Stone Age settlement found under the sea in Denmark
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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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
Borders are very much not a new concept. Nations are new-ish but not the idea of owned and protected land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasanian_defense_lines -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limes_(Roman_Empire)
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.
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.
For hunters and gatherers, it helped that their population density was relatively low. But there was still competition for good hunting grounds.
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.
Yes, commons, rotating field systems, and similar arrangements show that.
> But. There were plenty of others where land ownership worked almost exactly like today’s systems.
Not quite. Transactions existed, but they were embedded in systems of obligation and sovereignty — kings, emperors, or lords claimed ultimate rights. That’s a different structure from modern absolute private ownership.
> 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.
Those records exist, but even in Mesopotamia rulers could reallocate or confiscate land. Ownership wasn’t as secure or absolute as a modern freehold title.
> Incan quipu cords were records of who owned which piece of land.
Quipus tracked obligations and allocations. Land under the Inca was held communally and redistributed, not privately owned.
> Asian rice terraces have been individually owned for thousands of years.
Some land was inherited and sold, but there were also systems of redistribution (for example, the Chinese equal-field system). That’s not the same as permanent, alienable freehold.
> This urban legend that private property is not an ancient concept is really wonky.
It’s not an urban legend. Property has always been a bundle of rights that varied across societies. The modern model of land as a freely tradable commodity giving the holder near-total monopoly is comparatively recent.
No one "owns" land, they just protect and area that they claim is theirs.
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.
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
yeah, weve got even better technology, itll be even less of a hassle
Mad that people can write statements like this when the Netherlands exists: https://www.netherlands-tourism.com/netherlands-sea-level/
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.
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?
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.
Anecdotally I was not tought about Doggerland, and I don’t think it’s common knowledge.
I've always dreamed of making a tool to help visualize this. It would likely be very dramatic.
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).
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...
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 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?
If you are someone who has stepped back and realized this, good for you.
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.
“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”
There aren't many spots on land a body can wind up that are comparable in difficulty to access as thousands of feet underwater.
Moving here was quite a bit easier for me though, as I'm an EU citizen.
And as a reference, $65000 would be considered a preposterously low salary for a new STEM graduate in Denmark.
Anyway, I think the biggest difference is between Copenhagen and the rest of our cities. Copenhagen is different in that it has a lot more going on in terms of basically everything. I'm personally happy I'm not raising children in Copenhagen, mostly because of the cost of living.
We're just 5.5 million people though, so it's not like there is that much of a difference between places. When I say that I miss being closer to Copenhagen, we're talking 1,5 hours closer... It still only takes 3 hours from here.
If you work in IT like I do, Aarhus is a little more boring than both Copenhagen and Odense. Odense has a lot of IoT and robotics going on, and Copenhagen has everything. In the Aarhus area you'll probably want to work with C#, PHP, Java, Typescript or Python and Azure + general Microsoft products if you're going to work in tech.
But if you are interested in such research (and read Danish) I can recommend the magazine Skalk (skalk.dk).
You are overreacting.
Will have to dig deep for interesting, non-Trump related US news.
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...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-28/underwater-ancient-ab...
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.
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.
[1] https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/doggerland...
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)
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".
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.
There are seven-inch difference of sea level between Pacific and Atlantic ocean ... at the coastlines of Panama.
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.
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.
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.
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".
I may not agree with things like Aztec practices, but it would clearly be a far more interesting world if they had been able to served against the Hispanics and were over there still doing mass human sacrifices and rolling heads down pyramid stairs and were replete with gold.
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.
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/
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 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.
[1] https://open.spotify.com/episode/6jlHaJMCfRmsMsrqqLBY3O?si=1...
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?