The immediate take home is that our carbon 14 data is vulnerable to natural contamination able to make the samples far younger than they are. Again this type of dating is excellent yet vulnerable to unpleasant surprises. Unfortunately we draw conclusions that then inform further research and get really bitten when it comes to archeology. The first trip around that block was the idea that civilization arose in the middle east and slowly migrated outward. Correcting ages using 6000 years of tree rings turned decades of scholarship on its head. Now we have nicely bumped the Neanderthal to 40,000 years BP or more. I was not brave enough to say as much on the basis of the time lines that I am presently working with, but this new dating conforms nicely to my principal conjecture.
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