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1. Errors in Judgement
-coal from Russia from the Pennsylvanian era supposedly 300 million years old, was dated only 1680 years (Radiocarbon, Volume 8)
-natural gas from Mississippi and Alabama should have been 50 to 135 million years old yet C-14 dated it 30 000 and 34 000 years old respectively (also Volume 8)
-bones from a saber-tooth tiger, found in the LaBrea tar pits (near Los Angeles) were supposedly between 100 000 and 1 000 000 years old, were given a date of 28 000 years (Radiocarbon, Volume 10)
This is a common claim that keeps popping up. Following a meeting organised by AiG I went to last year where such things were claimed I did a bit of looking into the subject (we've just opened an AMS lab at work for 14C studies and wanted to see what the Creationists were saying). This
article by Andrew Snelling, TJ 14(2) (2000), 99-122 (link is to pdf file on AiG website) seems typical. Here there are reported ages determined by 14C dating of fossilised woods found in ancient basalt of approx 45000 years (p110). However, the article goes on to extensively discuss other samples that were dated to give similar (or slightly older) ages (cited from Radiocarbon
41 1999). Following up on this later point in correspondance with one of the speakers at the AiG event I was given a copy of the table of dates for old materials that had been presented there taken from a forthcoming paper by Snelling. Tracking down those papers I had ready access to in the limited amount of spare time I have, I found that the scientific papers Snelling was quoting (from Radiocarbon and Nuclear Instrumentation and Methods mainly) were reports on commissioning of new AMS equipment or techniques in which ancient carbon materials were being used as a measure of instrumental/procedural backgrounds. ie: the labs reporting ages for ancient material of 35-50000 years were not saying that these were actual ages - just that the instrumental background 14C measurements corresponded to these "ages". What Snelling does in the article linked to above, and would appear to be doing in the new work (I await publication of the paper to see if any of my comments were passed back to him and if he's considered them), is take the reporting of routine quality control data and spin them to indicate a complete lack of quality in the data.
Alan
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