OT Aztec Cave Beans

They were still viable because they're loaded with antinutrients. You can read about their deleterious health effects here:

They survived just fine on grains, fruits, vegetables, seafood and domesticated animal meats.

"Survived just fine" with a 35 year life span punctuated by occasional plagues and famines. Half their kids died young.

The fix for anti-nutrients is to combine them with lots of nutrients.

Do you suffer from "nausea, bloating, headaches, rashes, nutritional deficiencies, etc" ? That's maybe why you are such a downer.

Disease was a part of life back then. It was a big deal for a child to survive to teenage years. This was true even in this country up to early 20th century. The old country graveyards are full of children. Aside from the various causes of disease, they didn't know how to treat anything. Sickness that is easily treated and cured these days was a death sentence in the old days.

Some dietary regimens avoid anything called a seed altogether. The so-called paleo (caveman) diet does this.

No, but you will if you keep eating all these weird beans. Just because ape people did certain things in the distant past, doesn't mean it's the thing to do these days.

Placebo diet, more like. No thanks.

We don't eat beans every meal. Poor people often have to eat the same thing all the time, but we don't.

Isn't carbon dating up there with lie detector tests and dowsing for water?

Not really. The rate at which C-14 gets into the atmosphere (from cosmic rates hitting N-14 and transmuting it into C-14) is a bit erratic, but we now know how to correct for that - and have done for quite a while, since about 1967.

Paleo is not a diet to lose weight, it's a relatively austere diet favored by elite high performance athletes who require a lot of work capacity and high endurance strength. And like you say, no thanks.

I think it works pretty well. Not 1%, but a good estimate of the age of organics.

that article just reinforces the nonsense that carbon dating is.

Unless it was very dry and cool like in a cave then it seems just a bit too long to be credible. Kew seed bank stores at 15% humidity and deep freeze conditions. They reckon some legume seeds will be viable for about 600 years maybe longer under those conditions. There are a few exceptionally old seeds that have been dated and germinated.

It is pretty good provided that the sample is well isolated from its environment and not too old (and not too young either). We messed up the global C14 ratios pretty badly in the 1960's with too many atmospheric nuclear and H-bomb tests. It still hasn't really recovered to natural.

The crucial thing for all radio carbon and all other isotopic ratio dating methods is that the sample must not have been able to exchange material with its environment or all bets are off.

Cydrome Leader doesn't seem to have had much of an education. Carbon-dating is a useful technique and has made archeology a lot easier. It is not spectacularly precise, and there are small systematic effects that have to be corrected for, but the proposition that C-14 forms in the atmosphere when a cosmic ray hits an N-14 nucleus, and decays steadily once it has been captured during photosynthesis and incorporated into wood or other plant products is useful and reliable.

There also the global warming problem - a lot of the CO2 in the modern atmosphere has been produced by burning fossil carbon, which doesn't contain any C-14 at all. The modern atmosphere contains less C14 than it used to, and this is known as the Suess Effect

Too true.

And Mexican food.

"Modern medicine" that regularly saved more lives than it took was generously invented circa 1830, and as a poor person in 1930 you weren't that much better off than 1930 BC.

"The Nobel Prize for Chemistry is Nonsense" - Cydrome Leader, 2021

Cream-filled churros are health food.

Nobody can even agree on how prcise it is. It's flavor of the week nonsense. The wiki page had some pretty amazing stuff like 3000BC +/- 12 years or some other randon number nonsense.

On paper it looks good, in practice it's pure nonsense where all the numbers constantly change.

the nobel prizes are nonsense. the peace prize in 2009? What a joke.

sad trombones playing.

Like I said, carbon dating old stuff that's been who knows where is witchcraft, not science.