Evolution Diary

Interesting and informative BBC programme on carbon dating techniques advances. It also touches on how modern carbon dating help scientists to more accurately date human fossils and adds to understanding of human evolution and migration.

Synopsis:

Historians can turn back the pages of ancient manuscripts or discover the dates of kings and pharaohs carved in stone. But how can scientists determine ages before written records began?

There has been a revolution in scientific dating techniques. Aubrey Manning visits some of the most advanced dating labs in the world to discover their secrets and hear some of the stories they tell. The best can tell the age of a single grain of wheat or even of sand. They can date the origins of humans and the birth of the Earth.

Programme 1 - Counting the Rings
Radioactive carbon can reveal ages of everything from the Turin Shroud and the Ice Man to prehistoric posts and grains of soot.

But many of the dates were wrong - until people started counting tree rings. Blackened logs from Irish peat bogs were used to re-date the pyramids and the destruction of the Minoan civilisation, as well as revealing some particularly bad winters.

Now ancient timber in New Zealand is pushing history back still further.

Programme 2 - The Sands of Time
Human pre-history is too long for Carbon dates. Some of the great controversies have been resolved by the chemical fingerprints of volcanic ash and the energy of ancient sunlight stored in sand. In some there has been confusion along the way.

Now, scientists are sorting out the chronology of human ancestry and changing climate across the ice ages – something that’s vital for making sense of climate change in the future.

Programme 3 - Dinosaurs, Volcanoes and Drifting Continents
Our planet is constantly changing. Continents split and collide, mountain ranges build and erode, plants and animals evolve and suffer extinction. Using the nuclear tick of radioactive clocks, the frozen compass needles of magnetic rocks and the changing patterns of life, presenter Aubrey Manning fits a timescale to the break-up of continents, the rise of the Himalayas and the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Programme 4 - The Dawn of Time
The age of the Earth and of key moments in its deep past are now known with incredible accuracy, thanks to a machine that can weigh individual atoms.

With such techniques, geologists can measure the age of the oldest rocks on Earth and date the first evidence of life. And from meteorites, they can tell us that the solar system is 4 567.5 million years old, to within half a million years!

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