US Conservative "christian" on Getting the Right Date: Getting the Date Right

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What happens when an "archaeological" team
(I use the term loosely in the case of @noahsarkscans) chooses their spokesperson by how decoratively her blonde hair cascades and how many Christian colours makeup she uses rather than knowledge of dating techniques.  Dr Cenker Atila's "Durupinar Noah's Ark Scans" project has done some boreholes and got some samples they say is "wood" from some layers or other of this site. After (one hopes) getting the required export licences, they have gone for C14 testing at four labs:

1) "The official Turkish lab"

2) "One here in Switzerland" (export licence)

3) "One in Florida" (export licence)

4) "Maybe a fourth one, I see in the news about a French lab..." (export licence)

There is a very revealing dialogue here. There seems to be no official statement by Dr Attila himself. 

Andrew Jones: And so, you know, the with carbon 14 you if you get  the same results from all four labs, that's really exciting news because just one, uh okay, it's great, but you want to  back that up with another independent lab from the first results. And so, we're, you know, doing four of them. 

Lauren Witzke: Yeah. And a lot of people have a lot of spec.. like uh skepticism around carbon 14 dating because you know it's like "oh I  sent this and they said it was millions and millions and years old" and they just like automatically assume that everything's millions and millions of years old.* Well Dr. Dr. Cenker Attila told me that there is [sic] ways to calibrate it so to make sure that they get that date accurate and when we have it sent to four different labs I mean one of them's got to get it right, right you know and I am interested to see what the different lab results come back if any of them come back millions and millions of years old.** Dr. Cenker did tell me he believes that the wood is about uh it's a little over 4,000 years old. He said  just based on his examination of it.*** Um, now we won't know for sure until the lab results come back, but that is why we sent it to four different places, three  or four different places because of the skepticism around carbon 14 dating. Um, and a lot of these I don't even think the labs know what they're studying. We didn't tell them, "hey, this is Noah's ark. Like, tell us like...."; they have no idea what they're looking at. Yeah, they have no [snorts] idea what they're looking at. [...] 

Andrew Jones: The professor found these in one area when he..... So, it's about 8 to 9 m down, about 30 ft , and it was on the west profile side. So, and he says it's 1 to 2 m in. But, uh, in fact, he's going  back soon. He said he thinks he can get some more samples. Oh, this is great. [...] 

Host: "what what could another explanation be for this wood if it's not the Ark?"

I guess they do not teach much about radioactive decay in US schools.

 

What Ms Witzke said:

* "a lot of people have a lot of scepticism around carbon 14 dating" only among thicko US Young Earth Creationist/ Biblical fundamentalists. Because absolute dating methods based on radioactive decay [and indeed the very existence of certain long half-life isotopes in themselves] push the ticking clock back well beyond the date the Pentateuch assigns to the beginning of Everything. Their scepticism is born of ignorance and a failure to see the so-called "Books of Moses" for what they quite clearly are when seen in context.  

** "I mean one of them's got to get it right" Radiocarbon dates cannot be treated the cherry-picking way Lauren Witzke and Andrew Jones assume, if there is statistically significant variation you cannot simply accept the one that fits your preconceived notions and ignore the rest  

"if any of them come back millions and millions of years old" if you read books that say a Jewish sky-god created everything in six days (including the urethra - anyone who's had a kidney stone will immediately reject the idea of "intelligent design") then you might not be aware that C14 dating has an upper limit beyond which the results are not worth trying to get (40k years or so as I recall). NO C14 dates will be "millions of years". Sheer invented nonsense showing the amateurism of the people involved here. 

 

*** "Dr. Cenker did tell me he believes that the wood is [...] a little over 4,000 years old. He said  just based on his examination of it".  I certainly hope our archaeological colleague said no such thing and he is being grossly misquoted here. Since such statements make him look foolish, one wonders why he's not releasing his own statements. On the other hand, if he (a classicist and pottery specialist) did say what Witzke reports, it would explain a lot that is puzzling about this project. 

**** "about 8 to 9 m down [...] on the west profile side [...] 1 to 2 m in" (sic). This it seems can only refer to the bloke hammering a tube (one presumes) into the vertical cliff on the west side of the site. No contour map of the surface relief or profiles have been published, even at this late stage of the project, but to judge by the height of the man on the ladder, the cliff itself must be c. 8m tall here, so the tested samples were taken from "1 to 2 m in" from the base. But it is precisely here that there is a semi-conical talus layer ... material that has come down from above, burying whatever was lying there - such as [for example] fallen trees. The Durupinar team need to immediately clarify the PRECISE stratigraphical context of the samples (and doing a fake 'blind test' - not telling the laboratories that information will potentially hamper the pre-clean process). 

Hammering away blindly like a mad thing

A cynic however might observe from the way this group releases "information" to their audience that getting some tempting half-results that "we need more money to be able to take better samples and get better dates" might be the aim here all along. This whole "project" looks less like real research and more like a fundraising drive by the self-appointed "Guardians (sic) of the Ark". In which case, why would a Turkish university archaeologist be lending his name to it?