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Comment by otabdeveloper4 | Hacker News Reader

> A timely reminder that, damn, China is olllldddd.

China proper starts about 1000 BC, so China is quite a bit younger than Europe. (Whatever "Europe" is.)

We need to define "older". All areas are old, but it is history that can make one area seem old. Of course I am ignoring Africa, the oldest of all in Human History.

I think this thread is referring to record keeping. In Europe and especially in the mid-east, when an area was conquered, seems the trend was to destroy written records.

I think when that happened in China, a lot written records survived, so it has the appearance of being older.

Egyptian and Sumerian writing predates oracle bone script by about 2000 years.

If you define Europe as Sumer or Egypt, then yes. If you define Europe as Rome, then no. The earliest deciphered Greek writing dates from 1450 BC (Linear B) but that civilisation fell in the Bronze Age collapse and there is no (written) continuity with Europe as it stands today.

As far as I'm concerned we're all equally ancient descendants from LUCA.

It all comes down to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_moder... but most racists don't want to think of their African origins.

> quite a bit younger than

You have introduced a comparison, which thus begs the following questions:

1. What is the event that defines "China proper"? 2. What is the event that defines "Europe [proper]" to you?

1. Whatever was happening in Zhou. (Not sure it was really a "dynasty" pe se.)

2. Proto-Indo-European and Ancient Egyptian cultural norms and patterns are still very much alive in "Europe" today, so probably the invention of the wheel in the early Bronze Age is a good start.

So you're comparing China "proper" to Europe "whatever that is" ...?

Not exactly apples and apples mate.

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