AMMO Kid said:
A third example is the theory of Neanderthals. If they were really alive from 100,000 BC to 35,000 BC, where are all the skeletons? We haven't even found one legitimate set of bones yet. We came close with Lucy, only to discover that they were really ape bones from under 10,000 years ago... 50,000,000,000 - 55,000,000,000 generations of bones don't just disappear. I guess we'll just keep studying the dinosaur bones from BILLIONS of years ago that keep popping up everywhere...
I didn't want to reply to this thread because I've been replying to far too much of these kinds of threads, but as I study archaeology, when I read this, I almost got a heart-attack. Not to mention that I come from Croatia, where the most Neanderthal bones have been found (in Krapina, and other sites, such as the Vindija cave). Unless you give me some really, and I mean REALLY, good source for this what you wrote, I feel an
obligation to correct you on this matter. I will not argue about creationism or anything else you believe (I of course think creationism has little to do with science) because it's not my field of study, but this is.
The Neanderthals existed somewhere between 150 000 and 30 000 years ago (with various other dates, going as far as 5-600 000 as the first proto-neanderthal features, but setting the farthest date somewhere to 200 000 years ago. Their full name is Homo sapiens neanderthalensis (making Neanderthals our ... relatives, to simplify. We still have not reached the concesus over whether we mixed with them at some point in history, although there are indication that we did, such as the Lapedo child ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapedo_child ) where some scientists believe that the skeleton has both modern human AND Neanderthal features, making the child a probable evidence of breeding between us and Neanderthals, but some scientists say the skeleton does not have Neanderthal features. Still, the theory about homo sapiens sapiens (us) and homo sapiens neanderthalensis breeding exists). By finding the Neanderthal hyoid bone in the Kebara cave, we know that they had the ability to talk (whether they did talk or not, we can't know, but they had the biological ability too do so. I also mentioned Kebara because it has one of the best preserved Neanderthal skeleton which you can see here [http://www.donsmaps.com/neanderthalskeletons.html]. It's also one of the proofs that the Neanderthals buried their dead). Wikipedia article has tons of good sources so here you go, a list of some web-pages where you can learn more about them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_anatomy
http://archaeology.about.com/od/hominidancestors/a/neander.htm
http://www.culturenet.hr/default.aspx?id=23639&pregled=1&datum=9.1.2009%2015:00:13
http://www.paleoanthro.org/dissertations/krapina-bibliography.pdf (a huge list of books about Neanderthals)
And so on, I could google it for you for the next three hours.
Lucy is an Australopithecus Afarensis, 3.2 million years old and it has nothing to do with Neanderthals specifically. If its dating has been changed without any of our professor telling us about it, I'd need some hard evidence of it, from a reputable source and scientific research. Here's the wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(Australopithecus) for you to start.
Also, another wiki page that might be interesting to you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossils
We can argue that's not much, but ask any archaeologist or anthropologist and they'll tell you that it's a miracle that much survived. Bones of the dead people don't just end up in the ground and "pop-up" anywhere as you wish; there are millions of factors that influence the preservation of fossils (dinosaurs had much more time to fossilize properly, and are much deeper, not influenced by the weather, geology and human interference). Few month ago I was on a dig of an medieval graveyard and the ground is so horrible that it decomposed most of the bones that were only few hundred years old. I would touch the bone with my tools and the bone just fell apart, if the bone was preserved in the first place. The ground consisted of such materials that it decomposed the wooden coffin, clothes and most of the bones altogether (not to mention that people living in the 12th century didn't really have excellent healthcare and people were probably weak and sickly, hence the weak bones, on top of the acidic earth). To find bones that are thousands of years old, let alone hundreds of thousands or millions; it's pure luck. Even if there are more, how will you locate them? Prior to the neolithic (arguably, eneolithic), people did not build graveyards and necropolis'. Prior to Neanderthals, they didn't even bury the dead. Up until few hundred thousand years, the body would be left somewhere, eaten by animals and decomposed naturally. Lucy was so preserved only because of the volcanic earth where she died, because no one lived on top of it, because no one worked on the land and because animals didn't get to it. Who knows, there may have been fossils beneath every major city, but they are now long gone. There may have been fossils on our arable lands; they too are long gone now. What about the rising of the sea levels? There are thousands of underwater caves and possibly sites that were once above water and probably served to early humans, but we can't explore them now (and even if we do, there's little chance we will find preserved bones). What about natural processes in general? Rain, floods, rivers, landslides, earthquakes, tsunamis, storms? Finding stuff in the ground might sound easy, but it is not. The further back we go into the past, the harder it gets. All this that we did find is an extraordinary thing to have in our museums and institutes, and it's a shame that people believe it's useless. Just one skull can tell us thousands of things about the people that inhabited the world before us, even more so today with our excellent technology. I've visited the Prehistory Museum in France (in the "capital of prehistory", Les-Eyzies de Tayac); just that one museum is full of thousands of fossil remains, more than you can explore. Unfortunately, yes, bones do disappear. They are not made of diamond, they are organic matter that rots in the ground. Not even the best coffins protected the bones of people that died and were buried 500 hundred years ago, let alone the ones that were left in the open, God knows where in the middle of the savannah, 2 million years ago and hundreds of thousands of natural processes and human interferences went over them.
Also, dinosaur bones are not billions of years old; Earth is "only" 4 billion years old, and dinosaurs lived between 230 and 65 million years ago. If "dinosaur bones from BILLIONS of years ago" was just a hyperbole, then disregard this.
Anyway, I wrote this because I want people to know things that scientists worked hard to reach. All this knowledge is here and at your disposal, if you want it. I hope you will learn something new from this and be a more educated person; there's nothing wrong in not knowing something and then learning it. I strive to do so every single day.