Posted by Steve Price on June 29, 1999 at 17:42:48:
In Reply to: Re: Why the difference? posted by Steve Price on June 29, 1999 at 17:04:55:
Dear Yon (and everyone else),
There is one more fact that has been alluded to but given rather little importance. It is this. A significant proportion of the rugs that have been dated by C-14 come back with dates that everyone agrees are unreasonable. In every one of those instances (unless my memory is going selective on me again) the carbon dating was much earlier than the true age. One of these was, as I recall, a new rug (therefore of unambiguous age) that came back as a few hundred years old.
This ought to raise a prominent red flag. If the dating is obviously off in a significant fraction of the rugs (say, more than 5% or 10% of those tested), and always in the same direction, then we can be skeptical of the C-14 dating on the rest of them. And that skepticism will be that the reported ages are likely to be too far into the past. This line of reasoning is completely independent of what we know or suspect to be the sources of error.
Steve Price