Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Carbon dating of mammoth remains
From: sbishop@desire.wright.edu
Date: 14 Apr 92 21:13:32 EST
Organization: Wright State University 


	Ted recently stated that C14 research dated mammoth remains at 3500
years.  In my research I found absolutely *nothing* that was dated at that
time period.  The following is from _On the Track of the Ice Age Mammals
by Sutcliffe:

	"The absolute age in years of the frozen carcasses was for a long 
time a subject of speculation.  During recent years, with the availability
of Carbon 14 dating, the exact age of many of them has become known, with
surprising results.  Their ages fall into two main groups, one ranging
in age from 45,000 years to 30,000 years and a smaller number of remains
from 14-11,000 years old.
	Although skeletal remains lacking soft parts are known from the 
period 30-12,000 years ago, there is very little carcass material of this
age.  A tendon on a 22,000-years-old bone of a lion from Alaska is one
of the rare examples.  As we have already seen, this intervening period
was a time of massive glacial advance, the ice sheets in the northern
hemisphere expanding to their maximuyum extent about 18,000 years ago.
There were minor, more temperate periods from about 45-25,000 years ago
and about 12-11,000 years ago.  It was apparently during these ameliorations
that most of the known carcasses became frozen.  This appears to be a
climate-related depositional phenomenon, related to the amount of available
water (which reached its minimum at times of glacial advance) and does not
reflect an absence of mammoths from the areas in question.  Under cold
arid conditions, with little moisture to supply mudflows, carcasses would
have tended ultimately to rot on the surface with only the bones surviving
for potential fossilization.  Under moister conditions summer mudflows 
could rapidly have covered carcasses lying in their paths, which became
permanently frozen when the permafrost level rose above them the following
winter."   (Sutcliff)

	Dates of discovery and approximate radiocarbon dates of some
	of the most important mammalian carcasses from Siberia and 
	Alaska.
	_________________________________________________________
		Earlier Age Group		 

		Siberia

	Adams (Lena River) Mammoth, 1799	36,000-37,000 years
	Beresovka mammoth, 1900			more than 39,000
	Shandrin mammoth, 1971			42,000 years
	River Indigirka woolly rhino		38,000 years
	Selerikan horse, 1968			35,000-40,000
	'Dima', 1977				40,000
	Khatanga mammoth, 1977			more than 50,000
	
		Alaska

	Fairbanks, mammoth hair			32,000-34,000
	Fairbanks, bison, 1951			31,000
	Fairbanks, bison, 1979			36,000

_______________________________________________________________

		Later Age Group

		Siberia

	Taimyr Peninsula mammoth, 1948		11,500
	River Berelekh mammoth remains, 1970	12,000
	Yuribemammoth, 1979		       9,700

		Alaska
		
	Fairbanks, mammoth			15,400
	Fairbanks, another bison		12,000
	Fairbanks, hoof of horse, 1981		17,200
	Fairbanks, musk ox			17,000

____________________________________________________________

Sutcliffe, Anthony J., _On the Track of the Ice Age Mammals_, Harvard
University Press, 1985.


Sue Bishop
Newsgroups: talk.origins