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Niosus t1_j9v7v9m wrote

The data is what it is. If the data only supports a fairly wide range of ages, they can only report it as is. Future research is likely to narrow things down further.

And honestly, I think it's quite a reasonable range. That age range means that we only started wearing clothes after we became modern humans. There are many hundreds of thousands up to a few million years of hominids that came before that. It's not super precise, but it's pretty impressive that they managed to figure it out at all. If you read the abstract, you'll see that previous research only managed to narrow things down to between 40k and 3 million years ago. The new research is about 30x more precise. That puts the significance of this into context, doesn't it?

Finally, if you think science is not important or useful for historians, I'd urge you to look into the methods they use to figure things out. Radiometric dating, genetic sequencing to determine ancestry, anatomy, geology, climate science, plate tectonics, and so many more fields... It all comes together to interpret the tiny nuggets of evidence that still exists, into a bigger picture of what likely happened. Every field provides a fresh perspective on the evidence that can corroborate or refute hypotheses. Without the scientists, we would get so much less information from the artifacts we find.

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