> we would have found plenty of other wooden structures in the period
Well, wood is not exactly known to survive for hundreds, much less thousands or hundreds of thousand of years.
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!