Good for you, BYP.

Zircon crystals are a hugely important tool for dating rocks and such. It is incredibly tough, and usually contains atoms of uranium trapped in its matrix that serve as little ‘atomic clocks’ as they slowly decay into lead.

We are coming to know more and more about the hominins we call Neanderthals and to understand that during the period of time that they and our own species were coexisting in post-glacial areas of Europe, that we not only lived alongside them but we also interbred with them. There is strong evidence that on average, all human beings now alive, except those descended from Africans have on average genomes that consist of 2 percent of Neanderthal dna.

We do in fact have samples or reconstructible samples of actual dna from hominid remains as well as now extinct animals such as mammoths and mastodons which we know were hunted and eaten and whose bones and skins were used to construct clothing and shelter by various hominid species in the early years after the last ice age. There are efforts now underway to resurrect versions of these animals through genetic engineering and the use of actual elephants to serve as brood stock for these creatures.

Aside from the ability of both professional and amateur scientists to date the fossils themselves, we definitely have the ability to accurately date the rock layers in which the fossil bones are contained. The best way I can explain that is to give an example of how we can know about when a person found to have died in bed actually died. Let’s assume that the human remains that were found in a bed were in sheets that appear to have been new and that had a printed pattern known to have been produced say between 1980 and 1983, would it not be safe to assume that the person died during that same time, if at least not before 1980?

Creationists always confuse and conflate "radiometric dating" and "radiocarbon dating". They are both radiometric dating but only one uses carbon and carbon dating only work for thing LESS than 50,000 years old because of the half-life. When Creationists have sent dinosaur bones to be carbon dated if anything was measured it gives the high side of the carbon date because that is the NULL result of the test because it's impossible to remove ALL carbon from the sample or the equipment. It's like a 500 pound person standing on a bathroom scale that only goes to 250. There has yet to be found a dinosaur bone found in layers dated to less than 66.04 million years which is the current date of the K/PG event. There has yet to be a dinosaur bearing layer correlated with any other layers outside the Cretaceous Period layers. There has yet to be a dinosaur fossil found in any layer with IN SITU Human fossils or any other "modern" mammal form.

The chrono-resolution of dating going back to dinosaurs is down to like 500k years. We have so much information now and so many fossil species including key transitional species we can construct very good genealogies for many animal lineages. We have transitional forms that span the gaps between the major branches of life like fish to tetrapod. We now definitively know many smaller theropods did in fact have feathers or something close to feathers so "wings" existed before powered flight. "Archaeopteryx" and it's close kin were winged theropods and out of that group or a collateral group came "modern" birds. Birds are in fact theropod dinosaurs because you don't evolve out of your parent clade you just modify preexisting features. There are always specific traits (synapomorphies) providing a thru-line from parents to descendants.