I happened on an unfamiliar claim against geological dating today - that the equivalent of a ‘Precambrian rabbit’ had been found: recent insect and plant remains in the Cambrian rocks of India.
Although no source was given, I soon found this article by Paul Price of creation.com:
In Pakistan is a famous range of hills formerly known as “The Saline Series” (today called simply the Salt Range Formation). This site became the center of a hot geological debate of the 20th century, with strong opinions on either side. Is the rock salt layer near the border of the Cambrian/Precambrian eras (using the evolutionary nomenclature), or is it much later, in the Eocene? The geology of the region suggests the former—yet nonetheless there was hot debate for many decades. Why? A very peculiar series of fossil finds that were extracted from one of the salt layers in this formation. In the 1940s, a certain professor Birbal Sahni (an Indian paleobotanist of the University of London) set out to discover some fossils that would ‘date’ the salt range:
“If … these saline deposits are a product of normal sedimentation from salt lakes or lagoons, and if these lakes were exposed to the air at a period when land vegetation existed … we might reasonably expect to find … at least some microscopic specks of organic matter giving a clue to the life of the period.”3
And indeed, he found exactly that:
“In quest of such a clue I examined a dozen specimens, some collected, as stated, by myself from different places in the mines … others kindly sent me last December by Mr. Lamba from the Warchha mine. … There is no question here of any cracks or solution holes, nor of any foliation imposed by thrusting or shearing forces … The investigation of this material has given results beyond all expectation: the bands of kallar must be teeming with signs of life, for every single piece has yielded microfossils … mainly shreds of angiosperm wood, but there are also gymnosperm tracheids with large round bordered pits, and at least one good, winged, six-legged insect with compound eyes. These facts suffice to prove that the Salt Marl of the Punjab cannot possibly be Cambrian or pre-Cambrian …”3
Seems straightforward - tree and insect remains shouldn’t be found in Cambrian rock, so either the rock isn’t that old, or the remains are contaminants, or the whole of geochronology comes crashing down.
Ref 3 is Sahni, B., Age of the Saline Series in the Salt Range of the Punjab, Nature 153 :462–463, 10 February 1944. That’s old. Old enough that I’d expect there to have been work done since to resolve this discrepancy.
Paul Price provides a reference to some more recent work: Hughes, N., Biostratigraphical dating conundrums in the Cambrian and earlier stratigraphy of the Indian subcontinent, The Palaeobotanist 66 :1-15, 14 April 2017. This contains conformation of both the Cambrian classification of the salt deposit and the nature of the biospecimens, but concludes that the wood and insect parts are not contemporaneous with the salt flats, but more recent contamination.
Paul Price again:
This naturally leads us to wonder: how does Dr. Hughes address the issue of these astounding finds, attested by more than one qualified professional at the time? I’m sorry for the let-down, but the answer is just as predictable as it is disappointing. Hughes simply dismisses the evidence altogether with essentially no reasons given (other than the assumption of evolution, of course).
“Knowledge of the fossil record … is now significantly better than at the time of this controversy, and the possibility of these groups extending back to the Cambrian, as seemed plausible to Ghosh, Jacob and associates (although also contested at the time) is no longer defensible. The organic–walled material recovered from the Salt Range Formation and associated units is therefore clearly a modern contaminant … the most likely source is modern organic dust particles introduced from the ambient environment, despite the efforts made by Sahni’s group to sterilize the samples.”
The most striking sentence is this: “Hughes simply dismisses the evidence altogether with essentially no reasons given (other than the assumption of evolution, of course).” If Paul Price is right that Hughes had no reason other than evolutionary assumptions for rejecting contamination as a cause, then this is a genuine problem for geochronology and it should be acknowledged and investigated further, not summarily dismissed. If Paul Price is right.
You should always look up the original text when creationists use ellipses.
The unellipsed text is:
Knowledge of the fossil record of organic–walled fossils in the Proterozoic and Palaeozoic is now significantly better than at the time of this controversy, and the possibility of these groups extending back to the Cambrian, as seemed plausible to Ghosh, Jacob and associates (although also contested at the time) is no longer defensible. The organic–walled material recovered from the Salt Range Formation and associated units is therefore clearly a modern contaminant. Given that similar material was found in several different rock types and that there is no compelling evidence that this material was ever fossilized, the most likely source is modern organic dust particles introduced from the ambient environment, despite the efforts made by Sahni’s group to sterilize the samples.
So Hughes did give reasons why the organic material is more recent contamination - lack of fossilisation of the organic material, and lack of correlation between organic material and rock formation - and Paul Price has elided those reasons, claiming they were never given.
So an unfamiliar claim - organic remains in Cambrian salt deposits - leads not to any evidence against geochronology, but only to a much more familiar outcome: a creationist is quote-mining.