Earth is currently believed to be about 4.54 billion years old, but that number came after centuries of debate. In 1779, French naturalist Comte de Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon (1707–1788) caused a stir when he announced 75,000 years had gone by since Creation, the first time anyone had suggested that the planet was older than the biblical reference of 6,000 years. By 1830, Scottish geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875) proposed that Earth must be several hundred million years old based on erosion rates; in 1844, British physicist William Thomson, later first baron of Largs (Lord) Kelvin, (1824–1907), determined that Earth was 100 million years old, based on his studies of the planet’s temperature. In 1907, American chemist and physicist Bertram Boltwood (1870–1927) used a radioactive dating technique to determine that a specific mineral was 4.1 billion years old (although later on, with a better knowledge of radioactivity, the mineral was found to be only 265 million years old). Using different adaptations of Boltwood’s methods on terrestrial, lunar, and meteorite (space rock that falls to the surface of Earth) material, scientists now estimate that Earth is between 4.54 and 4.567 billion years old.