Editing Radiocarbon dating (section)

===Contamination===
Any addition of carbon to a sample of a different age will cause the measured date to be inaccurate. Contamination with modern carbon causes a sample to appear to be younger than it really is: the effect is greater for older samples. If a sample that is 17,000 years old is contaminated so that 1% of the sample is modern carbon, it will appear to be 600 years younger; for a sample that is 34,000 years old, the same amount of contamination would cause an error of 4,000 years. Contamination with old carbon, with no remaining {{chem|14|C}}, causes an error in the other direction independent of age&nbsp;– a sample contaminated with 1% old carbon will appear to be about 80 years older than it truly is, regardless of the date of the sample.<ref>Aitken (1990), pp. 85–86.</ref>