How reliable is science? (The limitations of science)

by dhw, Tuesday, February 05, 2013, 11:57 (4307 days ago) @ dhw

An article tucked away in today's Guardian:-"A new finding has cast doubt on the theory that ancestors of modern humans interbred with Neanderthals over thousands of years. Scientists have redated fossil bones from two sites in southern Spain and discovered they are much older than previously thought.
 According to the new evidence, it is unlikely Neanderthals and modern humans ever lived together in the region. Researchers now think the Neanderthals had long gone before the arrival of homo sapiens.
 Since the 1990s experts have believed the last Neanderthals sought refuge in the Spanish peninsula and died out around 30,000 years ago. That would have provided easily enough time for the Neanderthals to have mixed their DNA with that of modern humans, who are believed to have colonized Spain more than 10,000 years earlier.
 But research from Oxford University reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, using an improved dating method, indicates that the Neanderthal occupation of Spain only lasted until around 45,000 to 50,000 years ago,
 That traces of Neanderthal DNA can be found in people today may be due to them having a common ancestor."-Science of course is an ongoing process of discovery, revision, correction, and today's sensational revelation will become tomorrow's oops. So how much of today's science should we believe? When scientists announce that the Big Bang happened about 13.77 bya, Earth is about 4.55 billion years old, life began about 3.8 bya, homo sapiens has been around for about 200,000 years, why the heck should we believe a word of it? (These figures have changed anyway since I opened this thread!) If improved dating methods show a mistake of 15-20,000 years within a comparatively recent period, maybe improved dating methods 10, 100, 1000 years from now will show that all the current dates (not to mention some of the current theories) are way off target. We laymen have no way of knowing how trustworthy the so-called experts are, past or present, but in matters relating to the history of the universe and of life on Earth, a healthy dose of scepticism might not come amiss.