I believe it was primarily geology rather than radiocarbon dating that began to revise the age of the earth.
At least some people back in antiquity believed in a very remote origin of Egyptian civilization—hundreds of thousands of years. St. Augustine talks about these people in his “City of God” and takes them to task for so credulously believing in “histories” that were clearly falsified.
All radiocarbon dating is radiometric dating, but not all radiometric dating is radiocarbon dating.
Actually more like political correctness. Remember Mary Schweitzer, the one who found soft tissue inside the femur of a T-Rex?
Have they not also found carbon for C-14 dating of more dinosaur bones? And yet these truths never get widely circulated and published - inconvenient truths that would empty their bank accounts and end many careers.
It was the discovery and hypothesizing about the meaning of stratification of fossils largely discovered through mining. The father of modern geology is James Hutton (1726–1797), a Scottsman who had studied medicine and chemistry before becoming a farmer. From the observation of stratification of geological layers and the very very slow times for both erosion and deposition he realized that the earth must be very old