To explain.
Let’s say they have a method that can test bone age. Up to let’s say 1-2k years we can know for sure it’s accurate, since we might have believable records on the bones proving that the age test is accurate.
Past a certain age though there’s no more records. How can we know the testing is accurate and not just the method only going up to that limit and being inaccurate on anything older? Or are we just assuming?
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The gold standard is radiometric dating. This process looks at the ratio of radioactive isotopes in a sample of a material to determine when it was formed. Everything has tiny amounts of radioactive isotopes in them. These isotopes decay into isotopes at known, fixed rates. Since we know the decay rates and we know that the decay rate doesn’t change, we can look at the ratio of the isotopes to determine when the object was formed, or in the case of organic remains, when the organism died. This does not require historical records and it is not a guess or an assumption – it is a precise (with a small margin of error) and scientific way to date objects.
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