Surpries, surprise, yet another assignment for Guns, Germs and Steel. We read Chapter 5 today and it talked about radiocarbon dating, the effects it had on different societies, and what didn't go so well. Here are some of my thoughts and what I understand:
Radiocarbon dating is a process scientists use to determine dates of food production. This helps to visualize how and why different countries developed at different rates (which is the main question of this book). This method is based upon the slow decay of radioactive carbon into the nonradioactive isotope nitrogen. Everyone knows that plants take up atmospheric carbon which has a pretty constant ratio of carbon 14. That plant's carbon goes on to "form the body" of the herbivore that ate it, and the carnivore that ate that. After an animal or plant dies however it realeases carbon making it difficult to measure. From this the age of the material from a certain archealogical site can be determined.
This process isn't all good though. In the 1980s, this process required a lot of carbon ( a few grams), much more then the amount in a seed or bone. So, scientists had to resort to dating material from near that same site. You can never really tell with this if the material that was found was really left at the same time, by the same people that inhabited that area. Which leads me to the next downer of this method: The different materials can be mixed by ants, or rats or other travelers like that messing up the data. For example, materials can end up close by artifacts that were eaten a thousand years earlier or later. It wasn't a very accurate way to accumulate data on food production, but with time most of the ends have been tied up.
Radiocarbon dating is a process scientists use to determine dates of food production. This helps to visualize how and why different countries developed at different rates (which is the main question of this book). This method is based upon the slow decay of radioactive carbon into the nonradioactive isotope nitrogen. Everyone knows that plants take up atmospheric carbon which has a pretty constant ratio of carbon 14. That plant's carbon goes on to "form the body" of the herbivore that ate it, and the carnivore that ate that. After an animal or plant dies however it realeases carbon making it difficult to measure. From this the age of the material from a certain archealogical site can be determined.
This process isn't all good though. In the 1980s, this process required a lot of carbon ( a few grams), much more then the amount in a seed or bone. So, scientists had to resort to dating material from near that same site. You can never really tell with this if the material that was found was really left at the same time, by the same people that inhabited that area. Which leads me to the next downer of this method: The different materials can be mixed by ants, or rats or other travelers like that messing up the data. For example, materials can end up close by artifacts that were eaten a thousand years earlier or later. It wasn't a very accurate way to accumulate data on food production, but with time most of the ends have been tied up.
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