Matt Burns wrote:
> Dating with C14 leaves no doubts as to the
> authenticity of the alleged shroud, 

Not quite true. All C14 can tell you is how long ago the live beings 
that made up the shroud's material died. It can't tell you whether the 
flax (or whatever) was harvested 500 years before it was woven into 
cloth, let alone when the impression was made onto the cloth, let alone 
who the impression is of.

C14 dating works because there's a certain proportion of radioactive 
carbon in carbon dioxide (and other carbon compounds) that is maintained 
  by cosmic radiation, background radiation from stuff like uranium 
decaying, and etc. As long as you keep breathing, you flush out the 
radioactive carbon that has decayed and replace it with freshly-created 
radioactive carbon. Once you die, this stops happening.

If the halflife of the carbon is (say) 30,000 years (I think it's 
something around there) and you measure the ratio of radioactive carbon 
in the sample vs non-radioactive carbon, and it's half what you find in 
living beings today, then that substance was alive 30,000 years ago. But 
that doesn't really tell you much, if there's an intentional scam going on.

If you look up the details behind the "Vikings Discovered America" hoax, 
you find that it's quite likely a priest in the WW2 era took a page out 
of the back of a book several hundred years old and draw a map of 
America on it with nordic notations, and left it where it could be found 
by the Nazis. That doesn't meant the map was several hundred years old.

Followups redirected.

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