Carbon dating biology

Applying Carbon-14 Dating to Recent Human Remains

You probably have seen or read news stories about fascinating ancient artifacts. An archaeologist finds a child mummy high in the Andes and says the child lived more than 2, years ago. How do scientists know how old an object or human remains are? What methods do they use and how do these methods work? Radiocarbon dating, or carbon dating for short, is a way of determining the age of certain archeological artifacts of a biological origin up to about 50, years old. It is used in dating things such as bone, cloth, wood and plant fibers that human activities created in the relatively recent past. For example, every person is hit by about half a million cosmic rays every hour. It is not uncommon for a cosmic ray to collide with an atom in the upper atmosphere, creating a secondary cosmic ray in the form of an energetic neutron, and for these energetic neutrons to collide with nitrogen atoms. When the neutron collides, a nitrogen seven protons, seven neutrons atom turns into a carbon atom six protons, eight neutrons and a hydrogen atom one proton, zero neutrons. Carbon is radioactive, with a half-life of about 5, years.

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Covering a story? Visit our page for journalists or call Learn more here. Radiocarbon dating, or carbon dating, is a scientific method that can accurately determine the age of organic materials as old as approximately 60, years. First developed in the late s at the University of Chicago by Willard Libby, the technique is based on the decay of the carbon isotope. The invention of radiocarbon dating elegantly merged chemistry and physics to develop a scientific method that can accurately determine the age of organic materials as old as approximately 60, years.

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When we speak of the element Carbon, we most often refer to the most naturally abundant stable isotope 12 C. Although 12 C is definitely essential to life, its unstable sister isotope 14 C has become of extreme importance to the science world. Radiocarbon dating is the process of determining the age of a sample by examining the amount of 14 C remaining against its known half-life, 5, years.

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How do geologists use carbon dating to find the age of rocks?

This method is based on the idea of radiative decay of Carbon isotopes over thousands of years. Through physics, scientists have discovered that radioactive molecules decay at a specific rate dependent on the atomic number and mass of the decaying atoms. Scientists have concluded that very little change has occurred in the ratio of Carbon to Carbon isotopes in the atmosphere meaning that the relationship between these two should be very similar to how they remain today. Carbon dating is a revolutionary advancement in the study of the history of our planet.

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