Fossil Faeces provide America’s oldest human DNA

Carbon dates from dried excrement recovered from Oregon’s Paisley Caves show that humans were living on the American continent some 14,300 years ago, according to a paper published in the 3 April 2008 issue of Science magazine. Archaeologists have long debated whether the Clovis people – named after Clovis, New Mexico, where the characteristic stone spears and tools that define the culture were first recognised – were the first inhabitants of the Americas. Professor Eske Willerslev, of the University of Copenhagen, one of the authors of the Science paper, says the Oregon cave finds predate the oldest radiocarbon dates for Clovis culture by 1,300 years.

Re-dating Ice Age art

Cave art is one of the most recognisable features of the European Upper Palaeolithic. We know that it spanned at least 20,000 years, almost the entirety of the Upper Palaeolithic, but we still have only a rudimentary understanding of how it evolved. Now, by applying a method using uranium-series dating, a technique not previously used in this context, we are able to show that the earliest examples are older still: they belong to a period when the dwindling Neanderthal population overlapped with our own species, Homo sapiens, as it began to colonise Europe.

Charles Higham: The dating game and the saga of Ban Chiang

Very early in my archaeological career, I encountered an intense debate on the chronology of the earliest Neolithic in the Near East. It was rather like the race to the Pole: who had the earliest date? The English champion was the redoubtable Dame Cathleen Kenyon, her American adversary was Robert Braidwood. It was a case of Jericho v. Jarmo. I never imagined that I would one day find myself involved in a similar situation. Yet this is how our subject advances, by constant probing, questioning, and refining.

Japanese time capsule extends radiocarbon dating 40,000 years

Archaeologists will be able to determine the age of ancient objects much more precisely, following a breakthrough in radiocarbon dating using sediments from Lake Suigetsu in Japan.

Radiocarbon, or C-14, is a naturally occurring, radioactive isotope of carbon that is continuously produced in the upper atmosphere and becomes incorporated into all living organisms. Once the organisms die the isotope decays at a known rate, and archaeologists can use this to calculate the age of something by comparing how much radiocarbon remains in it.