:Actually there is a flood story in China remarkably similar to the Genesis account. The view on tree ring dating is that it should be used carefully. In good years, more than one ring can form, and also some of the pre-flood dates are actually obtained by methods other than a sample from the living tree itself. Not sure about your rock question. [[User:AddisonDM|AddisonDM]] 10:36, 1 June 2009 (EDT)
::* If the Chinese flood story to which you refer is the one found in the ''Hihking'', mentioned on [[Great Flood]], the problem is that the only references to this supposed "Chinese classic" are from sites discussing the Flood; a Google search for 'hihking china -hiking' (because there are many pages about hiking in China) has only 131 results, while a search for "I Ching" or "The Art of War" returns millions of hits. More notably, other Chinese sources, such as the ''Classic of History'' or the ''Records of the Grand Historian''--which covers the period around and immediately after the suggested date for the flood--make no mention of such an event. While it is in no way an unbiased source, [http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CG/CG202_2.html TalkOrigins claims] that the ''Hihking'' cannot be traced back any further than the 1930's, while other Chinese tales of floods bear little similarity to the Genesis account.
::* Tree ring dating should certainly be used carefully, just like any other method of dating. No-one claims that they can pin a certain event to 2478 BC based on tree ring dating, just as it is impossible to claim to know the exact second that, say, the Titanic struck the iceberg. It is possible, however, to gain a fairly accurate picture. Although extra or missing rings would introduce some error to any measurement, it must be unlikely that the error should be so great that a population of trees dated back to 8000 BC, or even to 4500 BC, as in the case of the Bristlecone pine, is actually more recent than 2300 BC. Also, it appears that this method is only reinforced by other methods, such as radiometric dating; it does not depend upon them to be useful. If a living tree has, say, 4500 rings, and the oldest 500 match up with rings on another, nearby, dead tree that goes back 4000 rings further, it can be assumed that trees in that region have been growing uninterrupted for 8000 rings. Since double or missing rings are caused by climatic variation, which can be verified through any number of other methods, it should not be the case that these scientists have made an error of 50% or more despite all efforts to avoid it
:::* On the matter of dendrochronology and other methods being used in circular logic: [http://www.wsl.ch/staff/felix.kaiser/PDFs/Friedrich_Dendro_RC04%20.pdf this source], as well as others online, show that carbon dating and other methods are calibrated off of tree-ring records, and that the trees' ages are not based off of other methods. The fact that carbon-dated results match with tree-ring dating is not a fundamental pillar of dendrochronology, only an additional support.
:::--[[User:TommyAtkins|TommyAtkins]] 12:14, 1 June 2009 (EDT)