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PSA: Check your carbon dating lab before you send samples
I sent bone fragments from a site in New Mexico to a lab last spring and got results back that were 3,000 years off from what the stratigraphy suggested. Turns out they had a calibration error they didn't catch for months. Has anyone else had a lab mess up their dating results this badly?
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park.aaron8d ago
Three thousand years is insane. I had a lab mix up sample IDs once and got a modern cow bone dated to 12,000 BP, which was pretty funny but not nearly that bad. Did they ever explain exactly what went wrong with the calibration curve or was it more of a math error on their end?
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