Radiocarbon is an isotope with two extra neutrons, created by cosmic rays interacting with nitrogen in Earth's atmosphere.When a plant or animal is alive, it constantly replenishes trace amounts of radiocarbon in its tissues.Today, many different radioactive elements have been used, but the most famous absolute dating method is radiocarbon dating, which uses the isotope C.This isotope, which can be found in organic materials and can be used only to date organic materials, has been incorrectly used by many to make dating assumptions for non-organic material such as stone buildings.Anthropologists can describe a people’s physical character, culture, and environmental and social relations.

At Warratyi rock shelter in the Flinders Ranges, South Australia, which shows signs of the oldest human occupation of the country’s arid interior, the oldest sample – a fragment of emu eggshell – has been radiocarbon dated to 49,000 years with reasonable confidence.Scratching around in a cave in the middle of nowhere, you find a bone.How do you find out if it’s the remains of an ancient animal that stomped the land tens of thousands of years ago or a discarded scrap from a cooking fire only a few hundred years back?Radio carbon dating determines the age of ancient objects by means of measuring the amount of carbon-14 there is left in an object.A man called Willard F Libby pioneered it at the University of Chicago in the 50's. This is now the most widely used method of age estimation in the field of archaeology.