Well, wood is not exactly known to survive for hundreds, much less thousands or hundreds of thousand of years.
Given such a large period with nothing found in it, and given that in this period wood needed to survive considerable less long than 476K, makes me want to look for other explanations.
Uppercase YES.
Second question, carbon 14 method has intervals of confidence. Show me the intervals
It's irrelevant to the OP because radiocarbon dating doesn't go back that far, but your general skepticism is very much misplaced. The people who have been using and improving radiocarbon dating for the last century do in fact know more about it than your superficial armchair doubts.
Maybe, if we assume that C14 is not distributed homogeneously in the log; that is the logical assumption by default
As we know that C14 had spikes in production in some particular years, Is trivial to assume that rings formed in those years stored more C14.
The main question is if we have this years registered on our log or not. If we would have it; and they fall on the outer part of the log (AKA the partially charred part), then is perfectly doable
Perhaps read about the actual technique more? A tree will be at equilibrium with atmospheric c14 throughout its lifetime.
> As we know that C14 had spikes in production in some particular years, Is trivial to assume that rings formed in those years stored more C14.
We have very solid time series data on the background C14 levels from multiple independent techniques. Spectroscopy based methods count the total number of C14 atoms in the sample throughout its entire volume as well.
> The main question is if we have this years registered on our log or not. If we would have it; and they fall on the outer part of the log (AKA the partially charred part), then is perfectly doable
As I said above, the entire radiocarbon dating discussion is irrelevant to the original article. I just wanted to reply against zero content lowbrow dismissals of the technique in general. It's disappointing to see commentators here posting the exact same FUD as young earth creationists.
The earliest known wood artefact is a fragment of polished plank from the Acheulean site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel, more than 780 ka (refs. 2,3). Wooden tools for foraging and hunting appear 400 ka in Europe, China and possibly Africa. At Kalambo we also recovered four wood tools from 390 ka to 324 ka, including a wedge, digging stick, cut log and notched branch.
I also don't understand the general idea. So there are humans capable of generating tools out of stones (the oldest flint tools are 3 millions of years old), but the idea that they use these tools to work wood to help making something structural out of wood - like some notches to be able to easier put some sticks of wood together - is debatable?
The problem for archeologists is of course to prove that these wooden "structures" existed by, well, finding traces(Oh, what a pun!) of them.
This isn't like modern humans - billions of individuals each generating tons of waste materials over their lifetime, stuff like concrete, plastic, glass, and metals. This is a few hundred thousand individuals who are sometimes making things out of sticks, grasses, and hide.
As far as I can tell from some quick googling, there only were ever a few hundred thousand homo heidelbergensis, and that's the high estimate.
We only have a few hundred specimens of the bones of homo heidelbergensis and some of those are from extremely bizarre circumstances, like a pit in a cavern where people seem to have been deliberately disposed of.
If we only have a few bits and pieces of bone left, consider how much less likely it is for a structure of plant and animal materials to survive. If it was in use by people, eventually it would wear out and be replaced, and get broken down to reuse its materials in various ways. If people abandon it, they probably won't bury it like they would a human being (very convenient to future archeologists). Abandoned structures will just stay on the surface, where the elements and decomposing organisms will eventually reduce it to dust.
According to the researchers here, the wooden structures only survived due to being preserved in fine sediment in the water.
So we're only ever going to find structures like this due to wildly improbable events. It's amazing we've found any!
Or is this some Quadrant sourced opinioning?
If Antikythera devices were common, with say every ship having one, every town and village temple having one, every school having one, and so on we'd have a big mystery because we don't think the Greeks had the technology for mass production of mechanisms with the necessary accuracy and precision.
But we've only found one, and we don't know how long it took to build.
The Antikythera device could be the work of one builder and his assistants over a lifetime, financed by someone very wealthy and able to supply as many slaves as the builder wanted. It could even have been built over more than one lifetime, if the sponsor was a government.
When you are not in a hurry and you have a lot of laborers you can make very precise mechanisms with little more technology than blocks of metal and hand files.
As Teller of Penn & Teller once observed, "Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect". Penn has said "The only secret of magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth".
The story there is more complex and there's a faction in Austalia that would insist that Australian aboriginals were on the decline when Europeans arrived.
We lose stuff all the time.
If we're talking about modern times, Damascus steel can be easily forged and replicated by modern hobbyist smiths.
If we're talking about being lost at some point between 0AD and, say...1900 AD, then it was probably just not economically viable to make it. Damascus steel is very labor-intensive to produce and does not offer significant structural advantages compared to regular mild or tempered steel. Certainly not in applications where most metal was used in the middle ages (hint: it was warfare).
For example, it makes no sense to make a full-plate armor or a musket out of Damascus steel. It would be mostly a status item, rather than a practical tool.
Hence when we say "lost", it likely just means people looked at it and decided it wasn't worth the time outside of niche applications. And since it was niche, there is very few historical artifacts, that make it look "lost", when in reality, there just weren't too many of these items to begin with.
Many people in Europe saw these steels and tried to recreate the effect through processing. However, they could not discover the secret, and could not make it. Though there was a demand for Damascus steel, in the 19th century it stopped being made. This steel had been produced for 11 centuries, and in just about a generation, the means of its manufacture was entirely lost. The reason it disappeared remained a mystery until just a few years ago.
As it turns out, the technique was not lost, it just stopped working. The "secret" that produced such high quality weapons was not in the technique of the swordsmiths, but rather on the composition of the material they were using. The swordsmiths got their steel ingots from India. In the 19th Century, the mining region where those ingots came from changed.
The actual paper about the impurities: https://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9809/Verhoeven-9809.ht...
And, like I said before, it did not offer any significant structural advantages for its labor inefficiency. So "Damascus steel" is just 1 minor technique of producing a specific steel alloy, with many substitutes that had been used in its place.
It's not like human civilization suddenly lost the technology of steel production and forging.
Lost tech is a meme. I could say the modern humanity lost the tech of making horse armor, but it is just inaccurate semantics. We can still make metal and we can still make armor in the shape of a horse, we just don't, because there's no demand for it.
My memory on the specifics is vague. I remember him saying they had lost fish hooks (maybe just some fishing technique in general?). And that further losses occurred in the migration to Tasmania, leaving the settlers there even further behind.
I don't know what "Quadrant" references.