[Hegemony Cricket]

"Except that carbon dating can be and has been verified by comparing its results to the dates of known historical events. For example, if you know that a particular battle took place in the year 1000..."

Would you agree that there are several orders of magnitude (and therefore much larger margin for error) between events a few thousand years ago, and events a few million years ago? By way of example, I coud glance at a cart full of groceries and guess the total bill within $100, but, if I glanced at the annual budget of, say New York City, I likely could not guess it closer than to the nearest $100 million.

On an interesting side note: Did you ever notice that our frame of reference of "known historical events" only extends back in history about 6,000 to 8,000 years?

[general_re]

Errors of precision like that for carbon dating are pretty much linear in nature, IIRC, which makes it pretty easy to correct for - the farther back you go, the less precise the results are, and the wider the range of valid results would be. So for recent artifacts, you might date them to 100 years old, +/- 2 years, and for older artifacts, you might date them to 70,000 years old, +/- 500 years. But those error margins are built right in to the calculations, and it doesn't go back as far as hundreds of millions of years ago in any case - carbon dating is limited to about 100,000 years ago, with modern particle-accelerator techniques.

[general_re]

On an interesting side note: Did you ever notice that our frame of reference of "known historical events" only extends back in history about 6,000 to 8,000 years?

Isn't that about what you would expect if writing were invented about 6,000 to 8,000 years ago? ;)