Word: radiocarbon
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What makes these disputes more difficult is that modern archaeological methods often guarantee that an artifact will--in the eyes of the Indians at least--be defiled. Not only is the find seized from sacred land, but radiocarbon dating (which was used to estimate the age of Kennewick Man) requires that a portion of the find be destroyed. "We're always presented as antiscience Luddites," says Huber. "But we don't like seeing remains pulverized and irradiated...
Then a CT scan revealed a stone spear point embedded in the skeleton's pelvis, so Chatters sent a bit of finger bone off to the University of California at Riverside for radiocarbon dating. When the results came back, it was clear that his estimate was dramatically off the mark. The bones weren't 100 or even 1,000 years old. They belonged to a man who had walked the banks of the Columbia more than 9,000 years ago. (See pictures of ancient skeletons...
...need not have belonged to James. Ossuaries often held the bones of several family members. Looters could have used the box as a handy receptacle while emptying others. Radiocarbon dating might be able to determine whether the chips date to the same approximate period as the box. As for genetic tests, James Chatters, a Seattle-based archaeologist with forensic expertise, says it is "entirely possible" that DNA could be extracted from such fragments. Most likely to be recovered would be the mitochondrial variety, which can provide a catalog of maternal traits. Of course, if the ossuary was biblical, the mother...
...find seemed too amazing to be true. In fact, it was. Last month, after five months of chemical tests, microbial diagnosis, X-rays, radiocarbon dating and 200 C.T. scans, Pakistani experts concluded the mummy is a fake. "The mummified body is 100% modern," according to archaeological chemist Muhammad Toseef-ul-Hassan. What initially seemed to be one of the world's most intriguing archaeological discoveries is turning into one of Pakistan's strangest murder mysteries...
...other experts insisted they knew of stars that were at least 14 billion years old--obviously a problem, since stars can't be older than the cosmos. Using the VLT, though, observers have measured minute traces of radioactive uranium and thorium in the oldest stars--a technique akin to radiocarbon dating--and proved that they're more like 12 billion years old (the age of the universe, meanwhile, is now estimated at 14 billion years...