7k-year-old well is the oldest wooden structure ever discovered

https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/this-7-000-year-old-well-is-the-oldest-wooden-structure-ever-discovered-archeologists-say-1.4815023

by shafkathullah • 6 years ago

281 130 6 years ago

ctvnews.ca

adamnemecek3• 6 years ago

Czech Republic is Central Europe. This is like saying that Kansas is West Coast because it's west of Mississippi.

meddlepal• 6 years ago

Everything east of the German/Austrian/Italian borders is usually considered Eastern Europe.

adamnemecek3• 6 years ago

Well it's considered that incorrectly.

n4r93• 6 years ago

The 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• 6 years ago

By whom? Western Europeans? Geographically Czech Rep is in Central Europe, as is Poland and few other countries.

masklinn4• 6 years ago

No. 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.

marton783• 6 years ago

By whom? Citation needed.

kgran• 6 years ago

It'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• 6 years ago

I 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.

gshdg• 6 years ago

AFAIK 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.

adamnemecek3• 6 years ago

Right, people living in those countries will tell you that it's Central Europe. What other cultural/delineation is there?

rozab• 6 years ago

It's a cold war thing. Czechia was part of the Eastern Bloc for 40 of the last 70 years. And is also situated in the east of Europe.

I don't really understand the controversy

akavi• 6 years ago

Ohio'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• 6 years ago

The 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.

Shacklz2• 6 years ago

I'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.

n4r93• 6 years ago

The 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

Mikeb852• 6 years ago

Central Europe is basically Catholic Slavs. Orthodox Slavs are east European.

masklinn4• 6 years ago

"Central" europe is not a recent (or local) classification at all.

It's just that for about 50 years there was an overriding east/west classification which overrode the old.

Historically, eastern europe was the areas where the orthodox church had primacy (north of the black sea). Basically the european part of the Soviet Union proper excluding the baltic states.

cagenut• 6 years ago

I had some Hungarian coworkers that similarly said they were "central european" not eastern.

eesmith• 6 years ago

Which time zone are you in? (Not that it's indicative - Spain is hardly "Central Europe". The point is, you've almost certainly heard "Central Europe" before, in a time zone context for Switzerland)

samatman2• 6 years ago

Kansas 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• 6 years ago

I 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.

NoodleIncident• 6 years ago

The meaning of the word "coast" makes this a pointless comparison

aggie2• 6 years 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.

rhacker• 6 years ago

I definitely agree (I mean in general - not that you specifically have a narrow view). As a people we keep deciding that ancient life = stupid / moronic. If we were alive back then, would we not consistently have that same critical thinking, technical solution oriented brain when confronted with the problems of the day. Isn't it possible too that the percentage of people that had to come up with innovative ideas was much higher than it is today? So we may have had a population that was more adept at solutions, working together, and creating than we do now. It's just that the toolkit and problem set was different.

Now we still have members of society that share in this innovation, but I am curious if we're down to 0.00001% of society that really thinks through things vs just being handed bread and work.

bluGill• 6 years ago

I think of it the opposite way: most of the easy stuff has been invented already, so 99.99999% of the population needs to work before there can be a new invention.

6510• 6 years ago

In the generalized sense people got a lot dumber and less creative over the last few decades. If we assume linearity our ancient ancestors must have been brilliant renaissance men. It makes good sense too! Like this we are much more dependent on technology and on others. Most of us cant grow crops and our [specialized] schedule is so full we need others to make simple things like pizza. Socially we are now lacking but in productivity we are [as-if] one giant tightly knitted organism.

ivanbakel• 6 years ago

You can take something philosophical from it, but I think these discoveries are common largely because they are the only kind of discovery you could make.

"Neolithic peoples behave as expected" is hardly a good headline - and though I don't know much about archeology, it seems like archeologists would be scientific enough to not attribute behaviours and technologies to Neolithic cultures for which there was no evidence.

Considering as well that the past is poorly documented (especially wood), discovering something not already known may be easier than we think.

aggie2• 6 years ago

That's a good point about what is a form of survivorship bias in science and journalism, but there are not just cases of "we hadn't seen this technology until later" but also cases of "we had seen a lack of this technology later".

I'll admit my thinking on this is very seat of the pants. I'm sure historians, archeologists, etc. think about this plenty.

mjw1007• 6 years ago

There's often some poor journalism involved too.

If archaeologists have only come across tool X in cultures which engage in (say) year-round agriculture, they'll fairly naturally come to a weakly-held belief along the lines of "cultures which invent agriculture tend to also invent tool X soon afterwards".

Then evidence comes along of hunter-gatherers with tool X, and someone trying to make a rather dry press release into something more exciting writes "archaeologists are stunned because they previously believed that hunter-gatherers were foolish primitives who couldn't possibly have invented tool X".

londons_explore• 6 years ago

The thing that interests me is why these people decided to use their carpentry skills at the bottom of a well like this.

Normally, one uses advanced carpentry techniques to look nice, or to make it strong and light. None of those are a restriction at the bottom of a well - Why not just use a thicker bit of wood and a basic unpinned miter joint held in place by soil?

When you're carving wood by hand, why go to the extra effort of fancy complex joints for no gain?

dsfyu404ed3• 6 years ago

When you're carving wood by hand, why go to the extra effort of fancy complex joints for no gain?

Because a bunch of complex joints are likely less labor intensive than using larger material. Remember, these "planks" were made by hand. It's the difference between spending an afternoon shoveling dirt or spending an afternoon fixing a tractor to shovel the same amount of dirt in 5min.

newnewpdro• 6 years ago

It's not like we don't embellish and overbuild high priority state of the art facilities today.

A well back then may have been quite a proud and precious thing you point your best builders at, considering it was the life source for the area village/farms.

radu_floricica4• 6 years ago

For example we were pretty close to the industrial revolution 2000 years ago. It was easily at an 1800s level, before it collapsed.

mars4rp• 6 years ago

could you explain or point to somewhere, this is really interesting.

nradov• 6 years ago

Helen Dale wrote an interesting series of alternate history novels set in an industrialized Roman Empire 2000 years ago. Archimedes survived the Second Punic War to revolutionize Roman science. Then Stoic philosophers led a movement that abolished slavery, thus giving an incentive to use machinery. Seems plausible, but who knows?

https://quillette.com/2018/03/27/romans-ever-done-us-discuss...

fennecfoxen• 6 years ago

No. The Romans never would have allowed an industrial revolution. They knew all about aqueducts, but they didn't even bother using water power to mill grain, because that would have undermined too many powerful people whose economic might was backed by the slave economy.

The whole "Dark Ages were backwards after Rome collapsed" story overall is a historical meme pushed by motivated reasoning and poorly backed by facts. Even "collapse" is dubious. If Rome was really on the cusp of industrial revolution, why didn't Byzantium bother to finish the job any time in the next 1,000 years?

kazinator• 6 years ago

Just one clever person can invent a lot by themselves.

cheese42422• 6 years ago

To 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-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.

lmilcin2• 6 years ago

I 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.

JoeAltmaier• 6 years ago

Toilets!

Ceramic toilets can last for millions of years in the geologic record. Our midden heaps will contain billions of them. That could be enough to ensure our place in archeological history.

kragen11• 6 years ago

Probably colonialism is partly to blame; to justify colonialist policies, Europeans engaged in motivated reasoning exaggerating the technological advantages they did in fact possess over other cultures (many of them Neolithic, despite existing up to the present day), and using them to justify claims of superiority not merely material but also intellectual and genetic. (A modern form of this is making fun of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, creationists, Apollo conspiracy theorists, Juggalos, and 9/11 truthers, and occasionally engaging in more violent rhetoric toward them.) It's to be expected that such politically-motivated claims wouldn't hold up as our knowledge deepens.

There's also the issue that, as long as our research isn't too shoddy, it's sort of unidirectional. Once you have found an example of Neolithic groove joints or whatever, you've established that at least some people at the time could make groove joints, even if you didn't think they could before. Going in the other direction would require showing that the original research was Piltdown-Man-style fakery or something.

lostlogin3• 6 years ago

A modern form of this is making fun of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, creationists, Apollo conspiracy theorists, Juggalos, and 9/11 truthers, and occasionally engaging in more violent rhetoric toward them.

What do you suggest is done with them?

speedplane• 6 years ago

to justify colonialist policies, Europeans engaged in motivated reasoning exaggerating the technological advantages they did in fact possess over other cultures ... and using them to justify claims of superiority not merely material but also intellectual and genetic. (A modern form of this is making fun of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, creationists, Apollo conspiracy theorists, Juggalos, and 9/11 truthers, and occasionally engaging in more violent rhetoric toward them.)

Nice try equating colonists with conspiracy debunkers, but the analogy does not hold up. The problem with colonists wasn't their arrogance or personal sense of superiority, it was their violent exploitation of others for their own benefit.

Sitting in an armchair smugly looking down on others isn't very nice, but it's far better than getting up from your armchair and murdering/enslaving/exploiting the people you look down upon.

People who debunk conspiracy theorists use argumentation, humiliation, and appeals to authority. Sometimes they do so improperly. But they aren't colonizing anything.

pjc50• 6 years ago

Probably colonialism is partly to blame; to justify colonialist policies, Europeans engaged in motivated reasoning exaggerating the technological advantages they did in fact possess over other cultures (many of them Neolithic, despite existing up to the present day), and using them to justify claims of superiority not merely material but also intellectual and genetic.

Yes ...

(A modern form of this is making fun of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, creationists, Apollo conspiracy theorists, Juggalos, and 9/11 truthers, and occasionally engaging in more violent rhetoric toward them.)

... no?

On the one hand you have things like aboriginal knowledge that were useful and valid for providing the needs of survival in the context in which they found themselves, but is dismissed simply for being different. On the other you have people who are wrong and in ways that threaten their survival and society.

tzs• 6 years ago

It seems these kinds of discoveries -- people were more advanced at some point in time than previously believed -- happen quite frequently.

I think part of it is that we operate on a different timescale now.

We are used to being able to build big things quickly, or make things that require precise machining quickly. And so of course we can also build small things, or make less sophisticated things, even quicker.

If it would take a lifetime to build something or make something, we don't do it. Pretty much everything we need can be done way quicker than that.

We forget that for many of these things what makes them difficult is the doing them quickly part. If you are willing to take decades or even lifetimes, those things can be done with much simpler technology than we are using.

For example, I remember reading about some sort of geared mechanism from a couple thousand or more years ago. I don't think it was the Antikythera mechanism, but I don't remember for sure. Anyway, it had gears to a precision that was not seen afterwards until something like the 15th or 16th century, and so many people wonder how such ancient people could have produced such a thing.

But precise gears aren't hard if you have time. All you need is some kind of fine file that can work on the metal you want to make your gears out of, and someone who can spend a lot of time doing a "file a little bit/check the fit" loop.

You might need a workforce of 100 apprentices working for a lifetime to make something this way, and so those things are are. We see the scarcity of such items in the archaeological record, and unjustly assume it is because they didn't know how to make them.

rebolek• 6 years ago

Precise gears are hard, as you need a metal that is good enough for your gears and tools to craft that metal. It's not just about time.

aksss• 6 years ago

I find a similar analogy in the idea of the bronze age vs iron age. It's not as if people in the bronze age didn't know how to make iron or even steel goods; but it was really, really damn expensive. It just wasn't cost effective until they found new methods of production and/or new energy sources to fuel those methods of production.

Spooky23• 6 years ago

I think that the big thing that is hard to fathom is how many fewer people were alive in those days, and how that smaller scale impacted life.

US Census estimates that there were 5-20M people 7,000 years ago. People tend to settle in similar places, so the stuff left over tends to disappear in normal circumstances.

mc32• 6 years ago

I’m not sure that’s wrong.

I think it’s prudent to only assert what we believe we have enough evidence to assert with commensurate certainty.

Surely that means we’ll underestimate historic abilities and skills but it’s better than presume things based on “no-evidence” because then it’s speculation without ground facts.

imtringued4• 6 years ago

The modern reader also makes the assumption that technological progress is global. It is very possible that the top 10 "cities" are centuries ahead of rural communities but they do not leave as much evidence because of their smaller numbers.

It's easy to see that this is still true today. Not everyone is living a first wold life. India may have a billion people but they aren't anywhere close to the living standards in USA or Europe.

rafaelvasco2• 6 years ago

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;

scardycat• 6 years ago

I 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.

rafaelvasco2• 6 years ago

Yeah, 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;

annoyingnoob• 6 years ago

I 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.

kiliantics• 6 years ago

Well 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• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

nobody wants to hear about your ancient wood

kragen11• 6 years ago

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.

twic2• 6 years 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.

kragen11• 6 years ago

#factsthatmakeyoufeelold

K0SM0S2• 6 years ago

Thanks 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.

dreen• 6 years ago

I think many ancient cultures seem empty because they wrote on things like paper that doesnt last that long. We know a fair bit about sumeria and mesopotamia thanks to cuneiform on tablets that can lie in a ground for millenia.

And since we use electrons and stuff like that we too, will seem an empty age.

anticodon• 6 years ago

I am afraid that civilization will collapse. Third world war will be devastating. It would be difficult to restart civilization after it because we already consumed all easily available mineral resources.

This will become a problem even if there would be no war. Energy resources had almost finished, and no viable alternatives were found.

imtringued4• 6 years ago

7000 years in the future our greatest inventions will be gone without a single trace. Steel corrodes, our buildings crumble and nobody will be able to read the data on our HDD or SSDs. This well only survived because of special circumstances. Can we perhaps create a preservative environment that will keep our own history accessible 7000 years in the future?

oliyoung• 6 years ago

Also around the time that the Gunditjmara were farming the Budj Bim area of southern Australia https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1577/

solarengineer• 6 years ago

Thanks for relating things as you have and putting things in perspective. We do understand things better when we view them in certain contexts.

I find Tim Urban’s post on time scale to be similarly eye opening and thought provoking:

https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.h...

mikhailfranco• 6 years ago

Göbekli Tepe (700km from Çatalhöyük) had already been abandoned for over 2,000 years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

incompatible• 6 years 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

physicles• 6 years ago

Dendrochronology 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.

pbhjpbhj2• 6 years ago

Isn'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• 6 years ago

digging

Well well well... look what we've found

xixixao• 6 years ago

Czech Republic is in Central Europe, not Eastern Europe.

Check wikipedia if you don’t believe me.

Otherwise awesome!

oska• 6 years ago

Not 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/S030544032...

When, what, where and how all addressed right from the start.

craz8• 6 years ago

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

lostlogin3• 6 years ago

It’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/archi...

7k-year-old well is the oldest wooden structure ever discovered

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