Swiss Door From 5,000 Years Ago Discovered By Archaeologists

[warrior1]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/21/swiss-door-from-5000-year_n_771191.html



GENEVA — Archaeologists in the Swiss city of Zurich have unearthed a 5,000-year-old door that may be one of the oldest ever found in Europe.

The ancient poplar wood door is "solid and elegant" with well-preserved hinges and a "remarkable" design for holding the boards together, chief archaeologist Niels Bleicher said Wednesday.

Using tree rings to determine its age, Bleicher believes the door could have been made in the year 3,063 B.C. – around the time that construction on Britain's world famous Stonehenge monument began.

"The door is very remarkable because of the way the planks were held together," Bleicher told The Associated Press.

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This begs the question of what technologies had to exist before this door was made to make it possible to be built or even dreamed.

[Odin2005]

1. That was only about 300 years after the Otzi the Iceman lived in that area.

Very cool!

[Terra Alta]

2. So, this door was made when Earth was only 1,000 years old!

:sarcasm:

On a serious note, it is a pretty neat discovery.

[WillyT]

10. Yep... And Their Canoes Were Made Of Dinosaur Hide

:D

:hi:

[pinboy3niner]

3. Larry King phoned. He wants his door back.

:evilgrin:

[DearAbby]

5. You're gonna burn for that.

[derby378]

6. Just so you know, I'm stealing that line

:rofl:

[TexasProgresive]

4. I'll bet that Bleicher did not use tree rings to determine the age of the door.

That statement is probably something the reporter put in the article because they did not understand the real process. Can we get less ignorant people.

[immoderate]

8. What process did he mean?

What's wrong with tree rings?

--imm

[JJ]

9. Tree rings can tell the age

they compare the ring pattern with ring patterns of a known age. Weather patterns during a specific span of years leaves the same ring pattern in all trees that grew during that time. They just need comparison rings from the same time period to compare to, that are dated by another method.

[glitch]

11. Very good. :) nt

[DeschutesRiver]

16. How can rings tell how old the door is, ie what if it was made from a tree that was >1k years?

I have junipers on my ranch that are likely that old, with smaller groves of trees in the 200-500 year range.

If I cut one of the 500 year old ones today, and make a door of it, it isn't a 500 year old door just based on counting its rings.

They know how old the wood is, but not the door.

[Lucian]

7. Wait...dendrochronology is only useful...

if you cut down the tree at the moment and count the rings or do core samples on a currently standing tree.

Maybe the idiot reporter meant 14C analysis.

But otherwise, neat find.

[TheMadMonk]

12. No, the pattern of the rings gives the age one helluva lot more accurately...

...than C14.

It's done by building a database of tree ring patterns from a variety of places around the world. Width of individual rings, inclusions of foreign materaials like volcaic ash, etc.

As in the final year of a sequence such as: drought, drought, wet, volcano, cold, drought might be 1492.

If the growth layer is somehow preserved it can even be possible to determine in which month the tree was cut.


Think that's accurate. Corals can be dated by the day and even morning and afternoon, using a similar technique.

[Lucian]

13. Yeah, but,

you can't know what year the tree was cut down. So counting the rings would be pointless unless you know exactly what year the tree was cut down.

[TheMadMonk]

14. Not when you have a continuous record of tree rings covering several...

...thousand years. Obviously not from the same tree, but by overlapping ring counts and thickness measurements from multiple trees it is possible to assemble a record against which an unknown sample can compared and fitted in.

The absolute widths of tree rings are obviously affected by a multitude of factors, but their widths relative to adjacent rings are a very good proxy for the climactic conditions under which the tree grew and a sufficiently long pattern of normal, above and below average conditions will have only one possible (or at least likely) match in the record.

[intaglio]

15. For Northern Europe the confirmed record goes back

10,000 years (check Dendrochronology on Wikipaedia).

Or as a Creation scientist would say 6014 years because all the independent studies of this record are mistaken; indeed as the record in the tree rings show no sign of the world wide flood in 2304 BC all tree ring records are wrong and cannot show dates older than 4314 years before present, so Goddidit or the Devildidit just to confuse people. As St Ignoramus the Literalist said "Yah boo sucks prove me wrong. Yo' mama was an ape Dawkins or Dork as I think of yah and stop confusing me with facts!!!"

OOOOOpppps sorry, rant over. I had this argument with someone once and, in essence, this is how it ended