Carbon Dating Accuracy

All old things from fossil bones to caveman artifacts are radioactively dated.  Amazingly, the dates for these artifacts are presented in very definite terms.

Carbon dating has been used by scientists to show that man is older than the dates offered by Bible records.

One dating example is that of the Shroud of Turin.  For anyone that doesn’t know the Shroud of Turin is a piece of very old cloth that has an image on it that some say is the very image of Christ.

How this relates to the title of this article is this.  A few years back a number of scientists said the shroud of Turin has to be a fake because it only dates radioactively to the middle ages.

Well, it seems that there is a little more to the story.  Now Italian scientists say that this cloth could date to the time of Christ because of earthquakes.  In fact, an earthquake could have been the cause of the picture in the first place.

“Alberto Carpinteri of the Politecnico di Torino and his team suggest that an earthquake in Jerusalem in A.D. 33 — the time of the crucifixion — released neutron particles that could have fixed the picture on the shroud.

The Italian hypothesis would concur with a study conducted by geologists investigating seismic activity in the Holy Land, who in 2012 offered a theory on the date of the crucifixion: Friday, April 3, 33.

The Italian scientists say that radiation from the earthquake could have elevated the levels of carbon-14 isotopes in the shroud, which would interfere with radiocarbon dating.”[i]

How about that?  It seems that radioactive dating isn’t so sure after all if something that some scientists say is 700 years old is really three times that old.

Another example of carbon dating inaccuracy recently was brought up on the show Nova on the PBS channel in the USA.  On the episode titled “Lost Viking Army” (May 22, 2019) the archeologists had a problem with a skull carbon dating a century or two older than the other bones in the grave.  Then they made a fascinating statement; Bones would yield different carbon dating results depending on whether the people ate meat or fish!  The age of the carbon-14 in a bone depends on the age of the carbon-14 in the consumed food!

This is a relatively new development.  Scientists have now determined that the carbon 14 in the oceans is far older than that on land.  In fact, the program said that the age of carbon-14 in the oceans is centuries older than that on land!

The scientists said that they have a way to use chemical markers to determine the “fish” sourced carbon-14 in bones and thus make the adjustment.  In this case, they pronounced the older carbon-14 dated skull the same age as the others because of this.  Good for them!  It looks like they were able to discern quite a bit about Viking invasions of Britain circa 873.

But it sure is something to think about.  For example, a Huffington Post article says that the oldest caveman bones are 7000 years old.[ii] With all of the earthquakes that have happened in the history of the world, what is to say that the date is off a little, maybe enough to line up with a biblically based timeline that puts modern man, i.e., Adam and Eve, starting about 6000 years ago?  Or what about what they ate, what if the carbon in the food they ate was older than what was originally thought?

Or what other scientific finds are going to be made to show more variances in carbon-14 dating?  Carbon dating does not look quite as straightforward as we have been told in the past.

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