from the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA), attached to the IPHES in Tarragona. "For the first time, a method has been put forward which allows us to establish the relative length of the human occupations at archaeological sites as, up until now, it was difficult to ascertain the difference between, for example, a single long-term occupation and a succession of shorter seasonal occupations in the same place", he explained to SINC.

In the study, recently published in the Journal of Human Evolution, the researchers analyze the dental wear of the ungulates (herbivorous mammals) caused by microscopic particles of opaline silica in plants. These marks appear when eating takes place and erase the previous ones. This is why they are so useful.

This almost qualifies as a taphonomic technique and to have it as an extra tool in trying to figure out how these people lived and what they ate is good news.



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A New Dating Method

According to a story from Science Centric, a new dating method involving water removal from an item during dating has come to light. The team of researchers from the University of Manchester and University of Edinburgh. The method involves the process of analyzing water absorption:

From the moment they are fired, ceramics begin to absorb moisture from the environment which causes them to gain mass. Using a technique they call rehydroxilation dating' researchers led by Dr Moira Wilson from the University of Manchester found that heating a sample of the relic to extreme temperatures causes this process to be reversed all the moisture it has gained since it was fired is lost again.

The more weight a sample loses during heating, the more moisture there was to start with, and so the older the relic. After heating, Wilson and her team used an extremely accurate measuring device to monitor the sample as it began to recombine with moisture in the atmosphere. They then used a law to predict how long it would take for all the water lost in heating to be reabsorbed, and so reveal the true age of the sample.

So far bricks from the Roman Empire have been successfully dated and the process has the potential to go back to 10 ky B.P.

Of course, all of the items that are dated should show varying amounts of moisture only for the last four thousand years or so. Before that, the world-wide flood would render all items waterlogged. As AIG states:

Genesis 11:10 tells us that Shem was 100 years old, 2 years after the Flood had finished. When was Noah’s Flood? 1,981 years to AD 0 plus 967 years to the founding of Solomon’s Temple plus 480 years to the end of the Exodus plus 430 years to the promise to Abraham plus 75 years to Abraham’s birth plus 350 years to Shem’s 100th birthday plus 2 years to the Flood. The Biblical data places the Flood at 2304 BC +/- 11 years.

Of course, if varying amounts of moisture are found in objects dated back before the supposed date of the flood, this would strongly suggest that no such flood took place, wouldn't it?