Archaeologists discover and crack a thousand-year-old chicken egg | Hacker News Reader

Archaeologists discover and crack a thousand-year-old chicken egg

smithsonianmag.com

46 pointsdrdee22 comments

> While much of the egg’s contents leaked out, some of the yolk remained, and the researchers preserved it for future DNA analysis.

I'm amazed there was still yolk in there! Although I'm sure it's probably decomposed I would still love to see a picture of 1k year old egg yolk!

I sometimes wonder: shouldn't archaeologists wait before cracking open specimens until science has advanced to the point where we can make much better measurements, perhaps even without cracking open the specimens and spoiling them in the process? And how do you determine the best time to do so?

They generally do. As per the article this time was an accident.

Utterly amazing that the contents were still liquid. I hope we learn some interesting things from the DNA!

Haaretz (deep-linked) has more details that some have brought up.

"Asked what it’s like to excavate a thousand-year-old toilet, Nagorsky explains that in the interim, the waste became dirt. They’re simply digging in dirt. It’s fine."

Dating of the egg is so far incidental, done by relational strata:

"That lamp was of a type only made in the late Abbasid period, Nagorsky explains – about 1,000 years ago. And thusly, they dated the chicken egg to that time."

High-res image with the crack(s): https://img.haarets.co.il/img/1.9888354/233647132.jpg

No description of the yolk yet that I could see.

I wonder how many things are still stored uncracked waiting for future measuring instruments.

All I can think about is the smell. Both of the "soft human waste" that was surrounding the egg, and the contents of the egg.

Likely dessicated and low on volatiles.

Might spring back to odiferous life if reconstituted, however!

So the egg really did come first after all.

well yeah, but we knew that long ago. fish, dinosaurs, etc.

and this one was long after chickens.

No one has ever interpreted the question as "which came first, the chicken or the fish egg?"

It's not interesting even when you don't intentionally misinterpret it. If a chicken egg is an egg from which a chicken will hatch, then the egg came first by definition. If a chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken, then the chicken came first by definition.

The attribute of "chickenness" is a sorites paradox. So even if you allow the interpretation of "egg which will become chicken" vs "egg laid by a chicken" (which is quite clever, I hadnt encountered that) you are still stuck with marginal difference between mother and child/egg in overall "chickenicity."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox

Fun take and it really points to one of the problems of making species distinctions.

The very nature of evolution on macro organisms is very gradual changes.

Reminds me of the futurama joke around the "missing link"[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICv6GLwt1gM

Chickens are a fun example to use here, given the culinary cliche that unfamiliar meats taste to varying degrees "kind of like chicken". So I guess any individual chicken would be very close in flavor to the Standard Chicken, whichever one that is.

> even if you allow the interpretation of "egg which will become chicken" vs "egg laid by a chicken" (which is quite clever, I hadnt encountered that) you are still stuck with marginal difference between mother and child/egg in overall "chickenicity."

But that has no effect on the answer to the question. Given the definition, it is not necessary to identify the first chicken in order to know whether that first chicken hatched from the first chicken egg (definition 1) or laid it (definition 2).

The whole question is a proxy for the evolution question.

If God put chickens on the Earth then they came first obviously.

If chickens evolved from some close but not quite chicken ancestor then the first chicken hatched from an egg with a beneficial genetic mutation.

Maybe God put chicken eggs on the Earth.

A chaotic neutral god would put one chicken and one fertilized egg on the earth, just to confound philosophers

And that's why archaelogy is not for me - I wouldn't share the excitement for finding a 1k old egg in 1k old human poop

What's the newsworthiness here? Thousand-year-old eggs are already a common delicacy in China. When preserved properly they not only stay intact, but are also edible.

You are probably thinking of century eggs, also known as thousand year eggs and many other names. The name isn’t literal; they are made within weeks or months and I seriously doubt they’d remain edible after 1000 years (nor would they be affordable for your average cook).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_egg

I'm not actually sure if this is in jest, but for the unaware, "Thousand-year" eggs do exist, but are not actually that old. They are fermented for a few weeks/months.

*Relevant info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_egg

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