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C14 dating gave me two totally different dates for the same bone fragment
Honestly I sent a piece of a bison humerus from a site in Wyoming to two different labs last year. Lab A said 11,200 years BP but Lab B came back with 9,800 years BP for the exact same bone. That's like over a thousand year gap which is huge for a Paleoindian site. Is this normal variation between labs or did I mess up the sampling somehow? Has anyone else dealt with this kind of discrepancy in radiocarbon results?
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sandra_black20h ago
Yeah same thing happened to me with a deer antler from Colorado! It's frustrating.
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hayden7201d ago
Wait, is it really that serious though? I mean yeah a thousand year gap sounds big but both dates are still in the Paleoindian range so your site's basically still old as hell. Maybe one of the labs just had a bad day or mixed up the sample prep. I'd send a chunk to a third lab just for fun and see what happens.
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