Pre-Clovis Breakthrough or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Radiocarbon Dating

Pre-Clovis Breakthrough

Ok, so this archaeologist has discovered human feces that radiocarbon dating has pinpointed as being 14,300 years old. Hrm.

That doesn't seem to square with a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis, does it? Radiocarbon dating has long been used to determine the age of organic materials recovered by archaeologists.

Now, not to get too technical, but Radiocarbon dating compares the amount of C¹⁴, or Carbon 14, a radioactive isotope of carbon with a half-life of only a bit more than 5000 years, with the amount of C¹² in the same sample. The problem here lies in the assumptions of those doing the testing. By determining the C14:C12 ratio and comparing it to the C14:C12 ratio in the atmosphere today, they can determine how much C14 has decayed away. Since they know the half-life of C14, they can then determine how long it's been since the organic specimen was alive. The problem, of course, is that we have no way of knowing what the C14:C12 ratio was 1000, 2000, even 3, 4 or 5000 years ago. In fact, it is possible, even likely, that the biosphere contained significantly more carbon in living organisms prior to the Deluge. In "Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth, Vol. 2", published by the Institute for Creation Research, J. Baumgarder stated:

If that were the case, and this C-14 were distributed uniformly throughout the biosphere, and the total amount of biosphere C were, for example, 500 times that of today’s world, the resulting C-14/C-12 ratio would be 1/500 of today’s level....

There's a good article on C-14 dating over at Lambert Dolphin's Library.

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