Hi Ron,
Thanks for chiming in. I’m really glad at least one YEC person read my post. Otherwise I would have felt it had been a waste of my time! Glad to discuss this.
Also, I’m very thankful for the helpful comments by @pevaquark here.
Some thoughts…
Critical scrutiny by whom? Non-specialists like the author? Did they publish their ““critical scrutiny”” in a peer-reviewed journal, or just snipe away at it from the safe enclave of creationist websites?
It seems the author of your article doesn’t understand much about the basics of archaeology, because he says that all those fossils were in the same stratum whereas it was actually only stated that they were all in the same site. This is, at best, careless.
Now, mind you, I’m not an archaeologist either, but I’ve done a little homework here to understand the original article, and it all seems fairly clear to me now. See what you think.
Feel free to pull up the original Domning 2001 article to follow along.
Let’s zero in on Domning’s description of the location of the Pezosiren fossils. He gives a very specific designation.
“Locality and horizon: Known only from Seven Rivers (about 15 km south of Montego Bay), parish of St. James, western Jamaica; Guys Hill Member, Chapelton Formation, Yellow Limestone Group (early middle Eocene).” (emphasis mine)
Now to understand this, read this description on Wikipedia, you’ll understand the way that Domning has described the location of these fossils. Quoting Wikipedia:
- A bed is a lithologically distinct layer within a member or formation and is the smallest recognisable stratigraphic unit. [AMW: This is what your guy should recognize as a “stratum”]
- A member is a named lithologically distinct part of a formation.
- Formations are the primary units used in the subdivision of a sequence and may vary in scale from tens of centimetres to kilometres.
- A group is a set of two or more formations that share certain lithological characteristics.
By contrast, “Seven Rivers” is a location that’s bigger than a group! Yet if you look in Domning’s article, it’s in Seven Rivers — not “the stratum in question”! — that he says all these other creatures have been found. From his introduction:
“Since 1990, abundant remains of sirenians, together with other marine taxa of early middle Eocene age (roughly 50 Myr ago), have been collected from Seven Rivers, Jamaica. The sediments […] represent a lagoonal, estuarine or deltaic depositional environment. The age of the site was determined from molluscs […] and corroborated by the presence of a primitive rhinoceros […]. The terrestrial fauna also includes an iguanian lizard and possibly a primate.”
It doesn’t say all those were collected “from Guys Hill Member bone beds.” It says they were collected “from Seven Rivers.” Domning says that the entire site has yielded all kinds of different fossils, but then he zooms in from that very broad site to the very specific locations where the early sirenians were found.
So what your guy is saying is more like, “All these different creatures have all been found at the Grand Canyon, therefore it’s obviously all a big hodge-podge of bones with no rhyme or reason to it… and they’re all in the same layer of rock.” Well, no — the Grand Canyon’s an enormous place. So is Seven Rivers, apparently, if it’s got multiple groups in it, which each has multiple formations, each of those with multiple members, and each of those with multiple beds, or strata.
And Domning drills down even more specifically when discussing the different sirenians he found in this location (remember, sirenians is a family of animals that includes everything from ancient Pezosiren through to modern manatees). Continuing from above, he writes,
“The sirenian fossils are found in five distinct bone-beds within a 5-m stratigraphic section referred to the Guys Hill Member of the Chapelton Formation, and occur as isolated bones and associated partial skeletons, with the remains of several individuals commingled. In the lower three bone-beds, all the sirenian remains appear to represent a single taxon (described here: Figs 1 and 2). These provide the first view of the overall anatomy and mode of locomotion of sirenians during their evolutionary transition from land-dwelling to obligatorily aquatic life.” (emphasis mine)
So what I see described here is that five bone beds here have sirenians. But only the lower, oldest, three have Pezosiren, which is the specific sirenian described in the paper at hand. But if you only read your author, you would think all of this was just jumbled together in a big pit, or all in the same layer.
Let me translate, “It seems quite likely to me.” That means, “As a complete nonspecialist with no firsthand knowledge of the data and not even the depth of archaeological knowledge that you can glean from 15 minutes on Wikipedia, watch me dismiss the careful work of a PhD in geology based on what I guess is probably right.”
And as for what has been found in the Guys Hill Member bone beds, I’ve already demonstrated that he’s actually misrepresenting what the article says here.
So can you find a better take-down article somewhere that actually represents the scientific literature faithfully instead of misrepresenting and mocking it?