At https://phys.org/news/2026-03-dinner-tooth-enamel-reveals-early.html … the bodies of people found in the streets of Nineveh after its conquest and destruction by the Medes and Babylonians in 612BC were found to be around 150 years too old, at the minimum. Some results suggested even longer, That means the skeletons in the ruins of the Assyrian capital dated to the 8th century BC rather than 612BC – the known date of the fall of Nineveh. It was never reoccupied and as recently as ISIS a few years back, pre-Islamic statuary was being destroyed. The ruins of that event were still standing, to some extent. The discrepancy had to be explained away somehow. Mainstream came out with a rather lame idea – the inhabitants of Nineveh had a diet rich in fish from the Tigris river. The assumption here is that rivers contain a lot of old carbon. Hence, eating a lot of fish will perhaps create a carbon date in the bones of humans. At the time, the idea managed to dispel anyone looking into the dates more seriously. No question has been raised on it for a long time. Not in mainstream literature.
So, what do we have. Basically, the implication is that at some point prior to 612BC between 150 and 200 years have been inserted into the C14 record. How can that happen. An injection of C14 into the atmosphere went unrecognised at the time and was wiped away by smoothing the data. How was that accomplished. See later.
Now we have a study, decades later, going back much earlier than that of the demise of the Assyrian empire, to around 4500 years ago – and the Sumerian era. Fossil remains, as left behind in teeth enamel, can allow scientists to reveal what people at the time were eating. It relies on chemical signatures, bone collagen, and teeth enamel. It seems that 4500 years ago people had a diet rich in wheat and barley, the staple crops of the early farmers. Bread and beer we may assume. Irrigation farming allowed huge crops that supported large human population centres. It was assumed by some historians that because clay tablets mention fish as a part of that diet it would be true of the teeth enamel. This was not the case. The elite may have eaten fish but the population at large ate bread and porridges, by making use of the staple crop. What was probably true of 4500 years ago was also probably true of the Assyrian empire period – which was sustained by irrigation agriculture and a healthy population. So, where does that leave the idea of 150 to 200 years differences in C14 dating? Out on a limb.
More properly – hanging on to the calibration model. Calibration was conceived as merging two different dating methodologies – C14 with dendrochronology. Tree rings. Why was it thought necessary? The Egyptologist lobby was the reason. Egyptian chronology is not archaeology based as in other locations around the world. It is derived from monumental inscriptions discovered in the period from Napoleon to the 20th century. And king lists as handed down from antiquity. To a certain degree Assyro-Babylonian history is the same, in that the archaeology is augmented by inscriptions and king lists. It has not always been easy to do archaeology in the ground in what has for generations been a volatile region of the world. A factor that actually goes well back into the past. However, Egyptology took primary place as it was the oldest discipline in a pecking order that was mainly, at the time, confined to European ‘gentlemen’ rather than trained archaeologists. All other regions took an even lower position on the pecking order – looked down upon by the top two regions. In other words, in the early 20th century it was the written records that took preference over the spade and the shovel. Here we are in the 21st century with a science based archaeology and yet chronology is still structured around the order of events as ascertained from Egyptian monuments. Even more so in the late 20th century. In other words, dendrochronology and C14 were combined on the Egyptian model. This was the backbone of the calibration model. It stands to reason that would open up gaps in the regions surrounding Egypt and Iraq. Which is precisely what we have. Big gaps in archaeology that cannot be glued together – but are stretched by overlong pottery sequences in an attempt to seal the holes. The Greek dark age is just one example. So too is the lack of archaeology in Anatolia, mostly what is now modern Turkey, and in the Levant [stretched archaeological periods in the early Iron Age]. Even as far away as Europe we have the Hallstatt anomaly. A big gap in Iron Age archaeology – not only on the continent but in Britain and Ireland too, and all points they have contact with.
This explains why dendrochronologists used Egyptian dating as a foundation for their tree ring sequences. Gaps exist between one sequence and another but this is left open for the discovery of other trees that may bridge the gaps. It is also a fact that Egyptologists would not accept wht C14 had revealed. That was that it produced dates much younger than their chronology would allow. They claimed C14 methodology was unreliable and was not as robust as claimed. To some extent they still do as criticism of scientific dating is still a position taken by Egyptologists – even now. The scientists wanted to establish a reliable system of dating and to do that with C14 they needed to establish laboratorities that archaeologists could trust. In order to get those laboratories accepted, and profitable, they had to placate the Egyptologists – and used their chronology to weave together tree ring data with that of C14. Unfortunately, it is still not perfect as archaeologists were forced to accept there was a grey area in the middle of the first millennium BC – a plateau where all C14 dates clustered together. This is what the Hallstat anomaly is all about. Archaeologists of the Iron Age remained frustrated with the calibrated model and some of them went back to the raw C14 date – which was frowned upon by mainstream journals. Hence we have had a succession of IntCal calibrations of the C14 data – using not just tree rings but various other dating methodologies. This has tended to make dating artifacts even more difficult as the dates are very often even older than the original calibration model. Where it will all end is anyone’s guess – but the Egyptologists carry on without a care in the world. They sit at the top of the pecking order.
Now, it occurred to me, after reading the new study press release in PhysOrg that the fish diet excuse should, in a just and interested world, be found wanting – as it has cast doubts on the veracity of the calibration models. Bread was the staple diet of Sumerians and all the peoples of the Near and Middle East back in the day. And still is. I was always struck by how many bakers were killed by ISIS in Iraq. Their skill set went back deep into history – and long before the Sumerian era. It was fundamental to the early farming communities of the Levant and Anatolia as well and was taken westwards after the 6200BC event had decimated the latter region. It eventually arrived in NW Europe. Various revisions of chronology have been proposed by amateur historians since the books of Velikovsky on the subject. Many of them are Bible based – and rely on numbers, or units of numbers. That is of course unreliable as those numbers also have a symbolic value as outlined by Steve Collins in one of his books on his excavations at Tall el-Hammam. The science of archaeology should take the prominent role – not words or lists or Egyptology.
Full paper at https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2526276123 …