"The Paluxy riverbed footprints clearly show a human footprint in rock that contains dinosaur fossils, thus proving that the Earth is young and humans coexisted with dinosaurs in the pre-Flood era."
Rebuttal
This is the "Meet the Flintstones" argument, in which two centuries of dinosaur fossil archaeological research consistently showing them to be geologically separated from human beings is supposedly disproven by a single human-looking footprint (ie- not an actual human skeleton; a depression that looks sort of like it might have been a giant human) in a riverbed in Texas.
Naturally, none of the peddlers of this idea ask why no human skeletal fossils have ever been found in geological proximity with dinosaur skeletal fossils in this mythical Pre-Flood Flintstones era. The fact is that vaguely human-looking footprints (leaving aside the picture-perfect impressions manufactured by overzealous creationists trying to exaggerate what their brethren found) are hardly unimaginable, particularly when the impression is of such poor quality that you can't tell whether the "toes" might have been claws.
Creationists were actually a victim of their own ambition in this case. By attempting to produce actual archaeological evidence of their beliefs, they caught the attention of real archaeologists, who promptly examined the evidence and pointed out countless errors in their interpretation. The result was the "Institute for Creation Research" (ICR) making the embarrassing admission that "it would now be improper for creationists to continue to use the Paluxy data as evidence against evolution".
Unfortunately, as with most creationist arguments, it does not stand up to the light of day but even if leading creationists admit this, the argument itself will live on and be continually repeated in perpetuity since creationism, unlike real science, has no professional peer-review system.
Fallacy watch:
Non-sequitur (the presence of a vaguely human-looking impression in rock does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that a human being must have made it, particularly when all of the human skeletons somehow mysteriously vanished from this geological epoch).
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