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A comment on 12,000-year-old realistic human statue was unearthed. Parent comment

Re:12,000-year-old realistic human statue was unearthed by asvitkine on Sunday October 01, 2023 @11:47PM (#37733748)
How does carbon dating work on a statue?

Wouldn't it be dating the underlying material (i.e. the stone), which presumably predates the actual carving of the statue out of that material?

Edit: I guess if it was buried, they date the organic material around it.

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Re:12,000-year-old realistic human statue was unearthed by p-e-w on Sunday October 01, 2023 @11:54PM (#37733789)
> How does carbon dating work on a statue?

It doesn't, and the stone itself is typically hundreds of millions or even billions of years old.

However, many ancient artifacts are found buried in the ground, and it is often possible to carbon-date organic material in the soil surrounding the artifact, which produces an estimate for when it was buried. This is typically combined with historians' estimates for when the culture that presumably produced the artifact flourished, though uncertainties of several millennia remain in some cases.

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Re:12,000-year-old realistic human statue was unearthed by tephra on Monday October 02, 2023 @07:20AM (#37736749)
In some cases you can also use luminescence dating[0], which can tell you the last time a mineral was exposed to sunlight.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminescence_dating

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Re:12,000-year-old realistic human statue was unearthed by defrost on Sunday October 01, 2023 @11:56PM (#37733809)
There's very little, if any, carbon in stone.

They dated the charcoal in layers settled about the statue:

https://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/2016/06/22/how-ol...

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