Quote Originally Posted by TomOfSweden View Post
Or is a misstake. Carbon dating has a huge problem of specimen contamination. Maybe somebody boobed at the lab. A journalist heard the story ran it and when the scientist did a re-check and got back to the journalist, it wasn't news any more.

If something requires knowledge in metalurgy that first was discovered in the 15'th century then we know it can't be older. A good scientist entertains every avenue, but in most cases the truth is painfully obvious to everybody involved.

I would agree with that, except that it apparently isn't.
More than a hundred years ago an extraordinary mechanism was found by sponge divers at the bottom of the sea near the island of Antikythera. It astonished the whole international community of experts on the ancient world. Was it an astrolabe? Was in an orrery or an astronomical clock? Or something else? For decades, scientific investigation failed to yield much light and relied more on imagination than the facts. However research over the last half century has begun to reveal its secrets. It dates from around the 1st century B.C. and is the most sophisticated mechanism known from the ancient world. Nothing as complex is known for the next thousand years. The Antikythera Mechanism is now understood to be dedicated to astronomical phenomena and operates as a complex mechanical "computer" which tracks the cycles of the Solar System.

These people apparently believe that this device was built centuries before its time. I have no problem with that, but I do not, nor will I ever, believe that.