[verga]

Lovely, except the carbon dating dated the shroud to medieval times. Until someone redates the shroud using carbon dating and overturns the previous results, the matter is closed, as far as I’m concerned.

I have been told by people much smarter than I am that the issue with Carbon dating something like this is the exposure that it has had to the elements over the years. If you have a bone or fossil which has been buried for X number of years it has not received fresh contamination which would distort the findings.

[Swordmaker]

I have been told by people much smarter than I am that the issue with Carbon dating something like this is the exposure that it has had to the elements over the years. If you have a bone or fossil which has been buried for X number of years it has not received fresh contamination which would distort the findings.

You've been told wrong. The amount of contamination to skew a date of an old object such a large number of centuries is huge. For the shroud, it would require that almost half the weight of the sample be modern material to skew it that far. . . and that's what happened! They tested a sample that had a patch invisibly rewoven into the older material! They broke protocols about where samples were to be taken and about how many were to be taken. They got garbage results because they did that.

[roamer_1]

I have been told by people much smarter than I am that the issue with Carbon dating something like this is the exposure that it has had to the elements over the years. If you have a bone or fossil which has been buried for X number of years it has not received fresh contamination which would distort the findings.

More than that, it was subjected to a fire... caused by heating an enclosed box wherein it resided. Anyone who has ever made char-cloth for starting fires would recognize the process, which ends with an almost pure carbon result. That amount of carbon in an enclosed space would permeate the cloth and mess with results, I would suppose.

At any rate, the original carbon dating was not accurate and proven so.