Bones, Rocks, and Stars

I am very excited about this book - Bones, Rocks and Stars: The Science of When Things Happened. It will be available June 8^th, but you can read one advance review here. The book is all about how scientists attach dates to when things happened at various points in ancient history. Odd as it may seem, I have been hoping for just such a book for a while!

Here’s why: too often in the Creation/Evolution debate, young-earth creationists (YECs) tend to strongly believe that ancient dates are made up solely because billions of years are necessary to make evolution feasible. History teaches just the opposite: geologists had described an ancient earth long before Darwin. I hope that a book like this one can be used to separate in YEC minds the reasons that the YEC position is scientifically untenable from the reasons that evolution is reasonable.

Amazon has this to say about the book:

Understanding how we pinpoint the past is crucial to putting the present in perspective and planning for the future. Now, for the first time, journalist and geologist Chris Turney explains to the non-specialist exactly how archaeologists, paleontologists, and geologists "tell the time". Each chapter explores one famous event or object from the past, walking readers step by step through the detective work used to determine when things happened. From the Ice Age to the pyramids, from human evolution to the Shroud of Turin, Turney reveals how written records, carbon, pollen, constellations, DNA sequencing, and more all play a part in solving the mystery of the true age of objects and events. As we struggle to manage current environmental threats and conservation troubles, we ignore or misunderstand these techniques and their results at our peril.