RE: carbon dating. Rocks are not dated by radiocarbon but by other isotopes with longer half-lives. They are also dated by other techniques - the way rocks lie on each other, cut across each other and push into each other. These allow the order of formation to be deduced. Then there is the observation of modern processes. If you have depths of hundreds of feet of a deposit which had to be formed in calm water and at the rate of less than a centimetre a year, times can be well estimated. And then they have to be buried, cemented, and hardened. Some show the signs of having been pressed, and heated at depth. The isotopes are only one strand of the dating processes which all combine to confim each other in establishing great ages. Or, if that must be believed, the appearance of great age.

Penny