> 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.
I 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.
I think the rigidity of land ownership will be put to the test because of climate change.
I think for a lot of people, their deeded land is in eventually in terms of lat/long, and if the water swallows their land or their land falls in the sea, they're pretty much SOL. Depending on the rules of their locality, they may keep ownership of the land that's now underwater: it may effectively cease if underwater land is not subject to private ownership, or it may continue but not be of value because you may not be able to exclude other people from the land (or the waters above it) or develop it.
For some though, the deed may be defined in terms of the coastline, and then they're going to have an interesting legal battle. But this isn't without precedent; coastlines and waterways change and things defined against them adapt.
No country I am aware of uses lat/long for property deeds
My deed is for:
That portion of the Northeast quarter of Section X, Township Y North, Range Z East, W.M., in Blank County, Washington, described as follows: The Southwest quarter of the Southeast quarter of the Northeast quarter of said Section. Except for some bits that aren't relevant.
That's not in terms of lat/long per se, but the section and townships are effectively equivalent to lat/long. If the shoreline moves, my property doesn't. Technically everything is relative to this stone ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willamette_Stone
That's just another name for war.
No one "owns" land, they just protect and area that they claim is theirs.
>>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/
These solutions didn't come from the Stone Age, though.
Yes, but the OP was talking about now and in the future.
Parent comment was talking about what we might learn from Stone Age evidence. The Netherlands' technology and methods already exist.
> Our culture's migration will be entirely different.
yeah, weve got even better technology, itll be even less of a hassle
I’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.
We have government subsidized insurance in the USA on coastal properties. The rest of us will pay for it.
Much 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.
Its certainly not existential. If anything itll probably spur some kind of new invention wed be glad to have (think WW2 and fertilizer)
>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.
Possibly, 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.
There were some premodern societies where land possession was very fluid. But. There were plenty of others where land ownership worked almost exactly like today's systems. The oldest clay tablets talk about buying and selling land, systems of laws protecting land ownership, court cases involving land disputes, and surveyors laying out stone boundary markers that were meant to stay put for centuries. Incan quipu cords were records of who owned which piece of land. Asian rice terraces have been individually owned for thousands of years. This urban legend that private property is not an ancient concept is really wonky.
Even 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.
War has almost always been over resource control...
Rigid land ownership seems to be the source of a great deal of our troubles.
Now 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.
> 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
It's a small town of 17k and they expect to be done "moving" (really just building a whole new town 3km away) by 2100. That's not a scalable process.
For a more likely scenario, see Japan. Demographic crash (which is already happening all over the developed world) followed by mass migration to urban centers with economic forces dooming or favoring a city depending on it's circumstances (looking at you, Miami).
Maybe the current system is the historical balance.
I 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.
Yeah i agree. Theres a very thin layer between these ideas and outright crazy.
To 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.
That’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.
I 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.
You're painting a false picture of pre-Colombian history. Indigenous groups fought wars over control of territory, sometimes escalating to genocide.
The 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!"
Border 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/Limes_(Roman_Empire)
City 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.
Control 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.
This is not related to the story as such, but I live in Aarhus and this is the first I hear about it. I read three national news outlets and one specific to my local region of Østjylland a couple of times a day. I wonder if I should swap some of them. I know about black trashbags being thrown out of a window in the white house and then I find an actually interesting non-tech story about something happening right outside my house here on HN...
I've sometimes witnessed newsworthy events. It was very interesting to see what media made out of it. Local news was very inaccurate. In Big papers the stories were more like fiction - using some fact from the real event as inspiration. It was surprising that local papers can't even get simple local news right. Only once I think the local paper got into a little bit of trouble. They wrote some nagging critic about the performance of some school theatre - but the event had been cancelled...
I think it is safe to say that using newspapers to wrap some garbage is where their real value shines. Reading the garbage wrap is something that people do, but I wonder why?
Few things bother me more than the fact that most media nowadays (left and right) is simply profiteering on half-true/false narratives meant mostly to make people hate each other.
If you are someone who has stepped back and realized this, good for you.
No, I don't think there is a reason to switch.
This is not exactly news for people living in this area, you would have learned it at school.
There is a vast area between Denmark and UK called Doggerland where fishermen constantly being up mamooth tusks and stone age artifacts.
Doggerland is on the other side of Jutland. Aarhus is east.
Anecdotally I was not tought about Doggerland, and I don’t think it’s common knowledge.
I don't think most people realize just how much of ancient civilization is now under water. The oceans rose 120 meters since 10,000 years ago.
I've always dreamed of making a tool to help visualize this. It would likely be very dramatic.
Kids in Germany learn about the evolution of the Baltic Sea, it is hard to believe how different the whole area was like during and after the last ice age: https://www.geomar.de/en/discover/the-origin-of-the-baltic-s...
Current global warming prediction that I could find was 10m by 2300 if the ice shelves melt.
The researchers and their work with underwater archeology has been covered extensively in Danish media. I'll bet you will see Danish media cover this project at the end of the year when the project is finished and results are finalized.
You are overreacting.
You probably shouldnt expect the regular news media to cover ongoing archeological research unless there is some sensational find (like a viking ship in Havana).
But if you are interested in such research (and read Danish) I can recommend the magazine Skalk (skalk.dk).
Archaeologists tend to keep such expeditions fairly hush-hush until they’re done with their research. If they don’t, they run the risk of treasure hunters ploughing through their find, destroying information, at night.
So, the villagers likely knew there were people working on the beach, but may not have known they were archeologists or that they found a Stone Age settlement.
This settlement is out at sea, about 8m underwater.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37997640:
“Three Dutch World War Two ships considered war graves have vanished from the bottom of the Java Sea, the Dutch defence ministry says.
[…]
A report in the Guardian says three British ships have disappeared as well.
[…]
the three missing wrecks were located 100km (60 miles) off the coast of Indonesia, at a depth of 70m”
I never understood the war graves thing. On land, people go to great effort to recover the bodies and re-inter them in proper graves. In the sea, they get designated as graves and nothing can be salvaged.
> On land, people go to great effort to recover the bodies and re-inter them in proper graves.
There aren't many spots on land a body can wind up that are comparable in difficulty to access as thousands of feet underwater.
I know. But for those that can do salvage, what's the problem?
You'd have the same problem if you tried to salvage topsoil from a cemetery.
That makes it harder to protect against treasure hunters not easier.
Not exactly related to the story or to your comment, but: is Aarhus as happy and wonderful a place as all writing about it claims it is? I know immigrating to Denmark is nearly impossible, but I keep telling my partner that if (or when) the political situation in the US deteriorates sufficiently, Aarhus should be our destination -- that or Copenhagen.
Immigrating to Denmark is actually pretty easy if you have the right kind of education or get offered a job with a high enough (~$65000) pay. See the "Pay Limit schemes" and "Positive Lists" on this page: https://nyidanmark.dk/en-GB/You-want-to-apply/Work
And as a reference, $65000 would be considered a preposterously low salary for a new STEM graduate in Denmark.
Oh, interesting, I like those odds! Thanks for the correction!
I've lived in Aarhus for the past two and a half years, and can say that it is quite a nice city to live in. Very walkable, decent public transport (despite how much locals love to complain about it), plenty of restaurants, bars and other entertainment. I'd definitely recommend it.
Moving here was quite a bit easier for me though, as I'm an EU citizen.
wat do u think could be particular about the state of journalism in Aarhus or Denmark that could've caused this? i sometimes learn of interesting news about my country from external sources too that gets drowned out by more petty concerns in the social media news cycle
lol I hear you about the stories on Trump saturating all news. For 4 years it's all in going to be able to read here. It's like crack cocaine to US reporters. They won't be able to help themselves.
Will have to dig deep for interesting, non-Trump related US news.
> This is not related to the story as such, but I live in Aarhus and this is the first I hear about it. I read three national news outlets and one specific to my local region of Østjylland a couple of times a day. I wonder if I should swap some of them.
Something that's stuck with me is the time I walked into my local bookstore and found banners advertising that a new book by Orson Scott Card was already out and available for sale then and there.
Pretty much any other type of product (that I might buy) would have managed to publicize this to me well in advance of the day you could purchase the product.
To your question, I think the types of content delivered by the publishers you read are unlikely to change, and if you want to start hearing about new types of things, you'll need to find sources that cover them.
I saw (what turned out to be) this story in my android news feed but didn't click on it because the title was too heavily clickbaited.
Seems that we focus on all the crazy stuff Trump is doing, just like we did the last time he was president, depressing stuff. All of it.
There is this astroturf new news outlet in Poland called Infopiguła. I follow that, 9 minutes per day and that's it for politician news for me. I just ignore anything else, politicial or world, knowing I'll find out about it anyway if it's important.
But you can also just cut out news completely. There are edutainment channels on YouTube you could follow instead. You have hacker news. I watch other sources, just not "newsy" news.
There is one VERY IMPORTANT rule for choosing channels/podcasts/content to watch. I only watch people presenting with positive energy, in a calm manner. "Scary" way of presenting, or clickbaity titles give more followers, but I feel bad from watching them. Just like when I'm low I sometimes play an audiobook read by Eckhart Tolle. I wonder why it makes such a difference?
Sadly he's one of the most powerful people in the world and we can't ignore the crazy stuff he does.
Is one of those ideas connected to the other one? Historically, being one of the most powerful people in the world is not even a minor barrier to most people ignoring the things you do, crazy or otherwise.
Well yes, historically most people ignored most things, but it's 2025 now.
We can ignore everything that doesn't affect the way we act. Sure, you need to be informed enough to go "okay, I'm going to join La Résistance" when necessary, but other than that, you only need to focus on things in your sphere.
I would hope that a hundred thousand or so people might be encouraged to act differently at the voting booth next time around...
Historically there was no journalism and everybody ignored everything that was happening. Or do you mean in more modern history?
US political news has infected the entire world now sadly, esp after Global Trump Tariffs. Its like he wanted to make sure the whole world talks about him...
> US political news has infected the entire world now sadly
I'm not sure if it's just because of the two countries where I grew up (Sweden) and live now (Spain), but news here seems to have always been infected by US politics, for as long as I can remember. I remember being like 9 years old and the adults around the living-room table making drunk jokes about how dumb Georgie boy was for invading Afghanistan for example...
The truth is also that there are more noteworthy this happening in the world now. Previous world order has fallen.* New one is being formed. And Trump is kind of in the midst of it as the leader of the ex-hegemon country.
There will be much happening for the next decade or two. New wars, new alliances. Countries agreeing (or disagreeing) on new influence zones.
*The old hegemon (the country that leads the world and calls all the shots) has no power anymore to influence countries to do their bidding. Look at how Putin makes fun of Trump, playing a delay game, while he is trying to slowly win the war he lost (by not winning it in 3 days).
The USA is far and away the hegemon country. Pointing out verbiage from nuclear powers doesn't change that.
US culture imperialism.
Given human propensity to settle near bodies of water (exhibited even to this day), and the change in sea levels after the last ice age, the bulk of intra-ice age settlement artifacts are probably submerged within a relatively short distance from our existing coastlines. I would be personally interested in an effort to systematically investigate these areas.
A recent episode of The Ancients talks about how oil and mineral exploration companies have been sharing their seismic mapping data of Doggerland with archeologists:
https://shows.acast.com/the-ancients/episodes/doggerland-the...
Partnering with industries that are mapping areas is certainly the only cost effective way for academic to work in submerged landscapes:
https://archaeology.org/issues/march-april-2022/letters-from...
That’s awfully short sighted.
I was listening to Stefan Milo recently and he said something similar about how people might have lived along the coast of the Americas but because it was all mud and wood back then and is now covered in water, it'll mostly be lost at this point.
The sea level rose more than 120 meters in the last 20000 years, so it won't necessarily be that short distance, but I think at least it should be easy to calculate where to look.
An area with a half % slope could have an entire city below the waterline.
I think we're going to find that much like central and parts of South America, the extent of civilization has been vastly underestimated because Nature has covered over it.
Yes, even more recently the entire space between England and continental Europe used to be connected landmass, Doggerland [1]. It was home to Mesolithic people just 8,200 years ago.
[1] https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/doggerland...
It would be great to see more underwater archaeology, I'm sure there's a lot to find. But due to variations in local conditions it's really tough to systematically investigate: every site has to be treated individually. Plus doing anything underwater becomes at least 10× harder and more expensive. Human scientific divers can only work easily down to about 30m: anything significantly deeper requires commercial diving protocols, submersibles, or ROVs which raise the difficulty and cost even further.
I mean something more of the sort of a survey of sea floor and subsurface which would have been coastline at the glacial maxima, boats trawling multispectral scanners to identify candidate locations. There are a few different recent systems that push in the direction of this being feasible, e.g. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/cmhrp/news/usgs-designed-tool-...
The Australians have found a few sites between Australia and Papua New Guinea/Indonesia
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-28/underwater-ancient-ab...
This is not even the only stone age settlement under water in Denmark, there is at least one other I know of on Zealand, article in Danish about it: https://www.vikingeskibsmuseet.dk/fagligt/marinarkaeologi/ma...
And here's one nearby in modern-day Sweden https://www.forskning.se/2016/11/07/valbevarade-spar-fran-st...
Sorry can't find much in English or much about it at all. Iirc I once chanced upon a meet-some-archaeologists stall set up in a town square nearby and listened to an archaeologist talking about it and showing fancy maps and diagrams that really excited me, but none of that seems to have spilled online.
There are likely way more, given that continental Europe was much larger just 8,000 years ago: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/doggerland
The Gulf of Thailand to the Java Sea was dry land 16000 years ago. China's coastline was 100 miles out. New Guinea was fully connected to Australia. The Persian gulf was walkable.
Unfortunately most have probably been destroyed by dragnet fishing.
Agree strongly. Especially around the Mediterranean including the north coast of Africa and the southern horn of Africa. Ancient humans are known to have inhabited the southern tip of Africa into the last interglacial period, and human migration across and settlement in the occasionally green Sahara could explain some things.
This is probably especially an issue for early North American settlements if people crossing over during the ice age glacial maximum were traveling down the coasts right after coming over the Bering Land Bridge
Less than you'd think. The white sands footprints push things back far enough that virtually all coastal sites would have been destroyed by glaciers at the LGM. We're still trying to map out the specific details.
Maybe if you specifically care about "the first people in North America". But even if that was really 20kYA+ (wild that this is a serious possibility now!) there's still a vast gulf of more recent prehistory that we know so little about. And there's probably loads of fascinating evidence to uncover.
The Archeology of Europe‘s Drowned Landscapes: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-37367-2
"Sea levels rose by a global average of around 4.3 centimeters (1.7 inches) in the decade up to 2023."
There are seven-inch difference of sea level between Pacific and Atlantic ocean ... at the coastlines of Panama.
Makes you wonder what would happen if that was opened to a river instead of a canal.
Related BBC podcast "In Our Time" about Doggerland, a landmass which was inhabited about ~10k years ago, but is now submerged in the north sea.
Some say the inhabitants are still in their cars to this day..
Thats doggingland you’re thinking of.
Every time I read an article like this I end up in a rabbit hole of reading about ice ages, sea level changes, and how the human evolved throughout it. It’s mind boggling that only 20000 years ago the sea level was 120 meters lower and much of Northern Europe was covered in ice
I wonder how rapidly the change occurred - were the people aware of it happening? Did they have people saying “don’t listen to Yarg! These recent floods are just normal weather…”
Given that cultures on all (at the time) inhabited continents have flood myths, it seems very safe to say that they were aware of it.
It was a relatively sedate 2m per century a lot of the time, but there was one catastrophic Tsunami event called the Storegga Slide around 6200 BC that would have been pretty dramatic.
At that time time they were still hunter gatherers. So they might have been aware of their surroundings, but I presume not as much if they would have been a sedentary community.
The first communities started to settle more or less after the ice age ended, the sea level had risen and the planet had a more pleasant climate around 10000 years ago (source: I'm not a professional on this topic, just summarising what chatgpt tells me)
Why would hunter/gatherer cultures be less aware of their surroundings? They depend on them a lot more; need to know where to move next to find good food sources for the current season. Plus, it's not like these people haven't had sacred spaces that they visited, which requires knowing how to get there from wherever you currently are.
My uneducated guess is: probably not before writing was invented. Populations where nomadic, changes were likely slow and life expectancy was much shorter. With no record keeping it is unlikely they had means to notice the changes.
similar doomsday predictions were made and went unfulfilled im sure, much like modern times
Not far away, but partially preserved by the mudflat, lies Rungholt. A city of ~1000-1500 (some sources say 3000) inhabitants that was drowned in the Grote Mandrenke (1362 AD). That's a very big city in that time. In my childhood we were told, while wandering the tidal flat, that we should listen closely if we could hear the church bells under the mud. Only in 2023 the whereabouts of the sunken city were definitely confirmed and mapped. "Rungholt" probably means "wrong/low wood".
> "Rungholt" probably means "wrong/low wood".
This is an interesting point. Names are often older than they appear.
I have a book on Greek mythology that takes the position that Hercules, including his name, is considerably older than most of the Greek pantheon and should be thought of as a foreign import. But the form of his name ("Heracles") looks so natural in Ancient Greek, "glory of Hera" in the same way that you see other Greeks named Agathocles or Themistocles, that the mythology around the relationship between Hera and Heracles, which is extensive, must have developed from that apparent similarity.
Potentialities like this keep us on our toes when we look at names like "Rungholt".
Absolutely, though in this case it would be the most obvious translation, since it was a frisian settlement and "Rung" and "Holt" are both frisian words in use. It is possible that Rung here could mean stanchion/post (so for wood that makes strong posts), but unlikely so close to the sea, is it not?
I get what you mean, though. Here is a village called Großenwiehe, easy to be translated as "Great Consecration", and that was the commonly accepted meaning. Only much later it became apparent that "-wiehe" probably came from wighæ, so "Great Fortification". And in fact the old fortifications are still visible today.
One of the fun parts of genetic genealogy is that it's always exciting to see what old DNA turns up in archeological projects like these. It's a stretch to hope for, but wouldn't a paternal-line relative from Doggerland be cool...
> exciting to see what old DNA turns up in archeological projects like these.
While amazing advancements have taken place in ancient DNA analysis (esp. by David Reich at Harvard and his collaborators), I think all of these have been done from dry human remains on land, not submerged ones.
Does DNA in bones survive long term in seawater? Intuitively I think it would "wash away", or be hopelessly contaminated with other DNA in the water.
There's an episode[1] of In Our Time covering Doggerland. Recommend.
[1] https://open.spotify.com/episode/6jlHaJMCfRmsMsrqqLBY3O?si=1...
It's interesting to me that items are well preserved. I thought salt water was particularly damaging and corrosive.
The salt water part is not particularly surprising to me, after all we have plenty of wooden shipwrecks from the bronze age. Wood is preserved much better in the salt water than on the ground (unless it's a desert).
What I don't understand is how it survived the surf. 2 meters per century means that the place had spent a century in the surf line, and surf grinds everything into sand and dust and scatters what it can't grind. I would have understood a sudden flooding but this is surprising.
Corroding what? This is before metals were widely used.
not corroding, but all the wood/bone/soft materials basically disappear over 10k years. very little will be left
Salt water without oxygen and salt water with oxygen are different.
Not wrong, but TFA mentions "8.5k years" ago as the projected time for these findings. In cold, low-oxygen water, even wood & bone is preserved fairly well.
Stonge Age settlements can be found in numerous cities around the world, above water and bustling with contemporary human activity.
Do you mean just coincidental re-settlement of an old city or continuously inhabited settlements?
Former could definitely happen (and most likely did many times) but for the latter I never heard of any city from the stone age. Bronze age -- sure, but stone age? What are the examples?
*that we know about. Humans are maybe 100k years old, and look how good we are with wood even today. We surely had settlements all over the place made from wood that just rotted away.
On a related note, since the Paleolithic rarely comes up on HN, something that seems to rarely come up in English language content; Menhir [1] (Long stone) or standing stones, which are spread all across Europe, some very elaborately decorated, others with sight holes cut in them, others extremely large, i.e., 30-40 feet tall before they were knocked over by the invasive meme, Christianity.
They are found from Portugal all the way to Siberia, but very little is known about them following the Christian meme eradicating the indigenous cultures through the many purges and programs from 300CE on.
There are some references that imply at least in some places they were a kind of connection to the afterlife and ancestors that would turn into birds that would perch on top of the standing stone, something that is still part of indigenous beliefs and practices in parts of Asia. It's basically the indigenous culture of the Native Europeans that middle eastern Christianity destroyed and eradicated like it destroyed and eradicated the Native Americans and so many other native people and cultures around the world.
The Wikipedia article suggest that they could have been erected as far back as 6000-7000 years ago - so older than Stonehenge, and therefor also older than Celtic culture. The Wikipedia article suggest that early Christians defaced and destroyed some of the stones, but knowledge about the people who erected those stones was lost way earlier than 300CE.
I just used Wikipedia as a quick reference in English. There is clear evidence that the practices of ancestors worship and their ancient practices involving these stones was directly linked to Christian persecution, including documented examples of the progroms against the indigenous Europeans starting immediately following crusades and effectively being part of them.
Can you provide some references to that. Also I've never before heard about Christian crusades earlier than the late 11th century one started by pope Urban II. Perhaps you are thinking about peoples like the Wends in Arkona (Slavic "pagan" tribe in northeastern Germany), who were force converted into Christianity in the 12th century. If they somehow were worshiping the stones in question, then that sounds more like retrofitting existing ancient monuments into their own religion, rather than keeping some ancient knowledge alive.
Maybe you also heard about an erdstall[0] which are old tunnel systems around Europe, often the entry is accompanied by an standing stone with a hole in it. Christianity did the same here. There is one case where they filled up the tunnel and build an monastery over it. Excavations and carbon dating revealed quite old objects dating between many thousand years. Some stones especially the ones in the entry area are big and heavy cut outs, the tunnels are often cut into stone. It’s still an unsolved mystery.
Heinrich Kusch[1] and his wife have done very interesting work regarding this.
0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdstall 1. https://www.unterwelt-kusch.com/forschung/erdstallforschung/
Yes, I am aware of it, but thought I would limit the topic. It’s amazing when you start building a mental model of just how pervasive and expansive this whole system and lost, destroyed culture gets. I do find most explanations for the various “tunnels” rather dubious, especially the more “modern” seemingly medieval ones, but it’s all a very interesting topic. The indigenous European history and culture is immensely suppressed.
I wonder sometimes if the people of Gobleki Tepe were just oddly prophetic or if cultural erasure has been going on a hell of a lot longer than we think it has.
Something I only learned well into my adulthood is that one of the reasons you can dig down and find the foundations of one, sometimes two different cultures below the feet of cities is that they used a lot of mud bricks, and when the house started to molder and fail they would pound it flat and start over, not haul the whole thing away. So a couple times a generation a neighborhood would be higher than it was before.
And the center of the city would be on a hill, and keep getting higher (even if expansion kept the slope roughly the same). Over time it would become more and more work to get to the middle of a city from the plains surrounding it.
What about the indigenous people the guys with the menhirs killed? Why are menhir guys indigenous, but whoever killed them, not indigenous?
Quote me the passage where he said they weren’t?
The question is whatever time period people discuss, somehow the indigenous people is whoever was there exactly before the time they mean. But people have moved around all through history and killed each other the whole way through so it's always strange. Almost as a rule the "original" indigenous people were killed by the "current" indigenous people sometimes not that long ago before the period under discussion. It think it's better to just use the terms for both groups. Also because it's a bit weird to relegate the conquered group to just "the indigenous", they have a name too.
I understand using the shorthand for encounters of two groups with very disparate technology knowledge like for example during the Discoveries period but when it's so long ago and people had access to "same" stuff it's a bit weird. My comment isn't a slight on the less powerful people it's weirdness with the term.
its implied in the definition of the word "indigenous"
I think you are seeing this a little too 2d. The reason the Christian meme spread so well is more complex than that. A codified belief system written down, the thought of a God that loves and cares about you, a path to redemption and forgiveness for sin or mistakes, these are just some of the reasons that it has been so successful. It wasn’t always just forced on people although there was that too. It’s just a really good meme and great story when you get to the heart of it. The people meeting in secret when Christianity started and risking their life to do so weren’t forced into it at all. Like capitalism, Christianity fits a lot of human needs and desires that are hard coded in humans.
> Christianity fits a lot of human needs and desires that are hard coded in humans.
Which version are you talking about because there is no one definition, Christians cant even agree amongst themselves about Christianity. Anyone is free to make up their own religion, include the bible in the lore, and call it "Christian".
There definitely was a moment when Christianity was a secretive cult ostensibly fuelled by brotherly love, but certainly by the time of Constantine it had become a major political force.
My impression is that Christianity took over Europe more for political reasons than the good story. There were strong incentives for pagan rulers to "convert", and force it onto the populace.
I agree that the good story is key to its staying power.
[stub for offtopicness]