Anyone have any links to scientific sites that explain mining anomalies?

[greekspeak]

What I refer to here are items that have been "unearthed" in mining and digging that are anomolous to the strata in which they are found. Like a fancy vase dug up in 1851 in blasting work in Dorchester, Mass. Or the countless screws, nails, and gold chains that have been "discovered." Or even the human remains that have been "discovered." I find little if any info out there to debunk or disprove the veracity of such findings. Instead, I see a lot of creationist nuts fueling their reactionary fires with these finds. Anyone know good sources, in print or on the net that truly debunk such finds, preferably piecemeal instead of with blanket statements?

[AverageJoe]

1. Michael Cremo and Forbidden Archeology Etc.

Here you go:


http://www.mcremo.com/

[Gildor Inglorion]

2. Check this out, too...

http://www.intersurf.com/~chalcedony/geofact.shtml

[AverageJoe]

3. Oops! I should have read your post a bit closer

I gave you the wrong side of the issue. The other response to your question looks good, though.

[greyl]

4. I agree. :) nt

[greekspeak]

5. Thank you all for the links

The despirateness of ID/Creationist people shows when they latch onto these anomolies and milk them dry. I will investigate these links and pick up some effective tools to debunk the nonsense.

[frogmarch]

6. You're right

That the www is full of creationist crap, with relatively little to debunk it.

Although it's not specifically what you're looking for, here's a website that attempts to debunk some of the fake claims put out by creationists:

http://www.weirdcrap.com/scholarly/debunk.html

(snip)

Claim:

"The Paluxi River basin contains footprints of dinosaurs, side-by-side with human footprints. This is proof that man and dinosaurs were contemporaneous, and that dinosaurs are not millions of years older."

This is absolutely false, and it's amazing that this argument keeps cropping up. The famous "man tracks" in the Paluxi river have been examined again, and again, and the results are the same every time. The alleged "man" tracks are 2-1/2 times the size of a large human foot, too large to be that of a human. They don't even have toe imprints, as would be expected, if a human made them. The prints are vaguely "bean-shaped", much like a human footprint, but when you see a cast of them, it is obvious that these prints are not human. Also, there is a 1-to-1 correlation with the Dinosaur tracks that these footprints are next to. In fact, it becomes more apparent when you see a sequence, that the "man" tracks, in effect, are part of the dinosaur's print -- they are the impression of one of the toes or footpads.

Some creationists argue that the print is that of a race of giants referred to in Genesis, but where are the fossils of these giants? There is no physical proof of these giants.

As for other kinds of peculiar finds, like those unearthed during mining and so forth, they're examined on a case-by-case basis. Nature sometimes reworks fossils and human artifacts into younger strata.

But unless "young" artifacts found in old strata are found in situ and not as the result of screenwashing, they are highly questionable.

At a paleontological site where I worked for a number of years, what appeared to some stone tool experts to be a chert spearhead was found during screening of the dirt removed during excavation. The site was believed to predate the arrival of humans in this hemisphere, so the artifact caused some initial excitement. Because no other artifacts (if the find was indeed a human artifact and not made by nature) were ever discovered during excavations, nor any more found during screening, it is thought by the site's scientists that the artifact wasn't really a human artifact and/or it was planted as a hoax.