Disproving the Flintstones

In my recent post on my letter to the editor, I mentioned that I could have discussed specific ways that the creation museum in Kentucky goes against science, and I mentioned that one simple thing to prove is that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. Since I brought up the point again in correspondence with Tom Eckstein, I thought I would expand on it here.

There are two possibilities, either dinosaurs coexisted with humans or they did not. We will test that, but also a slightly broader version as well. Either almost all organisms found in the fossil record coexisted, or organisms only coexisted with organisms found in the same strata.

There is an obvious way to test this. If humans and dinosaurs coexisted, then you might expect to find them buried together occasionally. Human bones and dinosaur bones could at least be in the same strata, even if they aren't actually in contact. We don't find that. But it doesn't have to just be bones. We could find dinosaur footprints near human bones or human footprints near dino bones or footprints. We could find human tools near dinosaurs--arrowheads and other tools are almost always found wherever humans have lived. We might find dinosaur remains in human cities. We might find dinosaur bones in human refuse or evidence that such bones have been scraped with tools or cooked in a fire. You might have pictures of dinosaurs on cave walls. You would expect at least a single instance like these if dinosaurs and humans coexisted.

You could argue that the absence of evidence doesn't mean evidence of absence. Maybe we coexisted, but just by chance there were no examples that fossilized. The likelihood of that depends on the abundance of the record. If we had only 10 dino skeletons it would be more likely than if we have thousands. If we rarely found human tools it would be more convincing than if human tools are very abundant. The fact is that there are tens of thousands of examples of dinosaur skeletons and footprints and the like and an even greater number of human artifacts, but there is not a single example in all of that to suggest we coexisted.

Still, maybe we don't have a large enough sample to rule it out. But we can expand our search. We can ask if dinosaurs coexisted with other hominids, like the Australiopithicenes. Or with other apes, or any other primates, or rodents, or deer, or carnivores, or whales, etc. We do know that humans coexisted with rodents and carnivores and deer. As predicted, we find their bones and footprints and tools together. So if we could show rodents coexisted with dinosaurs and also humans, then we could conclude that maybe humans and dinosaurs coexisted. But there is not a single footprint, bone, or other artifact of these groups of mammals that are found even in the same strata as dinosaurs, leave alone in contact.

And we can go farther. We can look at organisms that lived before dinosaurs, like pelycosaurs and other early reptiles. Not a single instance of them coexisting with dinosaurs is found either. We are now looking at a truly massive record of hundreds of thousands of bones and artifacts, and not a single one suggests coexistence.

Creationists claim that fossils separate based on things like hydrodynamic sorting, ecology, and the ability to escape the floodwaters. That fails miserably with almost any pair of organisms. But lets say it's possible: the reasons deer and dinosaurs are never found together is because for some reason the deer were better able to escape the floodwaters than all species of dinosaurs, or their bodies settled out differently. Then what about the contents of the stomach? We often find dinosaurs with their last meal still in their stomach. The contents are always other organisms that lived at the time, like other dinosaurs. Never a deer or other mammal. Certainly once a deer is in the stomach of a dinosaur, it will not sort differently. And this doesn't just apply to dinosaurs, it applies to mammals and all other organisms. With absolutely not a single exception, the contents in the stomachs of fossils are always species that are found in the same strata. The same is true for the contents of coprolites (fossilized poop). It is absurd to suggest that organisms only eat organisms with the same hydrodynamic sorting tendency.

There is actually even more evidence, like injuries caused by dinosaurs on other dinosaurs, but never by mammals, and adaptations, etc. But by now it is quite clear. If organisms coexisted, you would expect to see evidence for it. The complete absence of any examples of this rules out there coexistence. Notice that I am not being dogmatic. I am offering a falsifiable hypothesis. I am stating explicitly the kind of evidence that would make me throw out my hypothesis. If this is somehow not enough to convince the creationists that dinosaurs didn't coexist with humans, then they need to specify exactly what evidence would convince them.

Often creationists want "proof". They don't understand that's not how science works. Notice there is no piece of evidence that is proof that humans and dinosaurs didn't coexist. Rather there is an accumulation of data. There are thousands of little pieces of evidence, each one increasing the confidence in the hypothesis. And science can only compare two theories. There is not even a single piece of evidence to support their theory, just attempts to explain away the evidence. There is no single proof of the atomic theory either. It was the accumulation of data over many decades, and no single piece proved it. Even in 1905 it wasn't universally accepted, when Einstein explained Brownian motion using the atomic theory to give it what was probably the final piece. Any single piece of line of evidence can be explained away or interpreted in several ways. But when there are ten thousand arrows all pointing the same way, it is absurd to dispute it and the accumulated effect can be called proof.