> As today’s world faces rising sea levels driven by climate change, the researchers hope to shed light on how Stone Age societies adapted to shifting coastlines more than eight millennia ago.
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.
I think the problem is researches feel under pressure to make research of immediate relevance to get funding etc. Its value is it tells us about people and history.
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.
I think for a lot of people, their deeded land is in eventually in terms of lat/long, and if the water swallows their land or their land falls in the sea, they're pretty much SOL. Depending on the rules of their locality, they may keep ownership of the land that's now underwater: it may effectively cease if underwater land is not subject to private ownership, or it may continue but not be of value because you may not be able to exclude other people from the land (or the waters above it) or develop it.
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.
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.
Possibly, but what we think of as land ownership today — land as a commodity that can be freely bought and sold, and as something that gives the owner near-total control over how it’s used — is actually a fairly recent development.
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.
Even without formal land ownership, pre-modern societies were keenly aware about who exploits which scarce natural resources. There is just no way to cut scarcity out of human life experience.
For hunters and gatherers, it helped that their population density was relatively low. But there was still competition for good hunting grounds.
”Unfortunately I don't expect there is any particularly reusable solution to be uncovered.”
Scientist might write that in a PR piece or a grant proposal but I can guarantee you that no one thinks that.
Now try non-rigid land ownership, where land and buildings can be expropriated in the name of nebulous greater good.
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.
I’m not sure the people who own property next to ‘at risk’ coastlines will agree. As a whole, society may continue but there’s a lot of people at risk of losing their property as a result of rising sea levels. Probably decades from now.
This is not related to the story as such, but I live in Aarhus and this is the first I hear about it. I read three national news outlets and one specific to my local region of Østjylland a couple of times a day. I wonder if I should swap some of them. I know about black trashbags being thrown out of a window in the white house and then I find an actually interesting non-tech story about something happening right outside my house here on HN...
I've sometimes witnessed newsworthy events. It was very interesting to see what media made out of it. Local news was very inaccurate. In Big papers the stories were more like fiction - using some fact from the real event as inspiration. It was surprising that local papers can't even get simple local news right. Only once I think the local paper got into a little bit of trouble. They wrote some nagging critic about the performance of some school theatre - but the event had been cancelled...
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?
Few things bother me more than the fact that most media nowadays (left and right) is simply profiteering on half-true/false narratives meant mostly to make people hate each other.
If you are someone who has stepped back and realized this, good for you.
Archaeologists tend to keep such expeditions fairly hush-hush until they’re done with their research. If they don’t, they run the risk of treasure hunters ploughing through their find, destroying information, at night.
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.
> This is not related to the story as such, but I live in Aarhus and this is the first I hear about it. I read three national news outlets and one specific to my local region of Østjylland a couple of times a day. I wonder if I should swap some of them.
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.
You probably shouldnt expect the regular news media to cover ongoing archeological research unless there is some sensational find (like a viking ship in Havana).
But if you are interested in such research (and read Danish) I can recommend the magazine Skalk (skalk.dk).
The researchers and their work with underwater archeology has been covered extensively in Danish media. I'll bet you will see Danish media cover this project at the end of the year when the project is finished and results are finalized.
Not exactly related to the story or to your comment, but: is Aarhus as happy and wonderful a place as all writing about it claims it is? I know immigrating to Denmark is nearly impossible, but I keep telling my partner that if (or when) the political situation in the US deteriorates sufficiently, Aarhus should be our destination -- that or Copenhagen.
I like Aarhus but I'm not sure what they say about it. I was born and raised here, then at 19 I moved to Aalborg. A few years later I changed university and moved to Odense (they are the 3rd and 4th largest cites). I've spent a lot of time in Copenhagen over the years, both for work and in my private life. I don't think there is too much difference between Odense or Aarhus, I didn't like Aalborg as much but it's been 20+ years since I lived there. What I miss most about Odense (aside from house prices) is that it's closer to Copenhagen, but my now wife lived in Aarhus when we met, and I found a job here easily so...
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.
I've lived in Aarhus for the past two and a half years, and can say that it is quite a nice city to live in. Very walkable, decent public transport (despite how much locals love to complain about it), plenty of restaurants, bars and other entertainment. I'd definitely recommend it.
Moving here was quite a bit easier for me though, as I'm an EU citizen.
Immigrating to Denmark is actually pretty easy if you have the right kind of education or get offered a job with a high enough (~$65000) pay. See the "Pay Limit schemes" and "Positive Lists" on this page: https://nyidanmark.dk/en-GB/You-want-to-apply/Work
And as a reference, $65000 would be considered a preposterously low salary for a new STEM graduate in Denmark.
wat do u think could be particular about the state of journalism in Aarhus or Denmark that could've caused this?
i sometimes learn of interesting news about my country from external sources too that gets drowned out by more petty concerns in the social media news cycle
lol I hear you about the stories on Trump saturating all news. For 4 years it's all in going to be able to read here. It's like crack cocaine to US reporters. They won't be able to help themselves.
Will have to dig deep for interesting, non-Trump related US news.
There is this astroturf new news outlet in Poland called Infopiguła. I follow that, 9 minutes per day and that's it for politician news for me. I just ignore anything else, politicial or world, knowing I'll find out about it anyway if it's important.
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?
US political news has infected the entire world now sadly, esp after Global Trump Tariffs. Its like he wanted to make sure the whole world talks about him...
> US political news has infected the entire world now sadly
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...
The truth is also that there are more noteworthy this happening in the world now. Previous world order has fallen.* New one is being formed. And Trump is kind of in the midst of it as the leader of the ex-hegemon country.
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).
Given human propensity to settle near bodies of water (exhibited even to this day), and the change in sea levels after the last ice age, the bulk of intra-ice age settlement artifacts are probably submerged within a relatively short distance from our existing coastlines. I would be personally interested in an effort to systematically investigate these areas.
A recent episode of The Ancients talks about how oil and mineral exploration companies have been sharing their seismic mapping data of Doggerland with archeologists:
The sea level rose more than 120 meters in the last 20000 years, so it won't necessarily be that short distance, but I think at least it should be easy to calculate where to look.
An area with a half % slope could have an entire city below the waterline.
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.
Yes, even more recently the entire space between England and continental Europe used to be connected landmass, Doggerland [1]. It was home to Mesolithic people just 8,200 years ago.
It would be great to see more underwater archaeology, I'm sure there's a lot to find. But due to variations in local conditions it's really tough to systematically investigate: every site has to be treated individually. Plus doing anything underwater becomes at least 10× harder and more expensive. Human scientific divers can only work easily down to about 30m: anything significantly deeper requires commercial diving protocols, submersibles, or ROVs which raise the difficulty and cost even further.
I mean something more of the sort of a survey of sea floor and subsurface which would have been coastline at the glacial maxima, boats trawling multispectral scanners to identify candidate locations. There are a few different recent systems that push in the direction of this being feasible, e.g. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/cmhrp/news/usgs-designed-tool-...
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.
Agree strongly. Especially around the Mediterranean including the north coast of Africa and the southern horn of Africa. Ancient humans are known to have inhabited the southern tip of Africa into the last interglacial period, and human migration across and settlement in the occasionally green Sahara could explain some things.
I was listening to Stefan Milo recently and he said something similar about how people might have lived along the coast of the Americas but because it was all mud and wood back then and is now covered in water, it'll mostly be lost at this point.
This is probably especially an issue for early North American settlements if people crossing over during the ice age glacial maximum were traveling down the coasts right after coming over the Bering Land Bridge
Less than you'd think. The white sands footprints push things back far enough that virtually all coastal sites would have been destroyed by glaciers at the LGM. We're still trying to map out the specific details.
The Gulf of Thailand to the Java Sea was dry land 16000 years ago. China's coastline was 100 miles out. New Guinea was fully connected to Australia. The Persian gulf was walkable.
Every time I read an article like this I end up in a rabbit hole of reading about ice ages, sea level changes, and how the human evolved throughout it. It’s mind boggling that only 20000 years ago the sea level was 120 meters lower and much of Northern Europe was covered in ice
I wonder how rapidly the change occurred - were the people aware of it happening? Did they have people saying “don’t listen to Yarg! These recent floods are just normal weather…”
It was a relatively sedate 2m per century a lot of the time, but there was one catastrophic Tsunami event called the Storegga Slide around 6200 BC that would have been pretty dramatic.
At that time time they were still hunter gatherers. So they might have been aware of their surroundings, but I presume not as much if they would have been a sedentary community.
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)
My uneducated guess is: probably not before writing was invented. Populations where nomadic, changes were likely slow and life expectancy was much shorter. With no record keeping it is unlikely they had means to notice the changes.
Not far away, but partially preserved by the mudflat, lies Rungholt. A city of ~1000-1500 (some sources say 3000) inhabitants that was drowned in the Grote Mandrenke (1362 AD). That's a very big city in that time. In my childhood we were told, while wandering the tidal flat, that we should listen closely if we could hear the church bells under the mud. Only in 2023 the whereabouts of the sunken city were definitely confirmed and mapped. "Rungholt" probably means "wrong/low wood".
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".
Absolutely, though in this case it would be the most obvious translation, since it was a frisian settlement and "Rung" and "Holt" are both frisian words in use. It is possible that Rung here could mean stanchion/post (so for wood that makes strong posts), but unlikely so close to the sea, is it not?
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.
One of the fun parts of genetic genealogy is that it's always exciting to see what old DNA turns up in archeological projects like these. It's a stretch to hope for, but wouldn't a paternal-line relative from Doggerland be cool...
> exciting to see what old DNA turns up in archeological projects like these.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
No one "owns" land, they just protect and area that they claim is theirs.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
For hunters and gatherers, it helped that their population density was relatively low. But there was still competition for good hunting grounds.
Mad that people can write statements like this when the Netherlands exists: https://www.netherlands-tourism.com/netherlands-sea-level/
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.
Deleted Comment
yeah, weve got even better technology, itll be even less of a hassle
Dead Comment
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
Anecdotally I was not tought about Doggerland, and I don’t think it’s common knowledge.
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.
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.
But if you are interested in such research (and read Danish) I can recommend the magazine Skalk (skalk.dk).
You are overreacting.
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.
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.
Will have to dig deep for interesting, non-Trump related US news.
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?
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...
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).
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...
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...
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.
https://sea-level.vercel.app/
https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/m0006707
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide
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)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rungholt
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.