Petrified Peach Squashes Long-Age Dogma

In my last post, Katrina Victims Finally Come Home, I spoke about a family left homeless by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina that we are helping to move into their new house in my city. The youngest son, George (not his real name), showed me a chunk of rock that looked suspiciously organic in origin as we moved dresser drawers and other furniture. "Take a look at this petrified peach half I found, David! I dug it out of our backyard in Mississippi." I examined it, and sure enough this was all that was left of a peach that had been cut in half with a knife and thrown out for some reason. The features were preserved so beautifully that I could see the individual lines left by the peach pit in the flesh. I was going to post a photo on this site but I was unable to obtain it to take pictures. Perhaps I will post an image later. This family used to live near the mineral-rich Mississippi River delta. So I did some research and discovered that peaches originated in China and were not introduced into the Americas until colonists settled in Virginia around 1630. The appearance of having been cut by a very sharp object and its location near the Delta (which was not settled by Europeans until the 1820s) would make it seem that this peach was even younger than the 370 years old stipulated as a maximum by the first introduction into Virginia. We are generally told that petrification take hundreds of thousands or even millions of years as minerals slowly replace plant tissue. But obviously this peach was petrified less than 400 years ago and probably less than 200 years ago. Not only that, but the process was fast, judging from the intricate details now preserved in solid rock. Maybe the dogma of millions of years and long geologic ages is not that well founded. . . . In Him, David S. MacMillan III