[HN Gopher] Forgeries, Fakes, and Phantom Time
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Forgeries, Fakes, and Phantom Time
Author : samclemens
Score : 36 points
Date : 2025-01-30 18:42 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.historytoday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.historytoday.com)
| andrewla wrote:
| Fomenko's theories, mentioned in the article, are pretty
| fascinating. I love the romance of the idea that history is all
| wrong and that everything was made up at a variety of chokepoints
| around literacy and access to original documents.
|
| Fundamentally it seems implausible (extraordinary claims
| requiring extraordinary evidence and all) but it's fun to read
| about, although I have not braved his actual writings to get
| context (I do, oddly, have a couple of mathematical textbooks
| that he wrote, however).
|
| The most interesting thing that I saw was his critique of
| carbon-14 dating. And while I don't concede the central point, it
| led me down a rabbit hole of realizing that carbon dating is a
| lot more complex and rule-of-thumb driven than I would have
| thought, because in the end it relies upon historic atmospheric
| C14/C12 ratios that we mostly have good information on from ...
| radiocarbon dating on artifacts of known provenance. That's not
| the entirety of the story but it was surprising to me that
| something that is so often thrown out as an example of formal
| scientific methods in history is so heuristic and complex, rather
| than a simple application of math and physics.
| cwmma wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it's mostly tree rings that they use to
| calibrate it since they are pretty much perfect for it as each
| ring absorbs carbon for a single year and then stops so you get
| a two for one of basically a stack of samples each for a
| different year covering a broad span of time.
| louky wrote:
| Dendrochronology (dating cut trees via counting
| rings/size/ratios) has its own subjective interpretations,
| and different databases that don't always line up.
| andrewla wrote:
| In the early days of radiocarbon dating these were pretty
| much the exclusive source of calibration curves (since the
| coverage is so comprehensive). There were many problems
| encountered through this that led us to using a combination
| of different heuristics.
|
| Primary among those considerations was that the
| dendrochronology record is of pretty limited timeframes -- we
| have very few samples going back more than a couple of
| hundred years.
|
| And the study of carbon-14/12 ratios in dendrochronology led
| to deeper questions: there appears to be a significant
| geographic variation; the change in c14/12 ratio is non-
| monotonic (i.e. there are times of sufficiently increased
| historical C14 that samples from that era are
| indistinguishable from samples in a later era).
|
| This has led to a ton of research into calibration
| methodologies, leaving many questions that are still open
| today.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| This is entirely unplausible. We have a heck of a lot of
| arachnology refuting this theory.
| cormorant wrote:
| The spiders reveal the truth.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| They never lie, they are too dumb to lie!
| snapcaster wrote:
| Tried to google for this and wasn't able to figure out what
| you're referencing. Can you say more?
| cormorant wrote:
| I assume it was a typo/autocorrect for "archaeology".
| snapcaster wrote:
| haha i thought so? but then was like "maybe there is some
| method of using arachnid fossils to establish dates" or
| something crazy like that
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| Indeed, my appologies.
| janice1999 wrote:
| If people are interested in this type of conspiracy theory /
| pseudo history, another one I find fascinating is the "Lost
| Empire" of Tartaria [1].
|
| [1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/what-is-the-
| lo...
| andrewla wrote:
| This might be related to or be an offshoot of Fomenko's
| alternate history? One of the tangents in his theory, as I
| understand it, is that there was a large pseudo-Russian or
| proto-Russian empire that has largely been erased but was
| incredibly influential and was mingled into every aspect of
| antiquity -- basically the idea is that every empire pre-1000AD
| in the western world was the same empire.
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