It's ammusing that they tack on the extra significant figure when they are pretty much taking a wild guess. Must be some conversion from metric or something.
That reminds me of the time I was working at the refinery dumping bags of chemicals into a big mixing tank.
The bags were labeled:
40 lbs.
18.1437 kg.
LOL - What a bunch of idiots they were, huh?
Everybody knows that 40# = 18.143696 kg! 8^)
It's ammusing that they tack on the extra significant figure when they are pretty much taking a wild guess.
No, they're not "pretty much taking a wild guess". It's not all that hard to date things accurately to within two significant digits (which is all they're claiming in the above figures), especially when the item under consideration is of a nature to allow multiple dating methods to be used as "cross-checks" of each other, as is the case for arctic ice cores.
They're not guessing, they're measuring.