Forgeries, Fakes, and Phantom Time | Hacker News Reader

Forgeries, Fakes, and Phantom Time

historytoday.com

37 pointssamclemens13 comments

Fomenko's theories, mentioned in the article, are pretty fascinating. I love the romance of the idea that history is all wrong and that everything was made up at a variety of chokepoints around literacy and access to original documents.

Fundamentally it seems implausible (extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence and all) but it's fun to read about, although I have not braved his actual writings to get context (I do, oddly, have a couple of mathematical textbooks that he wrote, however).

The most interesting thing that I saw was his critique of carbon-14 dating. And while I don't concede the central point, it led me down a rabbit hole of realizing that carbon dating is a lot more complex and rule-of-thumb driven than I would have thought, because in the end it relies upon historic atmospheric C14/C12 ratios that we mostly have good information on from ... radiocarbon dating on artifacts of known provenance. That's not the entirety of the story but it was surprising to me that something that is so often thrown out as an example of formal scientific methods in history is so heuristic and complex, rather than a simple application of math and physics.

I'm pretty sure it's mostly tree rings that they use to calibrate it since they are pretty much perfect for it as each ring absorbs carbon for a single year and then stops so you get a two for one of basically a stack of samples each for a different year covering a broad span of time.

In the early days of radiocarbon dating these were pretty much the exclusive source of calibration curves (since the coverage is so comprehensive). There were many problems encountered through this that led us to using a combination of different heuristics.

Primary among those considerations was that the dendrochronology record is of pretty limited timeframes -- we have very few samples going back more than a couple of hundred years.

And the study of carbon-14/12 ratios in dendrochronology led to deeper questions: there appears to be a significant geographic variation; the change in c14/12 ratio is non-monotonic (i.e. there are times of sufficiently increased historical C14 that samples from that era are indistinguishable from samples in a later era).

This has led to a ton of research into calibration methodologies, leaving many questions that are still open today.

Dendrochronology (dating cut trees via counting rings/size/ratios) has its own subjective interpretations, and different databases that don't always line up.

If people are interested in this type of conspiracy theory / pseudo history, another one I find fascinating is the "Lost Empire" of Tartaria [1].

[1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/what-is-the-lo...

This might be related to or be an offshoot of Fomenko's alternate history? One of the tangents in his theory, as I understand it, is that there was a large pseudo-Russian or proto-Russian empire that has largely been erased but was incredibly influential and was mingled into every aspect of antiquity -- basically the idea is that every empire pre-1000AD in the western world was the same empire.

This is entirely unplausible. We have a heck of a lot of arachnology refuting this theory.

The spiders reveal the truth.

They never lie, they are too dumb to lie!

Tried to google for this and wasn't able to figure out what you're referencing. Can you say more?

I assume it was a typo/autocorrect for "archaeology".

haha i thought so? but then was like "maybe there is some method of using arachnid fossils to establish dates" or something crazy like that

Indeed, my appologies.

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