Radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin

Very small samples from the Shroud of Turin have been dated by accelerator mass spectrometry in laboratories at Arizona, Oxford and Zurich. As controls, three samples whose ages had been determined independently were also dated. The results provide conclusive evidence that the linen of the Shroud of Turin is mediaeval. © 1989 Nature Publishing Group

Postglacial viability and colonization in North America’s ice-free corridor

During the Last Glacial Maximum, continental ice sheets isolated Beringia (northeast Siberia and northwest North America) from unglaciated North America. By around 15 to 14 thousand calibrated radiocarbon years before present (cal. kyr bp), glacial retreat opened an approximately 1,500-km-long corridor between the ice sheets. It remains unclear when plants and animals colonized this corridor and it became biologically viable for human migration. We obtained radiocarbon dates, pollen, macrofossils and metagenomic DNA from lake sediment cores in a bottleneck portion of the corridor. We find evidence of steppe vegetation, bison and mammoth by approximately 12.6 cal. kyr bp, followed by open forest, with evidence of moose and elk at about 11.5 cal. kyr bp, and boreal forest approximately 10 cal. kyr bp. Our findings reveal that the first Americans, whether Clovis or earlier groups in unglaciated North America before 12.6 cal. kyr bp, are unlikely to have travelled by this route into the Americas. However, later groups may have used this north–south passageway

Saharan exploitation of plants 8,000 years BP

Sorghum and millets are among the world's most important food crops and, for the inhabitants of the semi-arid tropics, they are the main sources of protein and energy. Little is known about the history of these crops; their domestication is thought to have occurred in the African savannah, but the date and precise location are unknown1,2. Excavations at an early Holocene archaeological site in southernmost Egypt, 100 km west of Abu Simbel, have yielded hundreds of carbonized seeds of sorghum and millets, with consistent radiocarbon dates of 8,000 years before present (BP), thus providing the earliest evidence for the use of these plants. They are morphologically wild, but the lipid fraction of the sorghum grains shows a closer relationship to domesticated than to wild varieties. Whatever their domestic status, the use of these plants 8,000 years ago suggests that the African plant-food complex developed independently of the Levantine wheat and barley complex