4.6.3 Making Sense of Fossils

An important part of understanding fossils is determining how old they might be and putting them in chronological order. In order to use a primate fossil to reconstruct the evolutionary history of primates, anthropologists must first be able to estimate approximately how old that specific fossil is. For some time, relative dating methods were the only methods available for dating fossils. Relative dating calculates the approximate age of a fossil in comparison to other fossil specimens. The last half century has seen important advances in absolute dating, including techniques that have made possible the dating of the earliest phases of primate evolution. Absolute dating calculates the actual biological age of a fossil in years within a range of years.

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The content of this course has been taken from the free Anthropology textbook by Openstax