3205: Carbon Dating

Carbon Dating

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Title text: This dating is corroborated by the presence of stone tools at the site, rather than earlier and less effective helium ones.

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Explanation

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Carbon dating is a method for determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon. This method is commonly used by archeologists and is invaluable in terms of predicting the time an piece of organic matter came from, like fossils. The punchline of this omic stems from the fact that carbon in the universe was created in the first round of stars fusing elements, and thus a cosmologist's only conclusion from the presence of carbon in a skeleton is "this skeleton is less than 13.6 billion years old", which is not useful information for judging artifacts found on Earth (a planet which is less than 5 billion years old).

Transcript

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[Ponytail, standing, is pointing at a blackboard containing a drawing of a skull and some bones/bone fragments, as well as a graph and some lines of text. She is speaking to Cueball and Megan, who are standing beside her.]

Ponytail: The high carbon content of the skeleton indicates that the individual lived less than 13.6 billion years ago, after the first round of stellar nucleosynthesis.

[Caption below the panel:]

Cosmologist carbon dating

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Discussion

F10st p0st! 185.36.194.156 04:45, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

First explanation! Hopefully it's fine... (also, nice TCMP reference.)--Utdtutyabthsc (talk) 06:00, 10 February 2026 (UTC)
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