“The process of carbon dating just estimates the age of something before a specific date arbitrarily called the “present” which is not the present, but 1950, (which was the present when they started carbon dating things.)”
The article uses the calibrated BP abbreviation which you indicate is 1950s we subtract 1950 to contextualized to popular and well understood literature?
Kind of, yes.
But the BP “date” is constantly being dialed in (see posts above discussing “wiggles”) that can shorten or lengthen the amount of time represented by things that changed the process of C19 decay or increased or decreased the amount of C19 in the atmosphere (volcanoes, solar flares, whatever).
So they use the BP date with the understanding that the conventional calendar date it corresponds to might swing quite a bit. It’s a way to keep articles evergreen and not have to search for all those AD/BC estimations that are now off.
I am a petroleum geologist/engineer and we have to use similar off-calendar calendars for similar reasons. (We don’t use C19 because it’s generally long gone with what we deal with. But other decaying atoms work, albeit tied to events where the calendar date is estimated. To say it a different way, we know something is “x years” from “y event” but aren’t really positive when y was.