I thought this was a well known effect - it's certainly filtered down to some paperback popsci archaeology books I've read in the past few years.
bcraven 1 days ago [-]
This appears to be a comment, highlighting a case study that demonstrates the effect in detail.
It is not purporting to show it as 'new'.
clickety_clack 11 hours ago [-]
Dating of facts can be problematic due to the reservoir effect, occurring in text samples with a factual component.
tengwar2 24 hours ago [-]
Yes. Most of the research on C14 dating since its inception has concentrated on quantifying this for different environments, sample types, and dates, or quantifying other effects that give results other than a smooth exponential decay. I'm not clear why this was published. Any C14 lab is aware of this sort of issue. There are also non-C14 techniques available for human remains, e.g. ESR (electron spin resonance) dating.
Legend2440 1 days ago [-]
I remember reading about it as a kid, in 1990s creationist books that were attempting to argue that carbon dating couldn't be trusted and the world was actually only 6,000 years old.
bmenrigh 23 hours ago [-]
Yeah I grew up in a religious household. A reoccurring theme was about how scientists didn't have a clue about most things. Carbon dating was high up on the list of stuff "scientists were wrong about".
not2b 21 hours ago [-]
Yes, but for their young earth creationist beliefs to be valid, the errors from carbon dating would need to be far larger than the errors caused by effects described in this article, and other means of dating would need to be ignored.
noduerme 21 hours ago [-]
So like... finding carbon older than 6000 years was proof that the whole science was bunk? That's some circular reasoning, alright.
GJim 15 hours ago [-]
But.....
God created that carbon to make it look like the Earth is older than 6,000 years.
(Yes, an American I met did make this argument to me regarding the fossil record. There is no helping some people.)
No, the point is that you can't trust anything a scientist says. It's literally reliant on a giant conspiracy theory that most of society is controlled by a secret war between satan and god and scientists (and leftists and democrats and and and) are on the side of satan and trying to turn you away from gods light.
Remember that America has a large, large population of fundamentalist christians. Remember that The USSR was nominally an atheist state. The US pretended to be more "godly" to contrast itself against that. That included adding bullshit like "In god we trust" on all money, making kids every single day say "Under god" to an american flag, and literal propaganda campaigns about how those godless commies were terrible and in league with satan.
The point is that you can't trust anyone other than your dad or your pastor.
LorenPechtel 22 hours ago [-]
I would have expected it from the sea, I didn't realize it happened meaningfully in fresh water.
thisisauserid 22 hours ago [-]
Freshwater systems act as reservoirs storing ancient dissolved carbonates lacking radiocarbon; fish absorb this old carbon, artificially aging human bones.
p-e-w 18 hours ago [-]
Nothing special about humans here. The same would apply to dating the remains of a prehistoric canid that fed on fish.
1 days ago [-]
pvaldes 2 days ago [-]
Yep. I suspected that that arctic shark couldn't be so old.
gus_massa 1 days ago [-]
I think the age is calculated counting the "rings" in ... [looking at google] ... the vertebrae.
pvaldes 13 hours ago [-]
They confirmed it with radiocarbon data, that is known to have their limits in modern samples since decades. Rings in the bones are known to be difficult to read and not very trustable. I know. I tried it. Is a nightmare. Unlike tree rings, this rings fuse, fork and vanish all the time. Different observers will come with different ages, to the point of the protocols for otoliths directly advise to take the average of three measures taken by three different people. You repeat the read one year after and obtain a different age for the same sample.
In cartilaginous fishes I bet that is much much worse. In young fishes the method can give a clue, but being able to count 200-400 clear rings is not realistic. At that point the error intervals are too big. We can't even be sure that we are not registering 200 meals instead.
Of course everybody just swallowed the glittering result as a proven fact, without much critical thinking, because it made for a great history. Saying "we don't know" wouldn't be publishable.
The only real way to prove this is to keep the animal in captivity from their birth so you are totally sure of his real age.
archimedes237 1 days ago [-]
Defiling the dead bodies of monks...
defrost 18 hours ago [-]
Depending on the monastery, monks can get pretty creative with human bones themselves - small scientific bone samples are tiny in comparison to the bone fragments chipped off or drilled out when rearranging crypt assignments and creating something like the Sedlec Ossuary.
It is not purporting to show it as 'new'.
God created that carbon to make it look like the Earth is older than 6,000 years.
(Yes, an American I met did make this argument to me regarding the fossil record. There is no helping some people.)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_hypothesis
Remember that America has a large, large population of fundamentalist christians. Remember that The USSR was nominally an atheist state. The US pretended to be more "godly" to contrast itself against that. That included adding bullshit like "In god we trust" on all money, making kids every single day say "Under god" to an american flag, and literal propaganda campaigns about how those godless commies were terrible and in league with satan.
The point is that you can't trust anyone other than your dad or your pastor.
In cartilaginous fishes I bet that is much much worse. In young fishes the method can give a clue, but being able to count 200-400 clear rings is not realistic. At that point the error intervals are too big. We can't even be sure that we are not registering 200 meals instead.
Of course everybody just swallowed the glittering result as a proven fact, without much critical thinking, because it made for a great history. Saying "we don't know" wouldn't be publishable.
The only real way to prove this is to keep the animal in captivity from their birth so you are totally sure of his real age.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedlec_Ossuary