THE PROOF
WHAT LOOKED a bit OLD…
Years ago, when we just found the tree we had our suspicions that it might be very old. How else could the grain of the wood be so extremely dense and the color so dark? We decided to try out if it was possible to build a semi acoustic guitar out of it in the first place. Well, that worked out pretty great! We then knew that it was worth trying to find out its age. After quite a few search attempts, we finally found an institute that could help us out.
…Turned out to be Prehistoric!
We sent some samples of the wood to the Leibniz-Laboratory for Radiometric Dating and Stable Isotope Research of the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany, which uses the C14 method to determine the age of organic material. When Dr. Christian Hamann sent us the test results, we could hardly believe our eyes! With a probability of 95,4%, the wood dates between 5474 BC and 5316 BC. That means it is a prehistoric tree that grew in the Neolithic, right in the middle of the hunters and gatherers! Fast forward to modern times; it turned out that two befriended guitars builders who stumbled upon a tree trunk one day had unknowingly built a guitar with wood that is almost 7500 years old.
THE LETTER
“Analysis Report KIA-55974
Dear Mr Lievers,
With this letter you receive the results of our measurements. With high probability (95,4%) the wood dates between 5474 BC and 5316 BC. You will find a summary of the applied methods and cited literature following the measurement results. Please feel free to contact me by phone or e-mail if you need any further information.
Kind regards,”
THE RESULTS
HOW IT WORKS
C-14 DATING
“Radiocarbon dating (also referred to as carbon dating or carbon-14 dating) is a method for determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon. The method is based on the fact that radiocarbon (14 C) is constantly being created in the Earth's atmosphere by the interaction of cosmic rays with atmospheric nitrogen. The resulting 14C combines with atmospheric oxygen to form radioactive carbon dioxide, which is incorporated into plants by photosynthesis; animals then acquire 14C by eating the plants. When the animal or plant dies, it stops exchanging carbon with its environment, and thereafter the amount of 14C it contains begins to decrease as the 14C undergoes radioactive decay. Measuring the amount of 14C in a sample from a dead plant or animal, such as a piece of wood or a fragment of bone, provides information that can be used to calculate when the animal or plant died. The older a sample is, the less 14C there is to be detected, and because the half-life of 14C (the period of time after which half of a given sample will have decayed) is about 5,730 years, the oldest dates that can be reliably measured by this process date to approximately 50,000 years ago, although special preparation methods occasionally make accurate analysis of older samples possible.”