Art of Radiometric Dating
Radiometric dating is one of the most popular techniques in paleontology to establish the age of materials like stones and bones. Reported dates often fall in the millions or billions of years.
However, questions surround the art of radiometric dating − for good reasons. The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) recently ran the story “1.8 million-year-old skull may revise understanding of human evolution.”
Since the skull was unearthed in a medieval ninth-century A.D. village in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia known as Dmanisi, the obvious question centers on the validity of the million-year radiometric dating of the skull found within the same geological stratum as the village.
