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leaves and grasses contain it in amounts that remain the same. But all living organisms absorb vegetable matter in some form or other, so men and animals also contain C-14 in the same proportion. Now radioactive substances have a definite period of disintegration, provided no new radioactive substances are added. This period of disintegration in men and animals begins with death, in plants with harvesting or burning. The carbon isotope C-I4 disintegrates at the rate of one half its amount in about 5,600 years. This means that 5,600 years after the death of an organism, only half the original amount of C-I4 is detectable, after 11,200 years only a quarter, after 22,400 only an eighth and so on. Since the original amount of C-I4 in the atmosphere is known, the C-14 content of fossilised organic matter can be found out by a complicated laboratory process. In relation to the constant C-I4 content of the atmosphere the age of a bone or a piece of charcoal can then be determined. If grasses and bushes on the edge of a motorway are cut and burnt, the ashes give a false age of many thousands of years. Why is that? Day after day the plants have absorbed large amounts of carbon petroleum, but that in turn comes from organic material that stopped absorbing C-14 from the atmosphere millions of years ago. Thus a tree cut down in an industrial district may be only fifty years old according to its annual rings, but examinations by the C-14 method would date the wood ash so far back that the fifty-year-old tree would have had to have been planted in very remote times. I doubt the accuracy and consequently the dependability of this method. Measurements made so far start from the firm assumption that the proportion of a C-14 isotope in the atmosphere is and was And what happens if this premise is based on an error? In my book Chariots of the Gods?, I referred to ancient texts which said that the gods were capable of producing tremendous heat of the kind that only nuclear explosions can generate, and also that they were familiar with radiation weapons. In the Epic of Gilgamesh Enkidu dies because he has been smitten by 'the poisonous breath of the heavenly beast’. The Mahabharata tells us how warriors hurled themselves into the water to wash themselves always the same. But who knows if that is true? and their armour, because everything was covered 'with the death-dealing breath of the gods.’