Dating human fossils
The technique people are most likely to have heard of is carbon dating.
It hinges upon the presence of carbon-14, a radioactive isotope of carbon that accumulates in the bodies of animals throughout our lives, and gradually decays after we die.
And without that age, it’s hard to know how fits into the story of human evolution, or how to interpret its apparent habit of deliberately burying its own kind.
But other scientists disagree over exactly what the new findings mean. Up to this point, the oldest commonly accepted traces of our species were 195,000-year-old remains from the site of Omo Kibish and 160,000-year-old fossils from Herto, both in Ethiopia.
Far from tidily solving the puzzle of our origins, the Jebel Irhoud discoveries add to mounting evidence that the dawning of our kind was a very complicated business. Yet DNA evidence and some enigmatic fossils hinted that our species might have deeper roots.
It is impossible to give an evolutionary sequence to the human fossils because there is a coverage gap involving the dating methods which evolutionists believe are the most reliable—radiocarbon and potassium-argon (K-Ar).
This gap is from about 40,000 ya (years ago) to about 200,000 ya on the evolutionist's time scale.
, a new species of ancient human discovered in South Africa’s Rising Star cave.