(PhysOrg.com) -- While enthusiasts across the world pored over the Voynich manuscript, one of the most mysterious writings ever found – penned by an unknown author in a language no one understands – a research team ...
Archaeology
Feb 10, 2011
64
2
In a groundbreaking archaeological discovery, an international team led by archaeologists from Freie Universität Berlin has uncovered fortified prehistoric settlements in a remote region of Siberia. The results of their ...
Archaeology
Dec 7, 2023
2
506
Columbus famously reached the Americas in 1492. Other Europeans had made the journey before, but the century from then until 1609 marks the creation of the modern globalized world.
Archaeology
Apr 29, 2020
7
5570
Caves served as sites for burial and later modification of human remains for thousands of years in the Iberian Peninsula, according to a study published September 20, 2023, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Zita Laffranchi ...
Archaeology
Sep 20, 2023
0
173
An international team of scientists has discovered a huge spike in radiocarbon levels 14,300 years ago by analyzing ancient tree-rings found in the French Alps.
Astronomy
Oct 9, 2023
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401
The timing of the first entry of humans into North America across the Bering Strait has now been set back 10,000 years.
Archaeology
Jan 16, 2017
6
4413
Using the largest set of radiocarbon dates ever obtained from a single Maya site, archaeologists have developed a high-precision chronology that sheds new light on patterns leading up to the two major collapses of the ancient ...
Archaeology
Jan 23, 2017
1
4547
Ancient bricks inscribed with the names of Mesopotamian kings have yielded important insights into a mysterious anomaly in Earth's magnetic field 3,000 years ago, according to a new study involving University College London ...
Archaeology
Dec 18, 2023
0
9062
Neanderthal fossils from a cave in Belgium believed to belong to the last survivors of their species ever discovered in Europe are thousands of years older than once thought, a new study said Monday.
Evolution
Mar 8, 2021
7
8969
Radiocarbon dating is a key tool archaeologists use to determine the age of plants and objects made with organic material. But new research shows that commonly accepted radiocarbon dating standards can miss the mark—calling ...
Archaeology
Jun 5, 2018
3
1335
Carbon-14, 14C, or radiocarbon, is a radioactive isotope of carbon discovered on February 27, 1940, by Martin Kamen and Sam Ruben at the University of California Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, though its existence had been suggested already in 1934 by Franz Kurie. Its nucleus contains 6 protons and 8 neutrons. Its presence in organic materials is the basis of the radiocarbon dating method to date archaeological, geological, and hydrogeological samples.
There are three naturally occurring isotopes of carbon on Earth: 99% of the carbon is carbon-12, 1% is carbon-13, and carbon-14 occurs in trace amounts, e.g. making up as much as 1 part per trillion (0.0000000001%) of the carbon in the atmosphere. The half-life of carbon-14 is 5,730±40 years. It decays into nitrogen-14 through beta decay. The activity of the modern radiocarbon standard is about 14 disintegrations per minute (dpm) per gram carbon.
The atomic mass of carbon-14 is about 14.003241 amu. The different isotopes of carbon do not differ appreciably in their chemical properties. This is used in chemical research in a technique called carbon labeling: some carbon-12 atoms of a given compound are replaced with carbon-14 atoms (or some carbon-13 atoms) in order to trace them along chemical reactions involving the given compound.
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