Hi ILTTATT, the thing hidden from Jdubs is the whole of the scholarly world.
Just a general point to illustrate is that Wikipedia is not part of that academic method, however useful it may seem as an everyday reference, it cannot be guaranteed impartial or accurate. Neither is popular science, popular psychology, popular archaeology...and what with imagining that everything that the GB says is from God; Jdubs are floundering in intellectual darkness!
The problem for the layman is that academic works are written using concise language and rigorous argumentation in establishing a matter from evidence, knowing they will be challenged on all statements by their very well informed peers. This is the best known method to make headway or achieve a bridgehead in any particular discipline; it is necessary to establish facts. It is not sufficient to simply assert an idea, it is necessary to give concrete reasons based on testable, repeatable experimentation or logical argument. Another illustrative point is that generally the use of the word ‘logic’ within academic writing refers to something which cannot be argued against.
Contrast academia with the lazy, casual, often threatening dictates of the JW cult and the pathetic appeal to emotions. There is no ‘logic’ involved in what they assert, no arduous research, no steely resolve to elucidate truthfulness, instead just a susceptibility to obedience and fear demanded on the pretext of pleasing God which in practice means serving the interests of the cult leaders.
In view of all I have said, I don’t know of any popular books on the subject of archaeological dating methods but an overview can easily be found on the net. (Ah! Cofty has a good academic one) I have some experience doing prehistoric archaeology and the key to dating all artefacts and bones is the initial dating of the context of the depositional layers in which the item is found..Subsequent scientific analysis is necessary to confirm or even disprove and refine the time period. Since prehistory takes place over geological time it is vital to understand the rhythmic climate changes which occurred giving rise to the specific environmental conditions in which human life was experienced at the different climatic periods. This may sound trivial but is an absolute base-line ground plan for the pre-historian. Cold equals dry and desert conditions, warm equals wet and lush vegetation and all intergrades between. These are known from the earth-sciences and dated carefully.
This is the way of science, no miracles, just the plodding investigation and data determinations which build up a coherent picture of the past world in which humans lived even through the ice age which meant a mean annual temperature where I live in southern England of minus 3 degrees Celsius. (Known from the formation of ’ice wedges’ which only occur at this temperature and evidence of which remain visible today in local gravel pits and quarries).
You want an incontrovertible piece of evidence that mankind lived a long time ago. You first need to realise that the climate changes were dramatic and that during the last ice episode in the northern hemisphere, which finished only about twelve thousand years ago, the world's rainfall was commuted into vast ice sheets at the poles to a spectacular degree and one consequence of this was that the sea levels were correspondingly lower. We are talking by up to four hundred feet. Here is my experience, I was in Cassis on the south coast of France east of Marseilles and met Henri Cosquer a diver. In 1985 he discovered a cave now named after him but the entrance to his cave is 37 meters below today’s sea level. Inside the cave he found as did Howard Carter in the Egyptian royal tombs; “wonderful things.” M Cosquer in diving gear swam into the submerged cave and some distance inside and on a rising plane came to a dry zone above the present sea level with the walls covered with hand stencils and depictions of animals some now extinct such as the ice age megaloceros (deer with giant antlers) and birds such as the great auk.
So when were these paintings and wall etchings made? It could only have been when the sea water level was low enough to allow access without diving gear and that was before the ice melted and the sea level rose. In fact all the evidence shows that the Cosquer cave is dated to 27,000 years before present. Most of the numerous painted caves in France are from the late Paleolithic period between 38,000 and 15,000 bp before, during and at the end of the worst part of the ice age.
No question of humans having lived in the remote past. Take (or send!) your family on holiday to the Perigord region of France especially to Les Eyzies de Tayac, the pre-historic capital of Europe, the evidence is overwhelming.