resistance is futile, you will be assimilated

[Paleophyte]

Nope, 14-C is useless for anything that old. You asked for "a sample of life based material that is older than 50k years old". For that you'll need a much slower radiometric system. U-Pb is the gold standard, and works to several times the age of the Earth. Ar-Ar, K-Ar, Rb-Sr, and several other can also be used and provide independent cross-checks.


They've extracted single crystal Ar-Ar ages from the underlying volcanic ash that date to 3.18 and 3.20 million years. Here's the 1994 paper with the ages.

Not debuked, you must be thinking Piltdown Man or some other foolishness.

can you tell me exactly how to do the test... as if I would do it myself?

piltdown man.... you may be right. is there any paper on lucy?

Papers on Lucy? Countless.  The Wikipedia article will probably be more help to you and you can check the citations on Google Scholar.

I can tell you how to do a geochron analysis, but it's costly and a bit of a learning curve to get a meaningful date. It's all too easy to get useless rubbish. Much less costly to go online and look for published ages. Those will usually include the raw analytical data that the ages were generated from. The basic steps are:

1. Find a cool rock that you want to date. I'm guessing that you'll want to date a fossil. Fossils don't often have minerals that can be directly dated with much reliability, so we'll need to date overlying and underlying or crosscutting strata instead. If you want direct dating, look for material that was buried in volcanic ash or something else that can be directly dated. That happens, but isn't common.
   
2. Identify dateable minerals within the rocks of interest. This will probably be the trickiest step. Some rocks suck at having anything that you can pull a date off of. For example, basalt is pretty common but frequently lacks dateable minerals, especially if a little light metamorphism has overprinted and reset the igneous age. By contrast, silica-rich volcanics are awesome! I've already mentioned zircons for U-Pb and Th-Pb systematics. Potassium feldspars are a common mineral that works well for K-Ar and Ar-Ar ages and gives good results with Rb-Sr. Most silica-rich volcanics have both. Check the integrity of the minerals. The fact that zircon is virtually indestructible means that you can get detrital grains entrained in magma and that'll get you inherited ages that are too old. Happily that's really easy to check for with cathodoluminescence. Check igneous minerals for metamorphic resetting, which should be blindingly obvious. If it looks gnawed upon don't use it for a date.
   
3. Now that you have some useful mineral samples, submit them to an accredited geochron lab. The analyses will run you a few thousand each, but that's a lot less than the million or two plus budget for staff that you'd need for a fully functional geochron lab of your own.
   

If that sounds like a lot of work, you're right. It's easy to do rubbish science. If it's just a matter of personal interest then it's always much simpler and cheaper to look up published ages.

Good zircon! 

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Really nice igneous zoning with no overgrowths or inclusions

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Compromised zircon

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The core might be dateable, but that corona is rubbish

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Pristine K-feldpar

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A pristine phenocryst in volcanic matrix

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Microcline K-feldspar

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The cross-hatching is healthy and normal

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Bad feldspar

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This is serciite alteration of plagioclase rather than K-feldspar, but when it's this badly altered you can forget about getting an age from it

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