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To: Free Baptist
And no dating method is accurate beyond 10,000 years (to be most generous).

Carbon-14 dating is actually quite accurate. It has been calibrated against bristlecone pines going back some 11,500 years. This means you directly count tree-rings from the present back as far as you can, using different trees of course (the ring sequences overlap), and then you date rings that are, say 9,550 years old, and establish a calibration curve. By using thousands of samples you get a pretty accurate calibration dataset. The curve has been extended past 20,000 years using other materials.

The other methods of dating are also pretty good, but they are a bit out of my field, whereas I use Carbon-14 dating a lot.

Do you have some evidence that I don't know about that shows Carbon-14 dating is not accurate?

61 posted on 09/22/2005 11:29:55 AM PDT by Coyoteman (Is this a good tagline?)
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To: Coyoteman; Free Baptist
"It has been calibrated against bristlecone pines going back some 11,500 years"

More falsehood. Bristlecone pines are considered to be the oldest living things on the planet, but none has been found to be older than 4500 years.

Carbon dating definately has not been calibrated, nor can it be, due to the obvious lack of an atmospheric sample from ancient times. It is known that the percentage of atmospheric 14 varies, but no pattern has ever been established.

Coyoteman been sippin the lobo juice?

66 posted on 09/22/2005 1:17:27 PM PDT by editor-surveyor (Atheist and Fool are synonyms; Evolution is where fools hide from the sunrise)
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To: Coyoteman; Free Baptist
The curve has been extended past 20,000 years using other materials.

Actually quite a bit further (up to maybe 50Kya). One way radiocarbon dating has been calibrater is by examining ancient lake sediments. It is reliable because they can literaly see the years as layers.

100 posted on 09/22/2005 4:13:00 PM PDT by edsheppa
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