Topic
A laboratory method that estimates the age of organic material by measuring how much of its carbon-14 has decayed.
Researchers using high-precision radiocarbon dating at two sites say Waihemo's diet had shifted away from moa and seals by about 1410. They report that some economic change in early Māori society began earlier than previously thought.
Reality
Researchers matched oxygen isotopes in one Biggenden banded snail's shell to ex-tropical-cyclone rain across about 4.5 years of its life. It is one shell from a limestone-free park, so use at other sites is a projection.
Reality
Carbon-14 on the wall's timbers returns 200 to 10 B.C.E., a window wide enough to hold the 52 B.C.E. burning Caesar described and much else besides, and the officials quoted say function and chronology still need verifying.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
Oregon State and Columbia researchers found livestock spread across Madagascar about 1,200 years ago, as its large native herbivores declined. People may have arrived millennia earlier, so the timing argues against hunting alone as the cause of the extinctions.
Reality
Surface collection, geophysics and coring at Opovo Ugar-Bajbuk between 2022 and 2024 put the late Neolithic settlement above 9 hectares with up to 220 houses and more than 700 people at its peak. The house sizes vary too little to mark out a wealthy few.
Reality
A woman buried face down in a Henan cemetery had her nasal bones cut back to half the bridge and lived, and the team that found her among 300 burials argues the grave itself points to punishment.
Reality
Radiocarbon can leave a medieval burial floating inside a century. A University of Tartu team used each plague genome's position on the evolutionary tree to tighten that window, and says many samples now line up with recorded outbreaks.
Reality
A University of Tartu team sequenced Yersinia pestis from archaeological remains and built a way to narrow radiocarbon dates using a genome's place on the family tree, then matched samples to outbreaks chroniclers recorded.
Reality
The 2023 excavation of a ridge in northwestern Morocco dated a multiphase ditch, rampart and wall to about 4,000 to 3,500 years ago, the earliest confirmed defensive construction in North Africa outside Egypt.
Reality
An international team sequenced Yersinia pestis from teeth at four Siberian cemeteries and found it in 18 of 46 people, among them siblings and parents who appear to have died in the same outbreak. The work is published in Nature.
Reality
The bones were collagen-free, so the site's age came from radiocarbon on bone apatite. Two labs dating the sand around the bones instead returned 160,000 to 232,000 years, and groundwater chemistry is the suspect.
Reality
Brigid Lynch took it for an oddly shaped rock in a San Mateo County creek bed. Midpen has since donated the tooth to Stanford, where a radiocarbon date will test a preliminary estimate of about 10,000 years.
Reality
Archaeologists closing a dig near Żórawina noticed a four-metre circle in the soil and found 42 drilled teeth above a man's skeleton. The 2900 B.C.E. estimate rests on the shape of his battle axe until radiocarbon comes back.
Reality