> 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.
"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.
Most 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;
I’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
Czech Republic is in Central Europe, not Eastern Europe.
Check wikipedia if you don’t believe me.
Otherwise awesome!
Czech Republic is Central Europe. This is like saying that Kansas is West Coast because it's west of Mississippi.
digging
Well well well... look what we've found
7000 aint got shit on 300,000. 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.
7,000 years ? What about ancient ships pulled out of the sea - - some of them are much older ?
> 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
One 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... — 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-y... 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.