31 ms·
7k-year-old well is the oldest wooden structure ever discovered
- adamnemecek 7y agoCzech Republic is Central Europe. This is like saying that Kansas is West Coast because it's west of Mississippi.
- meddlepal 7y agoEverything east of the German/Austrian/Italian borders is usually considered Eastern Europe.
- adamnemecek 7y agoWell it's considered that incorrectly.
- n4r9 7y agoThe Czech Republic is usually considered to be in Central Europe. As an aside, it's Eastern-most border reaches about 18.8 longitude, Italy's Eastern-most mainland border reaches about 18.5.
- 6d6b73 7y agoBy whom? Western Europeans? Geographically Czech Rep is in Central Europe, as is Poland and few other countries.
- masklinn 7y agoNo. Everything east of the German / Austrian / Italian border was part of the Eastern block, which was the east / west clivage for about half a century. What's coming back is the pre-cold-war delineation where areas of orthodox primacy north of the black sea are eastern europe, south of it are south-eastern, and the catholic areas are central, northern, southern and western (with the iberic peninsula often being split out as southwestern). Basically before WWII "Western Europe" was France, the British Isles and the Low Countries.
- marton78 7y agoBy whom? Citation needed.
- kgran 7y agoIt's not the same with Kansas since West Coast is used for states that meet the Pacific Ocean while the basis for Europe's division into the compass point named regions is quite vague. Therefore we have Chechia in Eastern Europe according to the UN Statistics Division and Eurovoc, but in Central Europe, according to The World Factbook.
- LeftHandPath 7y agoI mean, it's more like saying that Nevada is west coast. It's definitely west --- but there's no coast. Czech Rep. is as far east as Austria, and I dont think anyone would question Austria being part of traditional central Europe. I'd think that Hungary and Poland are usually considered the same - just depends on how strongly their cultures were affected by the old iron curtain.
- samatman 7y agoKansas is an ironic example, since it considers itself part of the Midwest (as does the Census for what that's worth), but where I come from (Michigan) Kansas is in the West. Not to be confused with the West Coast, no one would think that because it doesn't have a coast. But relative geographical terms are, well, relative.
- wincy 7y agoI live in Kansas and we call ourselves Midwesterners. I get really confused when Ohio calls themselves Midwest, being 6 hours drive from Manhattan does not strike me as "the middle of the west". We think of Utah or Colorado as being "The West". I guess like you say, it's all relative.
- rhino369 7y agoMidwest was defined when the country didn't stretch to the west coast yet/ Midwesterner's east of the Mississippi tend to consider Kansas and the Dakota's "Great Plains" states and not Midwest.
- samatman 7y agoAs far as I can determine, there isn't a single state in the Union that's considered the Midwest by everyone in the country. As I mentioned, Kansas is in the West if you're in Michigan, which definitely considers itself Midwestern. But if you're a Southerner, Michigan is in the North. The North doesn't even exist, outside of the former Confederacy, where it refers to states which were in the Union during the Civil War. So "the North" is a pure exonym.
- gshdg 7y agoAFAIK it's a cultural / historical delineation, not a geometrical one. Kind of like how the "US Midwest" is actually mostly in the eastern third of the contiguous states. AFAICT the boundary is roughly the eastern border of the Holy Roman Empire.
- adamnemecek 7y agoRight, people living in those countries will tell you that it's Central Europe. What other cultural/delineation is there?
- carapace 7y agoThe Cold War had a pretty deep psychological effect all over. When I was growing up East vs. West was the fundamental political distinction. Check out this map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NATO_vs._Warsaw_(1949-1990).svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NATO_vs._Warsaw_(1949-199... The world was divided right down the to the physical Berlin Wall. It was so amazing when that finally fell.
- twic 7y agoAlthough the Berlin Wall was about 100 kilometres east of the Iron Curtain. And Greece was another several hundred kilometres east!
- empath75 7y agoEastern and Western Europe is a commonly understood in American media. Central Europe is not. Whether you’re in East or west depends on which side of the iron curtain you were on.
- marton78 7y agoThis distinction was relevant for a mere 45 years, a period which ended almost 30 years ago. It's time to get it over with. The Czech Republic is about as Central European as it gets.
- akavi 7y agoOhio's in the "Midwest" even though it's a solid 80% of the way to the East of the continental US. The Middle East is also quite far west in the context of Asia (or even in the context of Eurasia). Geographic clustering is always slightly arbitrary, but in American parlance "Eastern Europe" and "Western Europe" are used dichotomously, and with the former usually corresponding to erstwhile Warsaw Pact members.
- CydeWeys 7y agoThe Midwest used to just be the west, over two centuries ago. Then we continued expanding farther west and the name got revised. It does represent geographic reality; that reality is just now out of date.
- Shacklz 7y agoI've had a Polish friend once who insisted that she's from Central Europe - a term that is basically unknown where I'm from (Switzerland), everything east of Germany/Austria is considered "Eastern Europe". I guess "Central Europe" is a term only used by people who consider themselves "Central European", everyone else seems to only distinguish between east/west.
- n4r9 7y agoThe Wikipedia page for "Central Europe" cites both Encyclopaedia Britannica and Brockhaus Enzyklopädie as sources which include the Czech Republic in Central Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Europe
- Mikeb85 7y agoCentral Europe is basically Catholic Slavs. Orthodox Slavs are east European.
- masklinn 7y agoNot just slavs. Germanic homelands were / are also central european.
- Mikeb85 7y agoThe line is where Slavic tribes existed. Some Germanic tribes are from central Europe, but Germany itself is considered west. The presence of Slavs is what differentiates West from Central and East.
- umanwizard 7y ago> Germany itself is considered west. Certainly not by everyone. From German Wikipedia: “Deutschland [...] ist ein Bundesstaat in Mitteleuropa.” Translation: “Germany is a federation in Central Europe”.
- masklinn 7y ago
- NoodleIncident 7y agoThe meaning of the word "coast" makes this a pointless comparison
- aggie 7y ago> Its design shines a light on technical skills that researchers didn't think Neolithic people possessed. It seems these kinds of discoveries -- people were more advanced at some point in time than previously believed -- happen quite frequently. It makes me realize I have a much too linear view of the development of technology and civilization. There have been many stops and starts and backtracking along the way, of course with plenty of uneven distribution across single points in time as well.
- cheese4242 7y agoTo take it even a step further, there could have been advanced industrial civilizations on earth before us: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610886/if-we-werent-the-first-industrial-civilization-on-earth-would-we-ever-know/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610886/if-we-werent-the-f... I don't think it likely, but like the article says, we wouldn't have any clue if there were. Likewise, if our civilization collapsed, and in the far future another advanced civilization arose on earth, they wouldn't have a clue about us if enough time had passed.
- lmilcin 7y agoI am pretty sure there were no industrial civilizations and the reason is pre-industrial availability of raw resources. Things like coal, oil, tin, etc were basically lying around on the surface of the earth.
- fosk 7y agoWouldn't that make an ever stronger case for a previous civilization? An advanced civilization would build things, use them day to day, and eventually they would just collapse again on the surface of the Earth.
- cheese4242 7y agoThat's a great question and google hasn't yielded any useful answers. Would the materials we have extracted and refined such as metal, return to some sort of easily mineable state in a million years? lmilcin raises a great point that many surface deposits of material that help "jump start" a civilization would have been consumed, but would the decay of our civilization return those same materials back into the surface, ready for the next round of civ to extract it?
- kragen 7y agoOne of the things I most enjoyed about the previous find of this kind, from 2012, was the discovery that tusk tenons were 7000 years old: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0051374 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... — and now we know that groove joints also date to that era, before even copper tools. That discovery is only about 250 years younger than this one: "A total of 151 oak timbers preserved in a waterlogged environment were dated between 5469 and 5098 [BCE]." That is, the youngest timbers were from 5098 BCE. This one: https://www.upce.cz/en/our-restorers-to-help-preserve-7000-year-old-prehistoric-well#main https://www.upce.cz/en/our-restorers-to-help-preserve-7000-y... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440320300066?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030544032... I think it's wonderful that they're able to date the wood specifically to 5259–8 BCE. To put this in a worldwide human context, this is almost 2000 years before the beginning of the Harappan civilization; 1700 years before the Sumerian settlement of Uruk, where Gilgamesh and Nimrod ruled and from which we get "Iraq"; 2100 years before Narmer became the first Pharaoh in Egypt; and 3600 years before the Shang rose in the land of China. In 5259 BCE there were still woolly mammoths on two islands between the lands we now call Russia and Alaska. But the city of Çatalhöyük had already been deserted for 400 years after 1400 years of flourishing.
- twic 7y ago> In 5259 BCE there were still woolly mammoths on two islands between the lands we now call Russia and Alaska. Moreover, 5259 BC is roughly as long before the extinction of those mammoths as that is before the present day.
- kragen 7y ago#factsthatmakeyoufeelold
- K0SM0S 7y agoThanks for this account, I love such wider-than-history perspectives. It literally helps us put things in perspective, realize that there is so much already. A city that's 200 years old today is "young" by human standards; even civilizations (cultural shapes) a thousand years old have probably only gone 10% of the temporal distance since the first settlements. I sometimes wonder how our current present could possibly be seen by people 7,000 years from now in the future (well, I tend to stop at 1,000 because it's already too big, but contemplating 10,000 or 100k even is humbling). There's this sense that we would be "ancient" to them, a different world. That most of our preoccupations would be long solved, and that only a few memes of our culture would remain to their day. To wonder if, in the grander scheme of things, we're "empty" like so many times before us and will leave pretty much nothing substantial, or if we're "decisive" like those ideas and people and eras that shaped civilization as we know it today. Would future eras see our computers and AI-attempts as foolish delusions like some people thought vapor machines could solve everything? Would our cars and planes and trains be seen as a temporary means of transportation that only lasted a couple centuries before something much better, much more "obvious" would take place? When would we escape Earth and grow beyond, is it for this century or much later, would it even be a done deal by 3,000? What new science lies beyond us in time simply because we just can't see it now, and yet we could actually make now if we just thought of it? (like we could have invented electricity in Ancient times, but conversely Einstein's GR was a gift from the Gods because it was at least 100 years too early in refinement). How much of what we take for granted is actually debatable or plain wrong; how much of what we doubt today is actually true, the right intuition? When do we eventually cease to be "homo sapiens sapiens" because too many mutations is too many and we've become something else? How much of "something else" is of our own doing (volition, objective) though genetics, epigenetics, culture? Etc., etc., etc. I find that far from being sterile or futile, these are extremely valuable thought experiments because they let us break our current mold and observe things from an arbitrarily different (call it "weird") standpoint. They let us re-imagine the past and unfold it differently, thus see many futures — and as always, plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
- rafaelvasco 7y agoMost people think that ancient people , +5000 thousand years before Christ, were all barbaric troglodytes, almost devoid of intelligence. Well, I used to think that, as I learned that way in "school". Hope more and more discoveries like this help to put an end to that misconception; I mean , it wasn't linear at all. At the same time as one group of humans were totally undeveloped, other groups were hundreds or even thousands of years ahead in advancement; Some people even go as far as saying there were the atlanteans, lemurians etc, which were far more advanced than we today. It could be true. Nothing preventing it, but if they existed, they left almost no traces after disappearing;
- annoyingnoob 7y agoI once told some co-workers that I think that I would have been a good caveman. When asked why I said that its because I can build things. I was summarily dismissed with 'wait until you are the hunted'. I agree that things are not so straightforward.
- scardycat 7y agoI went to school in India and we were taught about major civilizations that existed BC, including the Indus valley civilization, which was ~3000 BC. Unfortunately, what we all learn is true to the facts but what the local authorities is important. It is not surprising at all that some communities that lean heavily in to religion may choose to say anything BC is Pagan, uncultured, etc.
- rafaelvasco 7y agoYeah, I was watching a video about ancient Hindu civilization and I was marveled. Such an amazingly rich culture and religion. In fact the video said that Hindu religion, with it's vast literature, the Upanishads, the Mahabharata with the Gita etc, is the mother of all religions and all spiritual lore. After looking into it more, I completely agree;
- kiliantics 7y agoWell they are equivalent to us in intelligence, since they have the same bodies and brains we have. So of course they had the same thought processes and emotions we have now. The difference is the material conditions they lived under, so they just had different incentives and priorities.
- tomcam 7y ago> Researchers are developing a process to dry the wood and preserve it without deformation using sugar to reinforce the wood's cellular structure. Now I have a reason for eating so much sugar
- kleer001 7y agonobody wants to hear about your ancient wood
- teslaberry 7y ago7000 aint got shit on 300,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6ningen_spears https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6ningen_spears every 100k years is around 33,000 human generations. so , people have been making spears for 100,000 generations of humans or homo-like human species. Quite amazing indeed. now imagine that while it's unlikely we would yet discover major permanent structures left behind by far far more advanced civilizations, that it's quite possible something like advanced spoken languages and even primitive forms of writing on animal or plant materials could have occurred multiple times through the ages and we would never have and never will know it. persons were smarter individually in the past. but as a group, civilizations herd knowledge and skill base is growing assymptotically, perhaps in proportion to the risk of the collapse of the stability of civilization. I'm an optimist, so i think we have at least another 10,000 years ahead of us, but that's only 333 generations of human beings left to repeat the same mistakes and learn the same lessons. It's not really that much. The key to our long term success isn't MARS, it's improving our culture and systems by which we pass on WISDOM. which is something we have gotten better at, but that is quite hard to say how much better and what the long term growth curve is for the improvement of this process. Considering we don't need to get that much better, the outlook looks good, considering we have nuclear weapons at scale and drones able to deliver them, outlook looks dubious. Cornovirus , However, will undoubtedly be looked at in hind-site as helping make the civilization far more robust by many measures regardless of the diseases origins. An outbreak of full or moderate scale nuclear war, however, will not.
- incompatible 7y ago"cut in the autumn or winter 5259 B.C. or the winter of early 5258 B.C.," ... "oldest dendrochronologically dated archaeological wooden construction". This is an interesting technique, which isn't explained in the article. Tree rings obviously stop forming when the tree is killed. However, the size of individual rings various according to the weather in any particular year, so by matching a sequence of trees of different ages you can build up a sequence of ring widths. Then you can find the position of an unknown tree within this sequence, accurate to the year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology
- physicles 7y agoDendrochronology holds a special place in my heart, because it's the thing that finally shook me out of my young earth creationist (YEC) haze about 9 years ago. As the Wikipedia page states, we have a good chronology going back about 12k years, which is a few thousand years before all YEC timelines. Other more complicated dating techniques like radiocarbon dating and ice cores are too abstract or complicated, and therefore easier to hand wave away as containing too many unprovable assumptions. For instance, serious YEC people like to point out that we're assuming that the speed of light or radioactive decay rates were constant in the recent past. If it seems insane to cling to bad arguments like this, welcome to the world of science-minded YEC people. But tree rings... everyone has seen tree rings, and everyone knows that sometimes they're thicker and sometimes thinner. That's hard to argue away. The YEC camp tries: they point out we're assuming there's one ring per year. But when I realized that this really was their best argument, I had to give up YEC and find out how deep the rabbit hole went. About a year later, I was an atheist.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoIsn't dendrochronology prone to mismatches. Surely there's some variance in growth rates and masses, even in the same region, and the chances of a false match must get relatively high as you go back further. Like if your tree is at the sunward end of the glade, the trees shading it are felled and it taps a nearby ground water vein then surely it grows better that year and the growth ring then won't match the rest of the trees there so closely. What's a bit more incredible to me is that they have 7000 years of unbroken samples of wood from that one area? I know you can corroborate with other dating methods but the headline here is that this is pure dendro? Also, with dendrochronology, surely we have to have other artefacts (wooden pieces at least) that are dated only just later from the same area (ie planted before these timbers were cut) -- be interesting to know what they are?
- purplezooey 7y agodigging Well well well... look what we've found
- stevespang 7y ago7,000 years ? What about ancient ships pulled out of the sea - - some of them are much older ?
- xixixao 7y agoCzech Republic is in Central Europe, not Eastern Europe. Check wikipedia if you don’t believe me. Otherwise awesome!
- oska 7y agoNot to mention that it wasn't until the sixth paragraph before they even gave this more specific detail about the well's location. The journal article about this discovery [1] gets to the point right in the first sentence: > In 2018, during the construction of a motorway in the East Bohemian Region near the town of Ostrov (Czech Republic), archaeologists excavated a structure of a wooden water well lining with a square base area of 80 × 80 cm and 140 cm in height. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440320300066?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030544032... When, what, where and how all addressed right from the start.
- craz8 7y agoI’m a big fan of the British TV show Time Team that is now on Amazon Prime streaming In earlier seasons, they often recreate some of the artifacts of the age they are digging, and it’s fascinating to see some of that technology in action
- lostlogin 7y agoIt’s great. If you haven’t already stumbled on it, have a look for the tv series on Must Farm too. It’s really incredible. I think much or all of it is on YouTube. http://www.mustfarm.com/bronze-age-settlement/progress/archive/ http://www.mustfarm.com/bronze-age-settlement/progress/archi...