Re: Creation Evidence Museum

  LDagget wrote:

It's pretty easy to suggest a reasonable explanation that could
be readily tested. A brief review of the web fails to find
documentation from tests performed.

That's part of the problem. You read claims -- "Gazillion year
old hammer!" or "Mostest hottest year in FOREVER!" -- but you
never see any credible science, ESPECIALLY when predictions all
fail.
For me it's fairly simple:  A hammer as depicted here is at
the very least an iron age tool. So we are not only missing
an entire iron age civilization to account for this tool, but
all preceding levels of technology.
      ...assuming one does not merely roll out of the
primordial ooze and jump directly into iron works.
And I know there are some extremely loose parallels with
fossils that do APPEAR to exist without antecedents but, even
they aren't technically the same. After all, you assume a
"New" species evolved and for the most part you can find
species that preceded it, regardless of how distantly they
may seem related on the surface.

The consensus seems to be that it looks very much like a type
of mining hammer what was in use in Texas (where it was found).
The design is consistent with other mining hammers used in the
early 1800s. There are similar artifacts known to be mining
hammers in existence.

Absolutely.

Two obvious things to test would be the iron in the hammer head
and the wooden shaft. I'd suggest metallurgical testing of the
atomic composition of the head including isotopic analysis to
be compared with a range of other artifacts known to have been
used in Texas, and of course comparison to a range of iron
artifacts from other sites around the world and other times.

I think carbon dating from within the handle would be a slam
dunk. Even if they used a 2,000 year old tree to make it, it's
impossible to explain conventionally, as it is iron, but it's
a mere fraction of the age of known human habitation sites. And,
again, that's if it's 2k years old... which it both know it
isn't.

I would however test the haft to determine the species of wood
and a C14 date. Special care is needed when doing that date
because the artifact is likely to be partially mineralized with
contamination from the limestone that feed the concretion that
it appears to be embedded in. The carbon in the limestone is
of course a distinct source of carbon from the wood of the shaft.
And of course the carbon in the limestone will be older than
a range relevant to C14 dating.

It just has to be younger than the 10 hundred gazillion years old
that they're claiming.
The problem is that the claims are so far fetched that nobody wants
to waste resources testing it.
If the people holding it were the least bit confident, they'd fund
the tests. That is circumstantial evidence to the contrary.

I will add that the fact that none of this, or perhaps better
alternative testing, has apparently be done suggests that the
keepers of this artifact are more interested in marketing a
manufactured controversy than in understanding it.

Yes.
--
https://jtem.tumblr.com/tagged/The%20Book%20of%20JTEM/page/5