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As far back as there were organisms who were able to consume food containing both ordinary carbon and an isotope of carbon; the comparison of the ratios - which pinpoints the time when an organism stopped eating - gives rise to carbon dating.

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Carbon dating can reliably determine the age of organic materials up to around 50,000 years old. Beyond this timeframe, the accuracy of carbon dating decreases because the amount of radioactive carbon-14 left in a sample becomes too minuscule to measure against the background levels of carbon-14 in the environment. Other dating methods are used for older materials.

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Q: How far back can carbon dating be used?
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Continue Learning about Archaeology

What is the accuracy of dating a 500 year old seed and a 1000000 year old bone with carbon 14 dating?

Carbon-14 dating is typically accurate up to about 50,000 years. To date objects older than that, other methods like uranium-lead dating are used. Attempting to date a 1,000,000-year-old bone with carbon-14 dating would not provide accurate results due to the relatively short half-life of carbon-14.


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How does radiocarbon dating or carbon-14 dating work?

Radiocarbon dating works by measuring the amount of carbon-14 in an object. Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope that decays over time at a constant rate. By comparing the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in a sample to the ratio in the atmosphere, scientists can determine the age of the object.


How far back can artifacts date back to?

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Related questions

How far back can you date with carbon dating?

By using carbon 14 dating, scientists can date plants and animals that lived as long as 35,000 years ago.


Only good for dating objects as far back as about 4000 years?

Carbon dating is a radiometric dating method that can accurately determine the age of organic materials up to about 50,000 years old. It works by measuring the decay of carbon-14 isotopes in the material. After 40,000 years, the remaining carbon-14 levels are too low to accurately date the sample.


Example problems of carbon dating?

The benefits of carbon dating is that it can give a guide as to the age of an artifact or fossil. Several problems exist with carbon dating. First, it only goes back so far. After a while, there is not enough radioactive carbon for the machinery to measure. Second, a sample may be contaminated. If a person picked it up with his bare hands, some of the carbon from his skin may have mixed with the sample. Third, if you want to know how long ago a cave was first occupied, you may miss the mark completely. People may have used the same garbage dump for over a million years.


What is carbon dating mean?

This is how carbon dating works: Carbon is a naturally abundant element found in the atmosphere, in the earth, in the oceans, and in every living creature. C-12 is by far the most common isotope, while only about one in a trillion carbon atoms is C-14. C-14 is produced in the upper atmosphere when nitrogen-14 (N-14) is altered through the effects of cosmic radiation bombardment (a proton is displaced by a neutron effectively changing the nitrogen atom into a carbon isotope). The new isotope is called


How far back can you date fossils by measuring radioactive carbon decay?

50,000 years useing carbon 14


The carbon-14 isotope is important because it allows scientists to determine what about an organic sample?

It is through measuring the amount of carbon-14 in an organic sample that we can find out how long ago the sample was part of a living orgainsm. Organic materials that have been preserved in some way can be dated using this technique, called radiocarbon dating. There are limits to how far back we can look with radiocarbon dating, but it is very helpful in a lot of cases were the age of the material goes back a few tens of thousands of years.


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