A team of scientists from Purdue University; the University of the Witwatersrand, in South Africa; the University of New Brunswick, in Canada; and the University of Toulouse, in France, performed the research, which will be featured in the journal ," he said.

"We have only a small number of sites and we tend to base our evolutionary scenarios on the few fossils we have from those sites.

The radiocarbon technique instead, enables absolute dating of any material of organic origin, and also materials that are inorganic which have however been generated by living organisms.

In both cases the method works so long as over 60 thousand years have not passed.

C dating method was developed between 19 by the chemist, Willard Libby of the University of Chicago, for which he received the Nobel prize in 1960.

(Lucy, for example, is only about 40% complete.) It took more than 15 years to excavate the fragile fossils from the rock.Stone tools found at a different level of the Sterkfontein cave also were dated at 2.18 million years old, making them among the oldest known stone tools in South Africa.is an evolutionary ancestor to humans that lived between 2 million and 4 million years ago.This new date is a reminder that there could well have been many species of There had not been a consensus on the age of the Little Foot skeleton, named for four small foot bones found in a box of animal fossils that led to the skeleton's discovery.Previous dates ranged from 2 million to 4 million years old, with an estimate of 3 million years old preferred by paleontologists familiar with the site, said Darryl Granger, a professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at Purdue, who in collaboration with Ryan Gibbon, a former postdoctoral researcher, led the team and performed the dating.Radiocarbon dating can easily establish that humans have been on the earth for over twenty thousand years, at least twice as long as creationists are willing to allow.Therefore it should come as no surprise that creationists at the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) have been trying desperately to discredit this method for years.