Since this exchange, I’ve been mulling this over.
What bothered me initially was the thought that, if a human were actually found in undisturbed rocks from 70 MYA — which is, of course, impossible — I’m confident that people would not actually abandon evolution. I crinkled my brow and wondered, “Gosh, does that make evolution unfalsifiable?”
But it doesn’t. To understand why, you have to understand how science actually works.
If a given scientific model accommodates, say, 100 million various bits of information from across various disciples, and one bit of information doesn’t fit, that one bit doesn’t force people to abandon the model. What it ̯does do is get that 1 bit of information put on a “this doesn’t fit” list. That list gathers and gets vetted by generations of scientists, until someone comes along and says, “Aha! Here’s a new model that accommodates all 100,000,001 bits of information.” This is what I understand happened with relativity over and against Newtonian physics, for instance. For evolution, such a new model would have to elegantly explain why we have exactly the distribution we have for all the other countless fossils we’ve described to date… AND the one anachronistic human. It would not be enough to say, “evolution is a bunch of stupid ballyhoo.” It would have to say, “This is why it looks for all the world like evolution is true AND there’s also this weird Homo sapiens fossil in Late Cretaceous rocks.”
My mentor in my scientific field, a respected pioneer, used to tell me, “You can’t beat something with nothing.” He would go on, “So that was his story. It’s not enough to say it’s wrong. What’s your story?” The one who has the story that most elegantly and convincingly explains ALL the data wins the day.
The problem with YEC is that it doesn’t have any good explanation for why we see the extremely coherent, high-definition, beautifully elegant picture of creation that we do when we look through evolutionary lenses. In and of itself, finding a 70 million year old Homo sapiens won’t convince people of anything.