I want to believe this, but I’m having a problem with this 138BC date. Is carbon dating that accurate?
Not carbon dating, but they do a lot of dating by tracking tree rings. For example you can take the wood from an old tree chopped down on a known date and match each ring to a year. Then you can find some older wood that has it's youngest rings matching the widths (and therefore year's weather) with your first tree's older rings so you can get an exact date for that second tree. Keep on getting older and older wood and you can go back pretty far. The tricky part is the assumption that they are all grown locally and therefore had the same growth pattern, so you probably need multiple trees in each era to cross check them.
The 138BC date comes from tree rings not from carbon dating of trees.
Well, I don’t know if carbod dating was involved. It mentioned only the measurement of tree rings from fossilized trees. I see no reason to doubt it.
The study of growth rings in trees for the purpose of analyzing past climate conditions or determining the dates of past events.
Because trees grow more slowly in periods of drought or other environmental stress than they do under more favorable conditions, the size of the rings they produce varies.
Analyzing the pattern of a tree's rings provides information about the environmental changes that took place during the period in which it was growing.
Matching the pattern in trees whose age is known to the pattern in wood found at an archaeological site can establish the age at which the wood was cut and thus the approximate date of the site.
By comparing living trees with old lumber and finding overlapping ring patterns, scientists have established chronological records for some species that go back as far as 9,000 years.