In 1900, the Scottish physicist William Thomson (better known as Lord Kelvin of the temperature scale) declared to an assemblage of physicists at the British Association for the advancement of Science that "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." Any announcement like this is likely to be proven completely wrong, of course, in a very short time.
In 1896, French physicist Henri Becquerel, inspired by German physicist William Roentgen's discovery of X-rays the previous year (Nobel Prize for Physics, 1901), started investigating whether salts of various metals, in particular uranium, when exposed to sunlight, might re-emit this energy as X-rays. This idea was completely wrong but, quite by accident on a cloudy day in February, he discovered that uranium compounds were spontaneously giving out some new form of energy.
Marie Curie, then still a student, decided to investigate these "uranium rays" for her doctoral thesis and quickly discovered that this radiation was being emitted by the atoms themselves and coined the term, "radioactivity". Her husband, Pierre, soon joined her in this work and, over the next few years, they discovered that thorium was also radioactive and discovered two new radioactive elements, polonium and radium.
Marie and Pierre Curie shared the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics with Henri Becquerel, making Marie Curie the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize.
Pierre Curie was killed in a road accident in 1906 but Marie continued working, now as the first female professor at the University of Paris, and was awarded the 1911 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for her discovery of polonium and her discovery and isolation of radium. She was the first person to be awarded two Nobel Prizes.
She invented radiotherapy and pioneered the use of radiology in medicine during the First World War but never acknowledged the dangers of long-term exposure to radiation. She died of aplastic anaemia in 1934. Her papers and even her cookbook from the 1890s remain so radioactive that they cannot be handled without protective clothing.
(I did consider using an old smoke detector as a themed radioactive log container for this cache but thought better of it.)
The Puzzle (Data used is from Wikipedia and to 3 significant figures. The data can be confirmed using Chemical Elements.com.)
Question 1
The bones of an ancient hominid Australopithecus Tradcachii were discovered in late 2016. Upon analysis, it was found that the ratio of calcium-41 to potassium-41 in the bones was precisely 71.5127:28.4873. Assuming all potassium-41 is of radiological origin and none has been gained or lost through erosion, leaching or other processes, how old are the bones?
Question2
A specimen of an earlier hominid , previously unknown to science, Anatoliopithecus Cryptocachii was discovered in early 2017. The ratio of calcium-41 to potassium-41 in this case was found to be 56.5943:43.4057. How old is the specimen?
NOTE 1:-It was quickly discovered that both of these calculated dates were incorrect and a correction needed to be applied. All the necessary information is supplied on these pages.
(NOTE 2: The isotopes and decay process are real but are not the ones used in actual dating techniques, although positron decay of calcium-41 is used in stellar studies. The decay calculation is treated simply with no corrections other than the one applied for the purposes of this puzzle.)
You can validate your puzzle solution with certitude.