4 ms·
>radiocarbon dating puts the site a few hundred years older than Stonehenge Is it really that reliable to make such precise statements?
by throwawaylolx 6y ago
>radiocarbon dating puts the site a few hundred years older than Stonehenge
Is it really that reliable to make such precise statements?
- simonh 6y agoSamples at the site were dated to around 3400 BC, which is 400 years earlier than the earliest samples from Stonehenge. Ive not seen the papers, but given standard techniques I expect there should be at least a couple of centuries gap between the error ranges.
- sandworm101 6y ago>>Is it really that reliable to make such precise statements? Carbon dating is never enough in itself. They are not saying that carbon dating proves that one thing happened before the other. They are saying that carbon dating does not disprove it, that the narrative they propose is not contradicted by carbon evidence. The fact that there are multi-century error bands means it can never be solid proof, but the fact that one error band is centered years later than the other does add weight to their proposed timeline. Carbon dating is a fuzzy telescope, but lack of perfect resolution doesn't mean it cannot produce useful evidence.