When a researcher picks up an object — whether it’s a scrap of leather from a dig site, a fossil from a museum drawer or a newly fallen meteorite — their first question might be, “What is this thing?” A natural follow-up: “How old is it?” The first question is fundamental, no doubt. But the second is powerful, too. It helps place the object in its proper archaeological, geologic or cosmological context. “Without knowing the ages of things, there is no narrative,” says Rick Potts, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
Up until a century or so ago, researchers studying rocks and
→ Continue reading at Science News