Passing of the Last of the Three Who Established14C Dating: A Historical Footnote

Abstract

Ernest Anderson, the last of the three scientists responsible for the initial research establishing the validity of the radiocarbon dating method at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s, has died. From early 1947 to the end of 1949, Anderson and James Arnold joined with Willard Libby to undertake three critical experiments, employing what one of them called a “procedure developed in hell” (solid carbon decay counting). They laid the foundation of what has developed over more than 6 decades into the “gold standard” for the chronometric dating of the most recent phases of the technological and cultural evolution of anatomically modern human societies, the geology of the terminal Pleistocene and Holocene, critical events in the history of the Earth's climate over the last 50,000 yr, and a range of other scientific and historical applications.