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One of the most important dating tools used in archaeology may sometimes give misleading data, new study shows - and it could change whole historical timelines as a result. The discrepancy is due to significant fluctuations in the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere, and it could force scientists to rethink how they use ancient organic remains to measure the passing of time.

Radiocarbon Dating Can't Prove an Old Earth by Vernon R. Cupps, Ph.D. * Evidence for Creation Recently, I conversed with an educated man who maintained Earth must be millions of years old because radiocarbon dating proved it. Although this argument is common, it’s simply inaccurate. Even evolutionary scientists acknowledge that radiocarbon dating cannot prove ages of millions or billions of years. Why? Radiocarbon (14C) is an unstable form of carbon that spontaneously decays into nitrogen over time.1 The best instrument for detecting radiocarbon is an accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS),2 which can typically detect one radiocarbon atom per quadrillion (1015) carbon...

Skulls and other human bones poke from large ceramic jars at Khnorng Sroal, one of the newly dated mountainside burials in southwestern Cambodia's Cardamom Mountains. The bones were placed in the 20-inch-tall (50-centimeter-tall) body jars only after the bodies had decomposed or had been picked clean by scavenging animals, according to the study, which is published in the latest issue of the journal Radiocarbon. "The Cardamom highlanders may have used some form of exposure of the body to de-flesh the bones, like the 'sky burials' known in other cultures," study leader Beavan said. Placing the sky-high burials couldn't have been...

'The desert city of Chinguetti, sinking ever-deeper under the sands of the Sahara, is the last place in the world you would expect to find a library. Yet this crumbling outpost in the west-African country of Mauritania is home to around 6,000 rare books and manuscripts, including some of the oldest Koranic texts in existence which date back to the 9th Century. It was once the prosperous and bustling trade centre of several 'trans-Sahara' trade routes. Traders from all over Europe, north-Africa and the Levant would stop in Chinguetti before moving on to sub-Saharan Africa. There, they would rub shoulders...

Explosive ramifications result from new evidence revealing the Muslim holy book has undergone a textual evolution Frontpage Interview’s guests today are Robert Spencer and Moorthy Muthuswamy. Moorthy Muthuswamy is an expert on terrorism in India. He grew up in India, where he had firsthand experience with political Islam and jihad. He moved to America in 1984 to pursue graduate studies. In 1992, he received a doctorate in nuclear physics from Stony Brook University, New York. Since 1999 he has extensively published ideas on neutralizing political Islam’s terror war as it is imposed on unbelievers. He is the author of the...

Folks, Sandro Magister, the world-renowned vaticanista, hosted in his website an exchange between Muslim theologian Aref Ali Nayed and the Catholic Islamologist Michel Cuypers which I think you should read. The subject of the exchange is one that I’ve covered repeatedly in these humble folios, having to do with the need for a higher criticism of the Koran in order to know, expose, and study its literary genres, its historical context, the oral traditions that converged in its formation, and the phases in its redaction that gave us the text as we read it today. Of course, such an...

J A N U A R Y   1 9 9 9Researchers with a variety of academic and theological interests are proposing controversial theories about the Koran and Islamic history, and are striving to reinterpret Islam for the modern world. This is, as one scholar puts it, a "sensitive business" by Toby Lester (The online version of this article appears in three parts. Click here to go to part two. Click here to go to part three.) N 1972, during the restoration of the Great Mosque of Sana'a, in Yemen, laborers working in a loft between the structure's inner and...

Ok, let's get down to brass tacks. How long has the Islam religion been around and have they always been so hateful and violent (like so many of them are today)? I believe they claim to be direct descendants of Abraham but I also believe that Abraham was a favorite of our one true Judeo-Christian God, and was the father or grandfather of the Jewish and Christian religions. I have a hard time believing that our loving Judeo-Christian God is also the Islam God, Allah, whose Muslim followers seem to be so misplaced. Haven't the warlike Muslim tribes fanned out...

The BBC announced enthusiastically Wednesday that “what may be the world’s oldest fragments of the Koran have been found by the University of Birmingham.” This news is not only of interest to scholars and Muslim intellectuals; it appears to buttress the Islamic claim that the Qur’an’s text has remained unchanged for 1,400 years – which is purported to be proof of its divine origin. There is only one problem with all this: the BBC article raises more questions than it answers, and reveals more about the wishful thinking of the academic and media establishments than it does about the...

What may be the world's oldest fragments of the Koran have been found by the University of Birmingham. Radiocarbon dating found the manuscript to be at least 1,370 years old, making it among the earliest in existence. The pages of the Muslim holy text had remained unrecognised in the university library for almost a century. The British Library's expert on such manuscripts, Dr Muhammad Isa Waley, said this "exciting discovery" would make Muslims "rejoice". The manuscript had been kept with a collection of other Middle Eastern books and documents, without being identified as one of the oldest fragments of the...

After nine months of tests, researchers in France have identified the head of France's King Henry IV, who was assassinated in 1610 aged 57. The scientific tests helped identify the late monarch's embalmed head, which was shuffled between private collections ever since it disappeared during the French Revolution in 1793. The results of the research identifying Henry IV's head were published online Wednesday in the medical journal, BMJ. Henry IV was buried in the Basilica of Saint Denis near Paris, but during the frenzy of the French Revolution, the royal graves were dug up and revolutionaries chopped off Henry's head,...

Radiocarbon dating of charcoal found elsewhere on this site has suggested people might have camped here and built fires by the north branch of the Potomac River, anywhere from 9,000 years ago to as much as 16,000 years ago... Some tools and bones have been found in Pennsylvania and Virginia that date well before the Clovis era, although scientists debate whether the dating is accurate.

Rediscovering AmericaThe New World may be 20,000 years older than experts thought BY CHARLES W. PETIT Late in the afternoon last May 17, a tired archaeological team neared the end of a 14-hour day winching muck to the deck of a Canadian Coast Guard vessel. It was in water 170 feet deep in Juan Perez Sound, half a mile offshore among British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands. For four days, team members had fruitlessly sieved undersea mud and gravel. Then, in the slanting light of sunset, a deckhand drew from the goop a triangular blade of dark basalt. Its sharp edge...

The media is abuzz with news that a portion of the Koran, which Muslims believe was first recited by their prophet, Muhammad, may actually predate Muhammad himself. Many seem to think that such news will have a large impact on the Muslim world and make Muslims rethink the veracity of their faith.

The 'Birmingham Koran' fragment that could shake Islam after carbon-dating suggests it is OLDER than the Prophet Muhammad Fragments of the oldest Koran were discovered last month in BirminghamCarbon dating found the pages were produced between 568AD and 654AD But several historians now say that the parchment may predate MuhammadThey believe that this discovery could rewrite the early history of Islam Fragments of the world's oldest Koran, found in Birmingham last month, may predate the Prophet Muhammad and could even rewrite the early history of Islam, according to scholars.The pages, thought to be between 1,448 and 1,371 years old, were...

Fragments of an early Koran found in a Birmingham library may rewrite Islamic history after carbon dating revealed they could be older than Mohammed.

Archaeologists rewrite timeline of Bronze and Iron Ages, including early appearance of alphabet FOR RELEASE: Dec. 19, 2001 Contact: Blaine P. Friedlander Jr. Office: 607-255-3290 E-Mail: bpf2@cornell.edu ITHACA, N.Y. -- Using information gleaned from the sun's solar cycles and tree rings, archaeologists are rewriting the timeline of the Bronze and Iron Ages. The research dates certain artifacts of the ancient eastern Mediterranean decades earlier than previously thought. And it places an early appearance of the alphabet outside Phoenicia at around 740 B.C. Writing in two articles in the forthcoming issue of the journal Science (Dec. 21), archaeologists from Cornell University ...

According to a recent international study, the volcano of the island Santorini, Greece, erupted in the 16th century BC and not earlier. The survey characterized a number of research studies that took place in the past and have indicated that Santorini's volcano may have erupted a century earlier, as unreliable because the method based on tree-ring measurements that they used, could not provide them with accurate results. An international team of researchers led by Paolo Cherubini from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) has demonstrated in the scientific journal Antiquity, that this method cannot provide...

Enlarge Image Nuclear fallout. Radioactive carbon-14 atoms released by atomic bombs are helping scientists determine the birthdays of new neurons in the hippocampus (inset). Credit: Spalding et al., Cell (2013);(inset) Weissman, Livet, Sanes, and Lichtman/Harvard University The mushroom clouds produced by more than 500 nuclear bomb tests during the Cold War may have had a silver lining, after all. More than 50 years later, scientists have found a way to use radioactive carbon isotopes released into the atmosphere by nuclear testing to settle a long-standing debate in neuroscience: Does the adult human brain produce new neurons? After working to...

Sediment from Japanese lake provides more accurate timeline for dating objects as far back as 50,000 years. The carbon clock is getting reset. Climate records from a Japanese lake are set to improve the accuracy of the dating technique, which could help to shed light on archaeological mysteries such as why Neanderthals became extinct. Carbon dating is used to work out the age of organic material — in effect, any living thing. The technique hinges on carbon-14, a radioactive isotope of the element that, unlike other more stable forms of carbon, decays away at a steady rate. Organisms capture a...