You are likely here because you have seen some post on social media that goes something like this:

“Archaeologists guess the Pyramids of Giza to be about ~4,600 years old as Carbon-14 can’t be used to estimate their age. An ostrich egg found in a tomb near Aswan shows the 3 Pyramid structures side by side. Carbon dating show it is ~7,000 years old.”

Or maybe something like this…

“Historians estimate that the pyramids of Giza are roughly 5000 years old. This can’t be verified for certain because you can’t carbon date limestone. You can, however, carbon date an eggshell. This one, found in Aswan, is 7000 years old, and depicts the pyramids beside the Nile.”

Probably with this image – though cropping out the original authors copyright.

There is a cottage industry on social media of people taking other popular tweets/posts/videos/whatever, stealing the images (if they have them), and rewording them slightly so they can post them as their own channels for the likes/retweets/followers/whatever. A Google image search will bring you to the source of this story, a blog post from 2018, updated in 2019.

This is out side more normal type of post, but on Twitter I got caught up in debunking one of these… less than honest… person’s tweets, and so I thought I would put out a long form post on this.

Unfortunately, people who steal images and don’t source there work also do not fact check – I know, you’re shocked too. Would you believe the exact opposite is true? That The Pyramids have been carbon dated and the egg has not. Though the egg is 7000ish years old, more on that in a minute.

A quick note – there are a lot of pyramids in the world, and in Egypt, but for the sake of brevity I am just going to refer to the pyramids at Giza as ‘The Pyramids‘ in this post.