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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

My gut instinct says they misdated the bones.

My partner is an archaeologist and this is an entertainingly common occurrence with older digs. She reassessed a few as part of some old work in the past few years and found that some bones were from lunch on the dig-site :|

How can that be? Are buried ancient bones indistinguishable from buried recent bones?

Could be sea food.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating#Reservoir_e...

Could be I suppose - though before announcing something like this you'd think they'd check more frequently.

In addition, I'm assuming the dating has a margin of error which was not stated in the article, so I'm curious what this margin is. (But even so, I doubt it's a large enough margin to get close to the 600k that was stated, which is already 'far out there')

The article links to a description, i did some hunting but was unable to find any hard number for a margin of error.

Electronic spin resonance: ESR, which measures trapped electrons using magnetic fields, is related to magnetic resonance imaging, the medical technique that allows doctors to look for tumors or peek inside your creaking knee. Because ESR essentially tracks the activity — the “spin” — of the electrons without freeing them, the sample can be subjected to repeated dating attempts. ESR also has a longer range — some researchers claim up to 1 million years — but it’s more complicated than other trapped charge methods, leaving it more susceptible to error.

The scientific paper stated that the rhino's age came out to 709000 +/- 68000 years. The number was consistent with other measurements made of the age of the depositional layer.

Before releasing a claim like this, I would have to believe they were extremely careful in the testing and interpretation. If they have this wrong, it could be a career killer.

That reminds me of CERN discovering they didn't find a particle moving faster than the speed of light after all - a connector was loose somewhere [0].

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/910000...

Oh man, scientific errors are everywhere, remember the mystery serial killer striking in multiple countries seemingly at random? Turned out, the swabs in the DNA kits were contaminated at the manufacturer by a single person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn

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