Isn’t radiocarbon-14 dating a fairly reliable technique to give the approximate age of organic material?
I heard there are different opinions on that.
Carbon-14 dating is reliable only to its “half-life”. If it is 5,740 years old or younger it seems to be reliable. If it is older than that each time they do the tests it seems to come up with a different age.
For objects of this age potassium-argon or uranium-lead dating is more commonly used than carbon-14 dating.
“Isn’t radiocarbon-14 dating a fairly reliable technique to give the approximate age of organic material?”
I question that myself. Dating something as millions of years old based on a supposition about an atom seems a stretch. I say supposition because my feeble mind struggles accepting the notion that an atom or isotope or whatever takes x million years to deteriorate half way based on any observable data. We haven’t been here long enough to confirm any of it. Based on a few years observation, one can extrapolate millions of years of information? Seems unreliable at best.