Geeks, mark the date on your calendar: this summer researchers are releasing new calibration curves for radiocarbon dating. For people like me, along with many archaeologists and paleoecologists, this is exciting news!
I can't remember when I first stumbled upon this piece of information... back when doing some other story touching on radiocarbon dating I guess. But I was intrigued by the idea: radiocarbon dating needs to be calibrated to match up with calendar dates, and this gets redone every 5-10 years or so as the science advances. My story for Nature:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01499-y
There is soooo much more interesting backstory to radiocarbon calibration. My favourite detail that didn't make it into this story for space: for the very first calibration curve drawn up in the 1960s, the researchers had to "connect the dots" of the datapoints by hand, lacking adequate computer models and stats to do it for them. They freehanded all the wiggles in the graph using a method the researcher nicknamed "cosmic schwung". Love it.
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