Can we trust radiocarbon dating? Update; full paper available

Full paper cited here now publicly available at
https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2018/PSCF6-18Davidson.pdf

Primate's Progress

Willard Frank Libby, inventor of the method

Can we trust radiocarbon dating? Young Earth creationists tell us that we can’t. After all, it makes the same range of assumptions as other radiometric dating methods, and then some. Other methods benefit from internal checks or duplications, which in the case of radiocarbon dating are generally absent. There are numerous cases where it appears to give absurdly old ages for young material, while apparent ages of a few tens of thousands of years are regularly reported for material known on other evidence to be millions of years old. So can the Young Earth creationist¹ objections be rebutted, and if so how?

The principle of radiometric dating is simple.² If we know how much of a particular radioactive substance was present when a material formed, how much is still there, and

View original post 3,141 more words