4 ms·

How accurate can these dating be? Can you really pin down burnt bread to 14.5k years? Maybe this was ritualistic. I don't know if you can infer that they regula

How accurate can these dating be? Can you really pin down burnt bread to 14.5k years? Maybe this was ritualistic. I don't know if you can infer that they regularly ate bread. Maybe some peganistic ritual or burial ritual had bread involved. Grain yield pre agriculture is supposed to be really low. So low that there are hypothesis claiming that it was used to brew beer and eating the grain directly wouldn't be viable for the tribe. I guess we'll wait and see as more researchers chimes into this.

muricula 8y ago
This is a classic use case for carbon 14 dating, so they probably used that. A quick glance at Wikipedia says that it’s pretty reliable for organic substances up to 50k years ago. Dating older rocks will often require lead uranium dating or other interesting radioactive elements. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating