Piltdown Superman

It is well known that the Vikings, including Leif "Lucky" Erikson, included North America in their travels around 1000 A.D. My Scandinavian ancestors were a rowdy, restless bunch. Vikings took a notion to explore and set up camps in Iceland and Greenland. They went on to North America and named the place they homesteaded Vinland . Records from Labrador were retrieved, but there was plenty of disagreement among scholars about the timing of Viking journeys. Surprisingly, tree rings helped nail down the date. Viking ship Lofotr , Flickr / Runar Storeide , posted by Geir Are Johansen  ( CC BY-SA 2.0 ) Although they never found Spam, the salmon fishing and grape growing were better on the east coast of North America. A couple of ancient Icelandic texts are referred to as the Vinland Sagas, but they were not firsthand accounts of the explorations and commutes. Strangely, dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating were used in conjunction with other forensic (historical) and empirical

As discussed previously, dendrochronology  (counting tree rings) a favorite of people who believe in an old earth, especially because important facts can be omitted so they can get the deep-time numbers they so desire. However, this and other methods of counting layers are terribly flawed . In fact, they like it so much, secularists still use dendrochronology on children as a propaganda tool . With all the difficulties that have been found in counting supposed annual layers , you wooden think they still used that method. Credit: Public Domain Pictures.net / Sheila Brown Some tinhorns exclaim, "Aha! There are trees with rings that date them older than you people believe. Take that , creationists!" Rein in there a mite, Hoss. The basic idea of one growth ring per year is misleading, since some trees produce multiple rings each year, other trees may take a notion to skip a year, and others produce none at all. What is seen is more likely a record of past climate and other enviro

Biblical creationists often need to deal with tendentious evidences for Earth's alleged old age, including radiometric dating, ice core samples, distant starlight, and others. These have been dealt with by creationists in many places (several of which are linked on this site). Another "proof" for Earth's age is that of trees, since the Genesis Flood, about 4,500 years ago, would have ripped them up and they'd have to start over. Yet some are claimed to be substantially older. "General Sherman" sequoia credit: US National Park Service , usage does not imply endorsement of site contents Some folks say that certain trees are dated at 30,000 years, so the timeline of the Bible must be wrong. Ofttimes, people are using outdated material and incomplete material. For example, the General Sherman sequoia pictured above was thought to be in excess of 6,000 years, but has been revised down to an uncertain approximation of 2,150 years. Many believe that thes

Some of Darwin's Cheerleaders think that they have a killing stroke against the biblical timeline by saying that counting tree rings reveals that some trees are older than the Genesis Flood. While this dendrochronology has some useful applications and can give general ideas, it is not a settled science. Credit: morgueFile / beglib The old adage of counting the rings to determine the age of the tree does not work as well as many people think. It is based on the assumption that a tree will yield one ring per year. However, trees can produce multiple rings in a year, skip a ring or produce indistinct rings. Other factors need to be considered. Dating a tree sounds simple—just count the number of rings from the trunk’s outer edge to its center and you discover the number of years the tree was alive. Secular researchers have determined that a few rare trees have more rings than the number of years since Noah’s Flood. Debater Bill Nye recently used these tree studies to chal