New Scientist
Image: Barras
China now consumes nearly as much coal as the rest of the world combined. And perhaps it always did: it seems coal was routinely burned 3500 years ago in what is now China – the earliest evidence we have for the practice.
John Dodson at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation in Sydney, and his colleagues in China, were examining early evidence of bronze casting in northern China when they found chunks of burned coal in the ancient slag piles instead of the charcoal they expected. “We got one of the guys to take samples and he sieved out some seeds, which we radiocarbon dated in Sydney,” says Dodson. The seeds were chosen because they formed at the time the coal was burned, whereas the coal formed millions of years earlier. “You can’t just radiocarbon date the coal because it is already ancient carbon,” he says.
The results confirmed that coal had been burned in the area around 3500 years ago. The team also found coal at four more sites, dating back 3500 to 3700 years – with one of them dating back even further, to about 4600 years ago (The Holocene, doi.org/rw8). Read more on newscientist.com…
