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An engraved bone, believed to be from a mastodon, giant sloth or mammoth, may be the oldest example of primitive art ever found in the Americas. The carved bone features the depiction of an ancient mammoth, and was discovered by an amateur fossil hunter in Florida, in an area near Vero Beach where other mammoth bones have recently been found. The archaeological team working on carbon dating the bone feel that it is at least 13,000 years old, and that the etching must be at least that old as well.
Since wines range from dirt cheap to astronomically expensive, fraudulent wine dealers are raking in the dough by diluting expensive wines with cheaper varieties, or mislabeling the vintage. How to catch these crooks? Carbon dating! Scientists can detect a wine’s vintage to within a year using methods to detect traces of radioactive carbon-14 released into the atmosphere by nuclear testing.
Almost all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere contains the stable carbon-12 form of the element. Each atom of carbon-12 has six neutrons and six protons in its nucleus. But atmospheric atomic bomb tests, which ended in 1963, released vast amounts of radioactive carbon-14 into the air. A carbon-14 atom has two extra neutrons.
When grapes grow on the vine, they absorb carbon dioxide, which contains both stable carbon and traces of radioactive carbon-14 left over from bomb tests, from the air. As time goes by, carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning dilutes the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere.
The proportions of the different types of carbon pinpoint the wine’s age. This method could be used to date other consumables, if we didn’t have expiration dates. Link -via Arbroath
Wow – talk about living in an old house. When ornithologist Kurt Burnham of the University of Oxford and colleagues carbon dated the guano and other debris of a gyrfalcon nest in Greenland, he got a very surprising answer:
Carbon dating revealed that one nest in Kangerlussuaq in central-west Greenland is between 2,360 and 2,740 years old, the researchers report
in Ibis.Three other nests in the area are older than 1,000 years, with the youngest nest site first being occupied 520 to 650 years ago.
These ancient nests are still being regularly used by gyrfalcons.
"While I know many falcon species re-use nest sites year after year, I never imagined we would be talking about nests that have been used on and off for over 2,000 years," says Burnham.
Link (Photo: Jack Stephens) – via TYWKIWDBI
