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> As today’s world faces rising sea levels driven by climate change, the researchers hope to shed light on how Stone Age societies adapted to shifting coastline
by jl6 1y ago
> As today’s world faces rising sea levels driven by climate change, the researchers hope to shed light on how Stone Age societies adapted to shifting coastlines more than eight millennia ago.
Unfortunately I don't expect there is any particularly reusable solution to be uncovered. Ancient peoples facing rising tides almost certainly just walked a bit inland and built new huts there. They probably thought nothing of it. They were a far more physically mobile culture, without great dependence on immense, immovable infrastructure - nor on rigid land ownership rules.
Our culture's migration will be entirely different.
- ehnto 1y agoRigid land ownership seems to be the source of a great deal of our troubles.
- inglor_cz 1y agoNow try non-rigid land ownership, where land and buildings can be expropriated in the name of nebulous greater good. Been there, done that, it is worse than the alternative. People will stop cultivating anything, because why bother if a random officer can just take things from you at will. Western regulations about land appropriation are strict for a reason, and they always require just compensation for a reason. That is the only way to prevent powerful people from just grabbing what they want, cloaking the thieving act in word bubbles about common prosperity.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- diggan 1y ago> Now try non-rigid land ownership, where land and buildings can be expropriated in the name of nebulous greater good. Maybe there could be some balance instead of "Either everything can be owned, or nothing is!". It isn't impossible to move cities if it's really needed and someone is footing the bill, even in a democratic Western country that is famously highly regulated, like Sweden. Since a mine in the north is expanding, they have to move the entire city (paid by the mine's operator in this case), building by building, which of course isn't without complaints, but it's a thing that actively being done as we speak. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cde3xp4xlw9o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cde3xp4xlw9o
- inglor_cz 1y agoI don't really mind takings for very good compensation. If you want to uproot people in the name of X (say, a railway that cannot really change its path, or a very valuable mine), pay them some low multiple of the current market price of their property and off they go. The part with the market price helps them buy property elsewhere and the extra part is sugar to compensate for injured feelings. (It is not easy to abandon a home if your family lived there for generations, and we should account for that.) But such situations are relatively rare. Perhaps the mine in Kiruna is worth it and the corporation/government can pay for the compensations. Same for vital ground communications (highways, railways). If it isn't, though, then let the ore in the ground and let the people live where they built their homes. Most of the time I hear ideas about "flexible ownership" etc., upon further discussion, the person starts talking about outright expropriation from people they don't like.
- sentinelsignal 1y agoYeah i agree. Theres a very thin layer between these ideas and outright crazy.
- ehnto 1y agoTo defend myself a little, I never said rigid land ownership was not still what I would prefer. But tying significant value to land and allowing individuals to hold it has some downsides.
- sentinelsignal 1y agoyeah i see what you mean. There are only trade offs.
- mc32 1y agoThat’s a limited population being moved for high value resources. This option does not scale for large populations. It’s easier and cheaper to rebuild.
- 1y ago
- gosub100 1y agoThe concept of borders is relatively new. Up until a few hundred years ago, countries simply didn't have them. Battles would start simply because "we saw those other guys again! Stop em!"
- inglor_cz 1y agoControl of borders was nowhere near as tight as today, given how underdeveloped technology was compared to today, and in some places (deserts, forests) the border was more of a very wide strip of no-mans land than just a line. But places like the Roman Empire absolutely had "hard" demarcations in some places, not just standard country borders, but also internal borders. For example, when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he legally crossed into Italy by doing so and thus triggered a war. Rome itself had pomerium, a city demarcation whose crossing had legal consequences as well. If you entered the Roman Empire peacefully, and you had something to tax or apply duties to, you would be confronted with officials in the closest suitable place. That sounds like border to me.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoCity walls and later regional walls are some of the oldest structures that still exist (some still in use today after 1000s of years) Borders are very much not a new concept. Nations are new-ish but not the idea of owned and protected land.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ahazred8ta 1y agoBorder walls and dykes are quite an ancient concept. Yours. Ours. Keep out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasanian_defense_lines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasanian_defense_lines -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limes_(Roman_Empire) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limes_(Roman_Empire)
- metamet 1y agoI don't think it's fair to pretend the only options humans have are the extremes of private and state ownership. Greed and the weight of capitalism under rail expansion in the US completely obliterated at least 15-20k years worth of Indigenous "non-rigid land ownership", being the apex system of human power consolidation and all that. Native American nations and tribes didn't "own" land in the way that European colonizers did, under a doctrine of private property, written deeds and legal systems. Even under tribal territories, access was fluid. America and its land was held communally by tribes and was generally understood in terms of use rights. If your nation, family or tribe cultivated a field, you had rights to that field as long as you actively used it. And stewardship of the land was seen as something to care for, not a commodity. And this was the way things were in America up until a few hundred years ago.
- nradov 1y agoYou're painting a false picture of pre-Colombian history. Indigenous groups fought wars over control of territory, sometimes escalating to genocide.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- welferkj 1y ago>nor on rigid land ownership rules. Land ownership was formalized about as soon as there was a reason for anyone to own land - i.e., as soon as any given people started doing pastoralism and agriculture.
- inglor_cz 1y agoEven without formal land ownership, pre-modern societies were keenly aware about who exploits which scarce natural resources. There is just no way to cut scarcity out of human life experience. For hunters and gatherers, it helped that their population density was relatively low. But there was still competition for good hunting grounds.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoWar has almost always been over resource control...
- adamlett 1y agoPossibly, but what we think of as land ownership today — land as a commodity that can be freely bought and sold, and as something that gives the owner near-total control over how it’s used — is actually a fairly recent development. In feudal Europe, land could only be “owned” by a lord, and even then it was bound up in obligations both to their superiors and to the peasants working it. There were all sorts of customary rights layered on top: in Denmark, for example, nobles had a monopoly on hunting and timber in their forests, but peasants still had rights to gather firewood, berries, nuts, mushrooms, and so on. Village fields were also often organized under the open-field system, where land was divided into strips. Each household got a mix of good and poor soil, and in some places those strips were even periodically reallocated to keep things fair. It’s a very different picture from modern private property.
- mrangle 1y ago[flagged]
- VeryNosy 1y ago[flagged]
- eigart 1y agoI think the rigidity of land ownership will be put to the test because of climate change.
- gadders 1y ago[flagged]
- survirtual 1y agoHow much of other people's tax dollars do you expect to spend to safeguard the bad purchases of land (soon to be water) owners? Rising sea levels aren't new, it's ancient. Buying coastal properties always carries risk. Society at large should not have to keep bailing out people who make poor decisions like this.
- gadders 1y ago>>Society at large should not have to keep bailing out people who make poor decisions like this. I get your point, and I agree to a certain extent, but do you apply this same approach to other bad decisions such as EG overeating causing obesity, drug taking etc?
- pdabbadabba 1y agoI'm honestly not sure which point you're making in this thread. Are you saying that government should somehow make people whole for the loss of their coastal property? Or are you making the point that the government has no business interfering with the property rights of others? There seems to be a tension here, because I don't see how you could do the latter without also doing the latter — i.e., making coastal property owners whole requires taking someone else's property (either money or real property) and giving it to them. Or maybe you'd propose that we resettle them onto federal lands? (Even in that case, taxpayers bear a significant opportunity cost.)
- gadders 1y ago
- skeezyboy 1y ago> Our culture's migration will be entirely different. yeah, weve got even better technology, itll be even less of a hassle
- johndunne 1y agoI’m not sure the people who own property next to ‘at risk’ coastlines will agree. As a whole, society may continue but there’s a lot of people at risk of losing their property as a result of rising sea levels. Probably decades from now.
- plasticchris 1y agoWe have government subsidized insurance in the USA on coastal properties. The rest of us will pay for it.
- barbazoo 1y agoMuch more expensive next time as we're not only subsidizing people's insurance but subsidizing moving them somewhere else. Orders of magnitude higher cost I imagine.
- skeezyboy 1y agoIts certainly not existential. If anything itll probably spur some kind of new invention wed be glad to have (think WW2 and fertilizer)
- gadders 1y ago>>Unfortunately I don't expect there is any particularly reusable solution to be uncovered. Mad that people can write statements like this when the Netherlands exists: https://www.netherlands-tourism.com/netherlands-sea-level/ https://www.netherlands-tourism.com/netherlands-sea-level/
- amelius 1y agoThese solutions didn't come from the Stone Age, though.
- gadders 1y agoYes, but the OP was talking about now and in the future.
- atombender 1y agoParent comment was talking about what we might learn from Stone Age evidence. The Netherlands' technology and methods already exist.
- graemep 1y agoI think the problem is researches feel under pressure to make research of immediate relevance to get funding etc. Its value is it tells us about people and history. There are far more relevant examples in how more recent cultures dealt with things like land being lost to erosion or desertification or shifting rivers etc.
- danielscrubs 1y ago”Unfortunately I don't expect there is any particularly reusable solution to be uncovered.” Scientist might write that in a PR piece or a grant proposal but I can guarantee you that no one thinks that.