well aware that fossils are paleontology, not archaeology. it’s my assumption that there’s overlap and that’s why siobhan knows so much about fossils and identifying them, as she did genuinely used to be an archaeologist.
There is actually a lot of overlap. There is an entire sub-field of Anthropology (which Archaeology is another sub-field of) dedicated to the study of non-human primates that would fall into paleontology as well.
Learning about the limitations of carbon-dating, learning other forms of dating (including seriation, stratigraphy, dendrochronology, and yes uranium-series dating) is in fact part of standard archaeological curriculum. --BA in Archaeology and History ☺️
@@greenjay7471 That's true in American scholarship, but in England, archaeology is (or at least it used to be, when I was in school) considered a separate discipline from anthropology. But it's an inherently interdisciplinary field, so yeah, there's lots of overlap.
"Can you believe that Siobhan used to be an archaeologist?" "Yes." She seriously has that look and voice that would be perfect for the "archaeologist" character actress. Also her doing a full on "Um, actually..." is incredibly on brand and deserves praise.
How fucking amazing would it be that this is how the players themselves end up in Spyre haha, “You find Siobhan Thompson, she’s sitting under the tree of the quad with her nose in a fossil book.”
*trilobite fossil gets shoved in Siobhan's mouth* "Uhm, while licking can be a method to identify fossils, it doesn't work for trilobites fossils as they were formed from a chitinous exoskeleton rather than porous bone"
@@StealthMarmot_I... would rather not look that one up. My dad is a fundamentalist Christian young-earth creationist science-denier, so I grew up hearing that shit. The most elaborate relevant BS was a rant he went on once: "Carbon dating doesn't work because the carbon in something used to be in something else. So the carbon could be millions of years old from when it was in a star, but that doesn't mean the fossil was! You could carbon date a tree in the backyard and you'd get a number in the millions for the same reason." Not only does that fundamentally (heh) misunderstand what carbon dating is and how it even works, it also proposes an impossible scenario (carbon dating a currently-living organism like a tree in the backyard), and further implies that for the last 80-ish years, thousands of professional scientists around the world who have studied this stuff their entire adult lives are stumped by *the third-grade science concept of conservation of mass* while you, a random guy with little scientific background, are just *so much smarter* that you figured it out. ...sorry, that got heated. There's a reason I stopped talking to him when I turned 18...
Once an archaeologist, always an archaeologist. the knowledge is still swirling about in her head, whether she's using it on the daily or not. You can take the girl from the bones but you can't take the bones from the girl.
I love how she couched her very real and serious correction in a silly voice so as to not come off as a know-it-all dickwad. I do the same thing constantly. I don't want to be _that guy_ but also i _need_ you to know that what you're saying is inaccurate
Just a question, I was under the impression that a fossil exists because various minerals replaced the original matter (bone, shell, whatever) so would you be dating the original material, or just the minerals that replaced it over time?
Hilariously a bunch of creationists have sent dinosaur-era fossils to be carbon dated and then gone on youtube to shout 'look, they're only 40-50 thousand years old!'
I wasn’t aware which one was the former archeologist until I heard trilobite and carbon dating, thought almost perfectly in sync with Siobhan. You can’t carbon date a trilobite, it’s too old. The poison is in too deep.
arch degree, didn't know off the top of my head how old a trilobite is bc what are dates even, but was lowkey immediately thinking it would be impossible to carbon date a fossil bc there are no more organic materials left, that's what makes it a fossil. but charcoal found in situ with the fossil? now we're cooking baby
@@he.said.teenjiejerAbsolutely, You for sure learn the different dating techniques in archeological studies. There are human artifacts that use more than just c-14.
Honestly, you wouldn't even need to date them using anything, just look them up on a chart. Trilobites are among the most well-documented kinds of fossils there are.
i love her so much for that. she may not be the adhd rep we deserve but it is the adhd rep i need. it’s so relatable that she used to be an archaeologist and then made a huge swerve and also she just knows latin for some reason.
Fun fact about carbon dating: this is about the creature's last meal. As long as it ingests organic matter, carbon-12 and carbon-13 are at an equilibrium. Carbon-13 decays if that stops.
Carbon-14 is the one that decays, Carbon-13 is stable but rare. Carbon-14 is produced naturally in the upper atmosphere when cosmic neutron radiation reacts with stable Nitrogen-14 in the air, and enters the biosphere through plant respiration. 14C decays with a half life of 5700 years, so there is an equilibrium where the production by Nitrogen irradiation is in balance with the natural decay rate, about one part per trillion. When an organism stops taking in carbon from its environment, the carbon in it is fixed, and the concentration of 14C begins falling. By measuring the concentration at a later date, we can find how long this decay process has been happening - but after about 57,000 years (10 half-lives) there’s too little Carbon-14 to detect. As a side note, future carbon dating will have to account for the fact that organisms which lived after 1945 have a significantly higher concentration of Carbon-14 due to the fact that nuclear weapons testing produced an enormous amount of the isotope and significantly increased its concentration in the atmosphere.
I don't doubt that she's an archaeologist at all. The literal first thing I thought when I saw her and heard her speak was, "Damn, it's Evelyn from The Mummy."
carbon dating only works on organic materials. fossils have their organics entirely replaced by surrounding minerals so carbon dating would be invalid.
one of my friends is a geologist in the UK working on fossil fuel stuff and she's always excited to talk about old rocks. unlike Emily, I appreciate my Rock Friend and her info dumping.
Part of being an archaeologist (like the biggest part because otherwise it would be sociology) is artifacts and materials from ancient times. Identifying fossils is a part of that process.
Um actually, Siobhan was an archaeologist. Carbon dating is also used in studying relics and human remains. Her knowledge of how it wouldn't work with trilobites would have been picked up when she was learning about how carbon dating works.
no, @@benjamingeiger, they still have carbon, just not Carbon 14, it all has decayed into C-12, the last bit of C-14 runs out at around 33 thousand years, that's why you can't date them using carbon.
How is that surprising? I would be more impressed if she went from a STEM direction into comedy rather than something that puts her in proximity of arts majors.
@@lodevijk Because archaeology employs a wide range of different procedures, it is considered both a science and a humanity. And even when the focus is more humanity- based, archaeology still utilizes the four disciplines of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (in shorthand called STEM).
Um actually, you can't carbon-date fossils because they don't have any of the original organic material in them; hence no carbon to date. They're stone, you see.
Depends on the rock, since some rocks are actually carbonates, which does incorporate carbon that can be carbon dated. Calcite is one example (limestone or shells)
U know what's crazy? I knew Siobhan before coming to Comedy Central. She used to work on a British RU-vid show about UK facts,culture,food, places, etc., and she had a THICC British accent. OUT OF NOWHERE, when she became an actress on Comedy Central, suddenly she had a full American accent loool.
I mean, one of the most famous videos featuring Siobhan is about doing every British accent. Seems like she's very good at accents, and probably found a thick accent was not conducive to working in America.
very funny that she said carbon date and went "carbon-14 has a half-life of like 10,000 years that won't work" and then siobhan said basically the exact same thing
What @stellamayer1836 said. But also, carbon-14 has a half life of only 5,730 years, not 10,000. However, it's because of that particular half-life that carbon dating is only accurate up to a few tens of thousands of years old; which is why she suggested uranium-lead dating, which is accurate up to over 4.5 billion years due to the longer half life of uranium (which is, of course the entire age of the Earth).
As someone who thinks power slap is sanctioned cte but doesn't mind the bmf belt I felt I should comment. I do agree the bmf belt not being applied consistently is an issue. But when the actual UFC rankings aren't being applied consistently what do we expect. Idk it just seems like the bmf is a symptom, a progression of the larger problem.
Friendly reminder that there are already many comments saying this and Siobhan WAS an actual archeologist, not a paleontologist. Whatever it is you think people are misunderstanding, they understood it just fine.
If you had studied history, you'd know that court jesters have often led better lives than scribes and historians. What with living in the castle and making fun of nobility and whatnot.
Archaeologist or paleontologist? I don’t know why there are so many things about fossils with archaeology attached, it’s like paleontology as a separate field of science was forgotten about or something.
Carbon dating is not unique to fossils. It just requires the object to be made with carbon to some extent. Knowing some amount about the fossil record is probably as much from just having an interest in it as anything.
I mean, maybe both fields share a lot of tools and techniques so it wouldn’t be out of place for one to know a bit about the other? Doesn’t sound too far-fetched IMO
@@shinreilbayou absolutely can and please don‘t lick the artefacts - signed, an archaeologist who has to undergo briefings on Weils disease and other such horrors on every new site. Also like. It‘s just disrespectful.
It has nothing to do with burning; as kwintin1000 said, anything that used to be alive -- but is now dead -- which had carbon incorporated into its body can be carbon dated. (Which of course also includes anything made of such living matter, like wooden tools, etc., if they're preserved enough to still be intact.) The overview of how carbon dating works: there's a relatively consistent ratio of carbon-14 isotopes to carbon-12 isotopes in the environment (at least until we exploded the first atomic bomb in 1945... we fucked that up hard). This has been confirmed through multiple different approaches, including ice core samples in the arctic, where as the layers of ice froze over, they trapped dissolved gases from the air in them; so the deeper you look, the "further back in time" you get a snapshot of the atmosphere and the chemical makeup of it. Importantly, C-14 is radioactive, while C-12 is stable. That means the amount of C-14 in a sample is constantly decaying at a well-defined rate (a half-life of 5,730 years-ish, to be precise), while the amount of C-12 stays the same. But otherwise, both are nearly identical, so a living thing will not generally prefer one over the other. While you're alive, you're constantly equalizing the chemicals in your body: inhaling and exhaling, eating and pooping, drinking and peeing, etc. There's a balance that keeps the ratio of C-12/C-14 inside you equal to that of the environment you're getting those resources from. When you die, though, all those processes stop, and whatever carbon was inside you at the moment of death stops getting refreshed. The C-12 remains, while the C-14 slowly decays. So if you get a sample from something dead, you can measure the C-12, then use the steady ratio to figure out how much C-14 there was originally. Then you measure the amount of C-14 left, which tells you how much has decayed; plug that into an exponential decay formula and boom, you know how long it's been since the decay started going unchecked, i.e. the time since it died. (Within error bounds; but all good science has stated error bars 😁) The thing is, those formulas are less accurate as you go well beyond the half-life of the object you're dating, so around about 50,000 - 60,000 years of decay, it starts being too inaccurate to get a good measure. Luckily, there are many other ways to date an object, including (as Siobhan mentioned) uranium-lead dating, which works similarly except using the ratio of uranium and lead instead of C-12 and C-14. Since uranium has a *much, much* larger half-life than C-14, you can get much better measures from this over longer timescales. (By the way, related fun fact: if you're wondering about there being uranium in the environment, it's natural, and in harmless amounts. The average adult human has about 90 micrograms of uranium in their body, mostly in their bones, but also spread through other tissues in even smaller percentages.)
@@davesprivatelounge No problem! I'm always up for science communication 🙂 By the way, re-reading my comment, I think I may not have explained well enough why the carbon measurements start to get inaccurate around 50,0000+ years old. It's just because there's too little sample left at that point to measure with current tools. Since decay is exponential, when you get to 10x the half-life, you have about 1/1000 the original sample amount left; consider that the average adult human has about 1.5 *micrograms* of C-14 in them while alive (yes, the ratio is that skewed: there's about 0.00000000000135g of C-14 for every 1g of C-12!). So if you're starting with such a tiny amount of C-14, then cutting that by a factor of a thousand... yeah, we just can't measure such small masses. Which is why uranium, which takes 4.5 *billion* years to decay by half, helps a lot, since it leaves more than enough behind at the usual timescales for us to measure today.
That’s not archaeology, what this lass did was paleontology or geology, depending on which thing you’re testing. Yes, I do have to explain the difference between paleontology and archaeology quite often, care to guess why?
@@davidvasey5065my dude you must know saying “wtf” is rude, I’m sure you don’t go around saying shit like that in real life to say your sandwich artist, or whatever.
@@davidvasey5065 hey man do you know that people can see the comments? that the comments are for viewers and the person who uploaded the video? you are not commenting in a vacuum or a void for your sole entertainment. also the comment is useless anyway because anyone who has ever used this app or has been on the internet longer than a few minutes knows what tagging is. youtube descriptions have been like this for YEARS.
