Comparing a C14 date from a lab in Miami vs a local university lab on the same bone fragment

Has anyone else noticed that the cheaper labs do just as good a job for carbon dating or am I getting lucky?

3 comments

3 Comments

Is it really that serious though? I mean, carbon dating is a pretty standard process once you get past the setup. As long as the lab follows the same cleaning and preparation steps, the results should be basically the same... seems like the cheaper ones are just cutting their overhead, not the corners that matter. Unless you're dealing with some really tricky sample contamination, I bet both labs give you a number within the same margin of error. Save your money for the important stuff like extra samples or something.

wendyprice1d ago

You know what this reminds me of? My cousin once spent like 200 bucks on a fancy coffee maker and swore it made better coffee than my 20 dollar dripper. We did a blind taste test and nobody could tell the difference. People just like feeling like they bought the best thing, even if the results are the same.

carter.casey1d ago

Oh yeah, totally with you on this one. I had this exact same debate with a friend who was stressing over which lab to use for some old wood samples they found at a dig site. We ended up sending half to the pricey place and half to a budget lab just to see, and honestly the dates came back within like 50 years of each other for stuff that was thousands of years old. I mean, unless you're working with something super fragile or contaminated like bone collagen from a wet cave, the standard prep is pretty bulletproof. It's wild how people get sold on the brand name labs when the cheaper ones are literally using the same acid-base-acid washes and mass specs.