I disagree.

Carbon-14 atoms that cosmic rays create combine with oxygen to form carbon dioxide, which plants absorb naturally and incorporate into plant fibers by photosynthesis. Animals and people eat plants and take in carbon-14 as well. The ratio of normal carbon (carbon-12) to carbon-14 in the air and in all living things at any given time is nearly constant. Maybe one in a trillion carbon atoms are carbon-14.

Carbon-14 atoms are always decaying, but they are being replaced by new carbon-14 atoms at a constant rate. At this moment, your body has a certain percentage of carbon-14 atoms in it, and all living plants and animals have the same percentage. As soon as a living organism dies, it stops taking in new carbon.

The ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-14 at the moment of death is the same as every other living thing, but the carbon-14 decays and is not replaced. The carbon-14 decays with its half-life of 5,700 years, while the amount of carbon-12 remains constant in the sample.

By looking at the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-14 in the sample and comparing it to the ratio in a living organism, it is possible to determine the age of a formerly living thing fairly precisely.

It's also important to consider the carbon-14 testing on samples previously collected from the pyramid (1987 Hawass, Lehner et all), those samples were mainly collected from the exterior course levels and a few from the interior (some 50+ samples in all) which included charcoal, plant fiber and wood... Dixon's cedar predates all of the aforementioned samples by nearly 500 years at the low end of the range. None of the samples have 100% probability in their date ranges, if I recall a significant batch of samples had an 89% probability range of dates between 2658 - 2638 B.C., which seems appropriate; it's probable the wood/charcoal used in preparation of mortar was repurposed from older structures.

Moreover, the question is whether or not the queen's chamber and the shaft Dixon retrieved the cedar wood from are older than the pyramid we see today. As you would expect by example pyramids are built by stacking stones on top of stones in courses, therefore in my view its more probable Khufu built over a pre-existing structure because of the extant early tomb history of the Plateau, which dates to the first dynasty, than the probability they used a 1000 year old piece of wood to build the pyramid. This also would support the hypothesis the plugged shafts that emanate in equal length from the chamber belong to an older structure, as that's where Dixon collected the artifact. The 19th century notion that Khufu changed his mind and abandoned the chamber because he wanted his tomb chamber to be much higher and the pyramid much bigger is absurd, the cost in every direction for such a change would have left the pyramid unfinished like many that were attempted prior.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 12/19/2020 07:44PM by Pistol.