How old is the earth?

Question

And when did man 1st make an appearance?

Answer 1

A little more than four and a half billion years. There are individual plants that are more than 6000 years old (look up recent studies on the creosote bush). We also have reliable tree ring studies from bristlecone pines in the White Mountains that go back a little more than 9000 years.

These are living, observable, proofs of the earths' existence past the 7000 year mark for anyone that actually thinks geology is made up and unreliable.

As far as man is concerned, Homo sapiens first appeared around 100,000 years ago. There were other species of hominids long before that. I believe the earliest known hominid fossils are around 2.2 million years old.

Answer 2

OK, how many of you 6000 years read the bible people have actually sat down and used the bible to calculate the age of the earth according to what it says, rather than just repeating some line you heard from mom and dad or the preacher or whatever? None? Why am I not surprised. You believe something you have never even bothered to verify and then claim the bible told you it. I've read the bible several times, and it does not explicitly state ANYWHERE that the earth is 6000 years old, give or take a bit. So don't tell me the bible tells you that, because it doesn't. You can calculate a number if you make some assumptions, but then I thought that making assumptions was contrary to accepting the word of god. Sooo, what's the deal then?

Answer 3

Slightly younger than the solar system which we think is 4.8Ga most geologists agree that current evidence suggests between 4.4 and 4.6 Ga I like 4.54Ga personally, but remember this geological dating is not an exact science! The oldest rocks on the earth can be found in Archaean shield which can be found in Canada and Oz as well as in the NW of Scotland, parts or Africa and Greenland. The oldest are probably the Acasta Gneisses in northwestern Canada near Great Slave Lake (4.03 Ga).

Homonids probably originated in eastern Africa approximately 2Ma H. erectus then spread throught the rest of Africa to Asia and Europe reaching Java about 1Ma and central China about 0.5Ma, enetering southern Europe through Greece during glaciated periods when the Aegean was much shallower than it is today reaching France, Italy and Spain 0.4-0.7Ma.
It wasn't until several hundred thousand years later that H. sapiens (that's us) invaded Europe and Asia probably following similar routes and have been widespread there for at least 40,000 years. Somewhere between 11,000 and 30,000 years ago people from Eastern Siberia crossed the land-bridge across the Bering Strait to Alaska when sea level was low in the last glaciation quickly spreading through N and S America and Greenland (there were probably multiple waves of migration).
Sea travel (long distance) emerged in SE Asia resulting in the population of New Guinea and Austrailia from Indonesia approx 35-40,000 years ago. The West Indes and and larger Mediterranean islands 10,000 years ago, Polynesian islands and Hawaii 6,000 - 3000 years ago, Madagascar and New Zealand were the last larger non-arctic islands to be colonised about 1500 years ago. H. sapiens is still extending its range further into the Arctic and Antarctic, Svalbard and the continuopus colonisation of the antarctic islands in the southern ocean only occurring in the 20th centuary.

Answer 4

The age of the earth is about 4.5 billion yrs. The first man-sort of man 1st make an appearance is about 200,000 years ago.

Answer 5

the matter that constitutes the earth is really old, dating back to mere moments after the big bang. I can't recall the latest version of the estimate, but 12 billion years sounds about right. The earth itself is believed to be about 4.5 billion years old.

Unless you talk to hardcore fundamentalist christians...their time frame is a bit shorter, maybe around 6000 years, based on some sketchy genealogy and a lot of supposition.

The aztec calendar is almost 12,000 years in length and due to complete a cycle in 2012.

Answer 6

It is generally accepted age for the Earth and the rest of the solar system is about 4.55 billion years
Anatomically modern humans appear in the fossil record in Africa about 130,000 years ago
The closest living relatives of Homo sapiens are two distinct species of the genus Pan: the Bonobo (Pan paniscus) and the Common Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). These species share the same common ancestor. The main difference between them is the social organization: matriarchal for the Bonobo and patriarchal for the Common Chimpanzee. Full genome sequencing resulted in the conclusion that "after 6.5 million years of separate evolution, the differences between bonobo/chimpanzee and human are just 10 times greater than those between two unrelated people and 10 times less than those between rats and mice". In fact, 98.4% of the DNA sequence is identical between the two Pan species and human. It has been estimated that the human lineage diverged from that of chimpanzees about five million years ago, and from gorillas about eight million years ago. However, a hominid skull discovered in Chad in 2001, classified as Sahelanthropus tchadensis, is approximately seven million years old, which may indicate an earlier divergence

Answer 7

Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. Modern man (meaning humans who looked basically like we do today) is estimated to have emerged between 250,000 and 100,000 years ago based on fossil and habitat evidence. However, human ancestry including our evolutionary cousins first popped up about a million years ago.

Answer 8

Are you a real cowboy?
Anyway,. The universe and everything within it, including you and I and everyone who has gone before, and everyone who will come after, every plant, or rock , every dewdrop. We are all the same age, as we are, virtually the dust of the universe. The second part of your question. It took around four billion years for life to slither out of the slime and since then we have been standing on the sidelines waiting to play our part.

Answer 9

The Earth is 4.55 byo. This information is gathered using Uranium-Lead isotope dating from meteorites from our solar system and the oldest rocks on Earth. Modern man emerged from Africa about 200,000 years ago.

Answer 10

In our science book it says that the Earth formed a little over 4.6 billion years ago. The closest scientists know that man have been on the Earth is I believe about 10 million years ago. I just did an assignment over this last night!