Rupert/Michael, I have just completed three films on Earth-House/Souterrains, they are supposed to be Iron Age cellars but two of these sites have Neolithic rock art incorporated into them. Thanks for the shout out, it is much appreciated, Martin.

Great new format. Had to watch Eric Morcambe's immortal delivery of "I'm playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the the right order" 😊. I think you meant Accelerator Mass Spectrometer.

QUESTION TIME: Why do earthworks in America have the same form/shape as in the UK? Massive circular outer ditch and inner bank, with gateways solstice/equinox aligned. Some with an interior mound, others with parallel embankments 120'+ wide, miles long leading to a henge. I'm mostly referring to Adena/Hopewell in the Ohio Valley, but there's also timber circles, or wood henges from Louisiana to New York. Megalith Passages in New England. Standing stones and stone box grave cist in the Cumberland Valley. There's Red-haired, plaid-weavers buried in a bog in Florida. The polished greenstone celts are found across eastern North America. Sound familiar? I'm just curious what you two have to say about it, if anything. I've devoted too many years to understanding the monument builders to come up blank. I need an outside perspective for a sanity check. 'Standing With Stones', and your channel is excellent, by the way.

Really enjoyed your video version of Monday Moot, and excited to watch this broadcast later tonight!

Yay! Am a little late but am watching from the start. Always loving the show 😁

Hi guys, thanks for the informative videos and interesting chat. I have a question and wondered if you might be able to shed some light on it for me. My girlfriend and I were at the South Tirol Archaeological Museum to see Otzi and while we were marvelling at the amazing preservation of his part-made bow and arrows, she asked me "How were bows and arrows invented?" I am aware of spear throwers and the like but what is the immediate precursor of the bow and arrow and how did it develop to the indispensable hunting tool and weapon of prehistory? Thanks again!

Most interesting chaps.Thanks.

Really enjoyed this, gentlemen. Keep up the good work!

Thanks Guys

Very interesting.

Thoughts on questions. Did neolithic / bronze age people play sports? Did neolithic / bronze age societies use money? Evan

Hi Guys. Is this the place for my question? "What Is The Evidence For Stone Circles Being Used As Multifunctional Spaces?" Thankyou

Not a question, perhaps an answer. You guys don't need fiber-optics, you need to check the focal-length of Rupert's camera. I've noticed this in many places now that so much is emanating from peoples' homes. Different cameras have different focal lengths. I can read the book titles on Rupert's shelves. I can't read Tim's. I suspect Rupert's camera has a greater focal length? Perhaps he needs to sit about a foot further back? Perhaps he needs to buy the same brand of camera? Experiment! It's the heart of science... Oh BTW, love the show...

Think I rather longer videos with a few questions but this was good too

What are the prehistoric origins of the traditional Martial Arts? You have had many discussions on violence in prehistory and there are plenty of videos on the origins of the warrior class in the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age but there seems to be a gap in the record in explaining a warrior tradition that survives to the present in a very tangible form?

Two nice looking guys giving advice on dating methods ...... Oh, wrong sort of dating 😊

The most frequent problem with C14 dating is limestone environments. The carbon in limestone is C14-ancient, and so any contamination from limestone will make the sample look older. R

Hey guys, love the video, you can go as long as you like, I watch on 2X speed 🤣 Couple questions, so c14/c13/12 historical data is updated regularly, and the last time it was updated, a lot of fossils ended up being dated 1,000 years off... So is the accuracy range of c14 dating, when there is lacking contextual evidence, still considered to only be accurate within +/- one thousand years? When the next data update happens could things shift drastically again? And do we know how close we are to being confident we've mapped the historical c14/c13/12 ratio accurately? Thanks again!

Some constructive criticism: Try not to prattle on discussing what you will or might be talking about later. All the elements of the intro (including the obligatory 9 mentions of Patreon) can and should be done in under 3 mins (max!) or risk losing chunks of the audience.

Martin Sweatman (Prehistory Decoded) did a comprehensive analysis of all the published papers about dating the Younger Dryas Event and comparing it to evidence of a comet impact. He did an excellent job of explaining the various dating techniques and how dating errors arise.

sorry, I missed the live show. Would someone tell me why the so-called Dinosovans are regarded as being true branches of Hominids when such a tiny number (of bits) of relics are found, when so many primates' share similar DNA with humans ?

No Monday Moot yesterday?

I would do much like if you could get Eske Willerslev on the show. He knows a thing or two, and he's Danish 😎

The only method of dating which is even remotely accurate is tree ring dating. It is not a guarantee of the age of the area where it was found, just of the date that particular tree died. All other methods are highly inaccurate, entirely too susceptible to tampering and interference from outside sources.

The luminescence techniques are what have me excited... particularly the one that will tell us the last time a stone was exposed to sunlight. We could absolutely get a hard date for the building of the pyramids (and other megalithic sites) with this. Simply go deep down inside the pyramids and drill a core sample centered on one of the tightly fitted seam joints between two massive stones... drill in a foot or so then pull the plug and test the deepest part of the two faces that rested against each other. Somehow I doubt this will ever happen though.. Too many people have too much to lose if they come back significantly older than current archeology dogma dictates.

waffle

Dendrochronology is pseudo-science. a. Tree-rings are hopeless as temperature sensors. Tree-ring thickness is determined by moisture, nutrients, canopy cover, disease, pests - and lastly by temperature. To say that tree-ring thickness is directly proportional to temperature is a complete nonsense. A very hot but very dry summer will produce thin rings (ie: cold dendrothermology temperatures). The best tree for dendrothermology would be the willow, but they don’t use those. b. Furthermore, you can find thick and thin rings within different radii ON THE SAME TREE. The 4 o’clock ‘temperature' data may well be completely different to the 12 o’clock temperature data. The core-borers that provide the ring-data are only 1 cm in diameter, so they only provide a small snap-shot of the tree circumference, and cannot see nor evaluate the fat and thin ring segments within the same tree. The methodology is so unreliable, that any climate research including dendro-temperatures should be thrown out. (Note: The IPCC removed Michael Mann’s dendrothermology hockey-stick graph, because it was shown to be fraudulent - they hid the 20th century decline in temperatures that the tree-ring data gave….! This was known as the ‘Hide the Decline’ scandal in the Climate-gate emails. I can show you the email.) c. However, this unreliability also calls into question Dendrochronology. If tree-growth is effected more by local conditions - moisture, nutrients, canopy cover and pests - then you cannot compare an ancient ship’s timber to a reference tree that may have grown many hundreds or thousands of miles away (ie: the Californian bristle-cone pine or Irish bog-oak dendro-data). There can be no comparison, because you cannot even compare two cores from the same tree! Take a look at the full circumference of a tree, and you will find rings of all shapes and sizes, around the full circumference. And all kinds of ring widths even in adjacent trees. So how can you compare a ship’s timber with a bristle-cone pine in California - when you cannot even compare that timber with a timber taken from the very same tree?? Dendrochronology is snake-oil science, and always has been. That is why they always ask for a rough archaeological date, before they date a sample. Ralph

Read the title and thought to myself “prehistoric tinder 🤔!?!?” - but genuinely interesting topic - how has dating changed over the eras and between cultures.