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According to a page titled Dating Techniques from the Minnesota State University web site, radiocarbon dating, also known as Carbon-14 (or C-14) dating, is a type of absolute dating technique used to determine the age of organic material. Introduced in 1947 by Willard F. Libby, C-14 dating was a real breakthrough for scientists, who up to this point, had to rely on relative dating techniques. Basically, all living things are mostly made of carbon. A small portion of this carbon is in the form of Carbon-14, an unstable radioactive isotope. Once an organism dies, the C-14 in the organism begins to disintegrate.
Because it disintegrates at a steady, known rate, scientists can measure the amount of C-14 remaining and use a scientific formula to determine the age of the sample. The University of Waikato, New Zealand web site offers an in-depth explanation and, for the less scientifically-inclined, a simple summary that's a bit easier to understand. Another good place to start is Yahoo's Archaeometry category, a sub-category of Archaeology that deals with methods of dating artifacts. While
C-14 dating has its limitations, it remains a significant scientific discovery and has been used to date some of the most important archaeological finds, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Iceman, and the controversial Shroud of Turin. According to British prehistorian Desmond
Clark, without Carbon-14 dating "we would still be foundering in a sea of imprecisions sometime bred of inspired guesswork but more often of imaginative speculation." Sounds pretty frightening, doesn't it?
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