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"We have been able to determine the age of the church by the growth rings of its timbers." Is this a mis-translation? How can growth rings show anything other

"We have been able to determine the age of the church by the growth rings of its timbers." Is this a mis-translation? How can growth rings show anything other than the age of the tree when it died?

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
No, it's not a mistranslation. Most people use freshly-cut trees when building things out of wood, rather than years-old fallen timbers. So the date of when the tree died is the date of the building (with few, rare exceptions).
jakear 4y ago
The gaps between rings are affected by the climate and can be used to find the years when a given pics of timber “accumulated” around the tree, by piecing together a timeline of gaps across many trees harvested over a long period.
numbsafari 4y ago
Dendrochronology… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology
googlryas 4y ago
Tree rings in similar ecosystems will follow similar patterns. There's more to it than this, but imagine if each ring is thick or thin, indicating a rainy year or a dry year. Now, imagine you cut down a tree. You see that it has 122 rings, meaning it was born 122 years ago, or 1900. Then you go look in the same forest and you find a dead tree, you don't know when it was born or when it died, but you see that the 20 outermost rings thick-thick-thin-thick-thin-thin-etc ring pattern matches the innermost pattern on the tree you know the date range of. So that means the last 20 years of the unknown tree's life overlapped with the first 20 years of the known tree's life. So that means your unknown tree died in 1920. You count the unknown tree things and see there were 140 rings, so that means that tree was born 140 years before 1920 - in 1780. Then, you find another tree that has overlaps with this now known tree, and you keep daisy chaining your information backwards. With this method, you can go back thousands of years, if you have enough preserved trees or wood available to you. Then, you can take any random piece of tree, and if enough rings are present, you can tell exactly when that tree was growing. If you see that every tree your building is made out of stopped growing in the year 1300, then you can be fairly confident that the building was built around or slightly later than 1300(since most people aren't going to let good lumber just sit around for centuries).

"We have been able to determine the age of the church by the growth rings of its timbers." Is this a mis-translation? How can growth rings show anything other than the age of the tree when it died?

AnimalMuppet 4y ago

No, it's not a mistranslation. Most people use freshly-cut trees when building things out of wood, rather than years-old fallen timbers. So the date of when the tree died is the date of the building (with few, rare exceptions).

jakear 4y ago

The gaps between rings are affected by the climate and can be used to find the years when a given pics of timber “accumulated” around the tree, by piecing together a timeline of gaps across many trees harvested over a long period.

numbsafari 4y ago

Dendrochronology… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology

googlryas 4y ago

Tree rings in similar ecosystems will follow similar patterns. There's more to it than this, but imagine if each ring is thick or thin, indicating a rainy year or a dry year. Now, imagine you cut down a tree. You see that it has 122 rings, meaning it was born 122 years ago, or 1900. Then you go look in the same forest and you find a dead tree, you don't know when it was born or when it died, but you see that the 20 outermost rings thick-thick-thin-thick-thin-thin-etc ring pattern matches the innermost pattern on the tree you know the date range of. So that means the last 20 years of the unknown tree's life overlapped with the first 20 years of the known tree's life. So that means your unknown tree died in 1920. You count the unknown tree things and see there were 140 rings, so that means that tree was born 140 years before 1920 - in 1780. Then, you find another tree that has overlaps with this now known tree, and you keep daisy chaining your information backwards. With this method, you can go back thousands of years, if you have enough preserved trees or wood available to you. Then, you can take any random piece of tree, and if enough rings are present, you can tell exactly when that tree was growing. If you see that every tree your building is made out of stopped growing in the year 1300, then you can be fairly confident that the building was built around or slightly later than 1300(since most people aren't going to let good lumber just sit around for centuries).