https://www.livescience.com/57868-earth-magnetic-field-spike...
https://www.livescience.com/57868-earth-magnetic-field-spike...
How many such techniques we haven't even discovered or technology is not there to observe such things?
I really enjoyed reading Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark that explores such things.
Or purely mathematical intuition.
from a random page on the web
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Mendeleev realized that the physical and chemical properties of elements were related to their atomic mass in a 'periodic' way, and arranged them so that groups of elements with similar properties fell into vertical columns in his table.
Gaps and predictions Sometimes this method of arranging elements meant there were gaps in his horizontal rows or 'periods'. But instead of seeing this as a problem, Mendeleev thought it simply meant that the elements which belonged in the gaps had not yet been discovered. He was also able to work out the atomic mass of the missing elements, and so predict their properties. And when they were discovered, Mendeleev turned out to be right. For example, he predicted the properties of an undiscovered element that should fit below aluminum in his table. When this element, called gallium, was discovered in 1875 its properties were found to be close to Mendeleev's predictions. Two other predicted elements were later discovered, lending further credit to Mendeleev's table.
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You’d probably like this short story which is about exactly what you’re describing: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/26/do-proteins-ho...
Under the right conditions, proteins can survive for millions of years. In recent years, proteomic studies of art works and archeological remains have yielded biological information of startling clarity, revealing gossamer-thin layers of fish glue on seventeenth-century religious sculptures and identifying children’s milk teeth from pits of previously unrecognizable Neolithic bones.
How do they know the dates are correct? Carbon dating doesn't work for those years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_plateau
Calendars are not a recent invention. People have been dating texts for as long as there have been texts. Especially texts related to trade and accounting.
If the pot says "made in the 4th year of king such-and-such", all you have to do is find out when that king took office, which is probably on a monument somewhere, if not in dozens of other texts, since a new administration is a pretty big deal that lots of people would write about.
Correlating them to other historic texts, filling in the missing parts, removing thing one doesn't care about etc is the job for historians.
Look I'm done with this thread. I've made my point, and your comment history shows you only post this sort of pseudo-intellectual nonsense. You represent everything that's wrong with this site.
Being too lazy to visit a library and educate yourself on a topic is called "willful ignorance", not skepticism.
"nullius in verba" means you don't accept theories on authority alone. It means that you don't formulate a conception of gravity by thinking about elements for a while and then declaring that you figured it out, as Aristotle did, but by considering testable possibilities and performing experiments, as Newton did.
"nullius in verba" does NOT mean you can throw out all of Newton's work as "words words words" because you don't feel like reading it.
Yes! If someone can actually make sense of something that was incredibly messy or biased that is a real reason for celebration :-)
On top of that, we also have astronomical records to serve as anchors for other dates. We can figure out when eclipses happened, when each planet was visible, and so on. If ancient texts record an eclipse during the reign of King Foo, and we know when there was an eclipse visible from that area, we can interpret any other events in Foo's time around those definite dates.
Carbon dating doesn't work for these years because there is a plateau in the reference curve. [1]
The earth must have had a weaker magnetic field (correlates with a low in sunspot activity), or there were lots of solar flares, or a supernova, near the beginning to create more c14 in the atmosphere than usual. Alternatively, the ocean "released" a bunch of old carbon to dilute the atmospheric c14 near the end of the period, thus making those years look older.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_plateau [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_reservoir_effect
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281738965_An_introd...