Word: radiocarbon
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...artifacts from Monte Verde have now been subjected to dozens of radiocarbon analyses -- a standard archaeological dating technique in which the amount of radioactive carbon in an organic specimen is used to calculate its age. Dillehay says he is "very confident" that he has found remnants of a culture that existed some 125 centuries...
...year ago remarkably preserved in the melting Similaun glacier high in the Alps. His discovery has already upset some long-held notions about the late Stone Age, chilled relations between Austria and Italy -- near whose border he was found -- and stimulated tourism and commerce. His age, established by radiocarbon dating as approximately 5,300 years, makes him by far the most ancient human being ever found virtually intact. (Some Egyptian mummies are older, but had their brain and vital organs removed before interment...
From the well-preserved contents of middens, scientists using radiocarbon dating can peer thousands of years into the past to discern when climates changed, why civilizations withered and how plants and animals migrated...
...snapshot of the flora and fauna existing within about 50 m ((164 ft.)) of the midden at the time it was accumulating," explains Peter Wigand, a paleoecologist at the University of Nevada's Desert Research Institute. Scientists can pin down the approximate time the snapshot was taken by radiocarbon dating of a preserved twig or fecal pellet; the technique can date specimens that are more than 40,000 years old. And by studying middens of different vintages in the same area, researchers can in effect create a movie from a sequence of snapshots, showing changes in local ecosystems...
...those estimates, while valuable, are also known to be somewhat uncertain. Last week geologists at the Lamont-Doherty Geological Laboratory in - Palisades, N.Y., offered firm evidence of just how uncertain. Writing in Nature, they showed that some radiocarbon dates may be off by as much as 3,500 years -- possibly enough to force a change in current thinking on such important questions as exactly when humans first reached the Americas...