Some of the oldest rocks in the world have some of the oldest signs of life.

Oldest fossils of life going back 3.5 billion years ago. It's cool and all but I was thinking and went off on a tangent. I think it's really cool that we have 3.5 billion year old rocks. Australia is about the only place with them because it's been a pretty consistent land mass over the history of Earth. With the amount of shifting and moving and subduction zones, it seems like sitting there unchanged for 3.5 billion years ~ 3,500,000,000 years is quite a feat. If anybody could do it, rocks could do it. Go rocks! Way to exist.

While really old fossils are cool, my suddenly being impressed by the feats of rocks warranted a blog post.

Primate Fossil being pitched as the second coming of Christ, hurting the cause.

The fossil is admittedly really cool. It certainly is up there with some other impressive fossils and it could shed some light on primate ancestry but in many other ways it's not as cool as tiktaalik or archeopteryx. It really does look like a monkey. It might shed some light on primate evolution and thus our evolution but then so did Tiktaalik, and I wasn't joking in the title. It's actually being hyped as the second coming of Christ. One of the dates listed in the hyperbolic advertisement for the program was 0AD. Despite the fact that there was no 0AD, it's a pretty clear reference to Jesus and putting this up there with the importance of the supposed date of the birth of a mythological character during the time when both the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew rule out as a supportable birth year (after 4CE Herod the great isn't alive to murder the children, before 7AD there's no supposed Roman governor to order a census).

So when creationists chime back in and point out that it's one fossil that looked like a monkey and that's where all the damned evolutionists put their marbles in one last grasp to try and justify their "made from nothing" theory... they will be partially right. The hype is massively overblown.