Re: URL of Science article Re: 30,000 year old Homo erectus

Dan Barnes (dbarnes@liv.ac.uk)
Wed, 18 Dec 1996 13:41:49 GMT

In article <01bbebd5$e61c5b00$49fbacce@b1dsjv38>,
liz.daunt@sympatico.ca says...
>
>Thanks. Just finished reading this article. Sounds like they are
>stretching quite a bit to come up with their stated range of 27 to 53 kya.
>I have a question for the experts out there. Is there a way to obtain
>radiocarbon dates directly on the hominid bones. This would seem to be
>within the range of that method, and would avoid many of the troubles with
>the method used for this article. How the hell did they manage to lose
>25,000 non-hominid fossils.
>
I'm not too sure they are 'strething it'. There are was an AMS date could be done
on the hominid but destructive dating should be a last resort (I think its been
done on the Hahnofersand find). Semi-non destructive single aliquot ESR
(Grun, 1995) would be a better bet since the material can be returned to the
teeth after dating. However, it seems like the person in charge will not permit
any of this.