re: Scientists find 800,000-year-old footprints in UK

quote:

---

"Maybe they had cultural adaptations to the cold we hadn't even thought were possible 900,000 years ago. Did they wear clothing? Did they make shelters, windbreaks and so on? Could they have they have the use of fire that far back?" he asked.

Scientists dated the footprints by studying their geological position and from nearby fossils of long-extinct animals including mammoth, ancient horse and early vole.

John McNabb, director of the Center for the Archaeology of Human Origins at the University of Southampton — who was not part of the research team — said the use of several lines of evidence meant "the dating is pretty sound."

---

I'm not a die-hard young-world creationist, but I've never found the dating methods we use for anything past about 2-10 thousand years to be particularly convincing as far as hard science. There's a lot of Kentucky-windage they speculate with, in addition to assuming decay at a constant rate without some kind of outside intervention (radiation changes, etc etc).

Just because the current alternative is 'god created everything 10,00 years ago' doesn't mean carbon dating or other current methods are accurate at all.