The week I stopped trusting carbon dating results from wet sites

2 comments

2 Comments

So you're telling me the mud and water messed with the clocks on ancient stuff? lol, that's like trusting a soggy napkin to tell you the time. Wet dirt really does whatever it wants with those carbon numbers, I guess we should just start dating things by how much they smell instead. Honestly, I'm surprised it took this long for someone to figure out that water might mess up the results, but thanks for the heads up I guess.

milesbailey16h ago

Admit I was totally on the same page as you until like last year. I remember arguing with a buddy about how carbon dating was basically foolproof, no way some rain could throw it off that much. Then I read about this study where they tested dry cave samples against ones that had been soaked in groundwater for centuries, and the wet ones came back thousands of years older. Like, that's not a small oops, that's a whole different era. So yeah, soggy napkin analogy is pretty spot on, it definitely made me stop trusting the numbers so blindly.