Since there are practical limits to the age range of the method, most samples must be younger than 50,000 years and older than 100 years. Most samples require chemical pre-treatment to ensure their purity or to recover particular components of the material.

What is the practical limit of carbon dating?

A practical limit for accurate dating is 26,000 years (in other words material that is younger than the Last Glacial Maximum), but you can get less accurate dates up to 43,500 years and, some facilities provide rough dates to ~60,000 years.

What is the practical limit of carbon-14 dating?

about 50,000 years The practical upper limit is about 50,000 years, because so little C-14 remains after almost 9 half-lives that it may be hard to detect and obtain an accurate reading, regardless of the size of the sample.

What is the youngest thing you can carbon date?

As a rule, carbon dates are younger than calendar dates: a bone carbon-dated to 10,000 years is around 11,000 years old, and 20,000 carbon years roughly equates to 24,000 calendar years. The problem, says Bronk Ramsey, is that tree rings provide a direct record that only goes as far back as about 14,000 years.