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Vent: everyone keeps saying the Cave of Bones handprints are 200,000 years old, but the dating just doesn't hold up
Honestly I get why the headline went viral, it's a great story, but people keep repeating the 200,000 year number like it's set in stone and it bugs me. The dates at the Cave of Bones site in South Africa come from flowstone and sediment layers, not from the handprints themselves, so you're dating when rock formed around the art, not when someone pressed a hand to the wall. I've been following this since the 2021 paper and every time I bring it up in a thread I get downvoted, but the margins on those samples are wide and some of the layers got reworked by water. My old field school prof in Flagstaff drilled this into us: a date is just a date until you can tie it to the thing you care about. People see a cool result and skip the part where the researchers themselves put big error bars on it. Does anyone here actually work with uranium series dating and can tell me if I'm off base on this?
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