So I’ve been scrolling through a book that shows ancient rocks/ artifacts archeologists have discovered over the years and it’s always been really confusing to me just how they’re able to figure out how many millions or thousand of years these things have been around for. Just how do they know, what information do they need to know the age of an artifact and is there a certain method used universally?
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We have a couple ways of determining absolute age. The simplest for me to explain is radioisotope dating, where you measure how much of a radioactive material is in an object. If the thing it decays into is not present in the material otherwise, you can also use that. We know the rate at which the material decays, so we can reverse engineer the age of the material.
Then, you can compare these things. Was your rock just below the rock you dated to 300,000 years ago? Then it was probably one era older than that. Was it found next to this known fossil that lived 3,000,000 years ago? Then it was probably formed around then. Etc.
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