Archaeology
The carbon-14 forms at a rate which appears to be constant, so that by measuring the radioactive emissions from once-living matter and comparing its activity with the of living things, a of the time elapsed can be made. If a sample that is 17,000 years old is contaminated so that 1% of the sample is modern carbon, it will appear to be 600 years younger; for a sample that is 34,000 years old the same amount of contamination would cause an error of 4,000 years. Errors and reliability The reliability of the results can be improved by lengthening the testing time.
Nasa: Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Binocular Vision and Stereopsis. Measuring the amount of 14 C in a sample from a dead plant or animal such as a piece of wood or a fragment of bone provides information that can be used to calculate when the animal or plant died. To verify the accuracy of the method, several artefacts that were datable by other techniques were tested; the results of the testing were in reasonable agreement with the true ages of the objects.
Dating for Scientists - In Leng, Melanie J. In the words of anthropologist R.