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10,000-Year-Old Stone Tool Site Discovered in Suburban Seattle
- thisandthat 12y agohooray go Seattle!
- joncp 12y agoI'm loath to count anything on the Eastside as Seattle.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago"10,000 year old stone tools found in Redmond" doesn't sound as good. They were probably just used by ancient Microsoft programmers in building a very early version of Windows, which is why this is on Hackernews at all.
- chucksmart 12y agoMaybe they worked for Boeing?
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoRedmond...not Renton.
- codyh1 12y agoWindows 3.1?
- davydka 12y agoThe article clearly says suburban Seattle.
- umanwizard 12y agoNormally I would use "suburban X" to describe one of the more suburban parts of X, not a different, nearby city, which I would instead call "suburb of X". I guess maybe this is because I grew up in what was clearly the suburbs despite being legally part of the primary city of the region (Phoenix, which is more or less a suburb of itself). The difference might not matter in places like where I'm from, where Phoenix blends into Glendale or Mesa or whatever. In Seattle it does feel more like two nearby cities than one mass of suburbs, though, since there's a big physical boundary (Lake Washington) between them. Edit: Further muddying the waters, I kind of lump the Eastside into one "city" from a geographical perspective, though legally it's Bothell, Kenmore, Redmond, Bellevue, etc. I do think of Seattle as a separate thing.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago> Bothell As a BHS graduate, this kind of got me. We are clearly "north" of the lake, and more apart of Everett than say Bellevue.
- umanwizard 12y agoI'll have to plead ignorance, then! The only times I've gone to the northern cities on the Eastside are biking on the Burke, and since I'm not constantly checking a map it's not clear to me exactly where the boundaries are between Lake Forest Park, Kenmore, Bothell, etc.
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoAs the roads go, Kenmore is just on the western side of the lake (its actually right above it, but there is a huge deadspace to the south of residences), you keep going that way and you are quickly in Seattle. If you go along the eastern side of the lake, you are basically in Kirkland which abuts Bellevue. Bothell is basically equidistant from Seattle, Everett, and Bellevue (I was living in Snohomish County, so closer to Lynwood and Everett), basically under all those cities's influences.
- ars 12y agoAs far as I know you can't radiocarbon date anything that has been soaked in water. That would explain the discrepancy between 3,500 and 10,000 years.
- jschwartzi 12y agoI'm curious why you can't? I'm guessing that seawater permeation would alter the isotope distribution, but I also wonder if the alteration is predictable in some fashion. Does seawater affect the decay rate in some fashion?
- ars 12y agoYes, that's exactly it. You can sometimes adjust if the water was constant and you have some other clock you can calibrate to (for example the bottom of the ocean at a specific depth). But if you have water that came and went then the errors are too large.
- jccooper 12y agoUh, no. Radiocarbon dating is routinely done on such things as shells, shipwrecks, peat, mud, and groundwater.
- ars 12y agoIt only sometimes works if the water is constant, and not replenished. And even then you need an external clock to calibrate each site. If it's things like floodwater then the errors are too large. Water does not have the same isotope ratio as air, and water can also move carbon in and out of the sample. They have procedures for adjusting the dating for marine samples, but it's only valid in certain cases.
- M8 12y agoUSA is like: "Look, we have ancient history as well!". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan National Treasure the movie was a good laugh though.