Scientists amazed at the discovery of an underwater road that points to a 7000-year-old city

karashta@lemm.ee to News@lemmy.world – 301 points – Scientists amazed at the discovery of an underwater road that points to a 7000-year-old city
good.is

The submerged Neolithic city most possibly belonged to the pre-historic remains of ancient Hvar civilization located in Croatia.

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I see you posted this misinformation twice. Here and in World News.

This is the original article: https://www.bradford.ac.uk/news/archive/2024/undersea-scans-of-gateway-to-europe-reveal-astonishing-detail-of-sunken-landscape.php

It mentions nothing about a city. There was no city. That is just a total fabrication.

I only posted this in news. Not sure why you commented twice and both were basically saying the same thing.

Directly from the article

"To their astonishment, it was a 4 to 5-meter-deep structure offering clues to a settlement almost identical to the one in Soline. They also dug out several Neolithic artifacts such as flint blades, stone axes, and fragments of wood on this site."

I'm not personally saying that one building is a city but it's a start.

They never mention the university at Bradford, but speak of the university of Zadar, so I'm not really sure why you linked that article that is related but not the same.

A settlement isn't even close to a city. A settlement isn't even a village.

Also, you need to read your own article. This is the very first paragraph:

In ancient times, the Adriatic Sea was a major trade route for the Croatian population, which is likely why scientists have discovered various antiquities submerged in this sea. From Roman artifacts to a 2,200-year-old shipwreck and networks of sunken streams, the sea has revealed some fascinating discoveries, reported the University of Bradford. But this time, divers have stumbled upon something that left scientists flabbergasted.

That links to the Bradford article I linked to.

And again, the information came from the University of Zadar, not of Bradford.

https://www.facebook.com/unizd/posts/pfbid02sn75brvNKh4JPfReAgDDrvJ6B93tY6uoKwAd71FLKLBrSLZn3KatnbniwPapMUunl

Here's a link to their facebook post where they told everyone about it.

You can absolutely criticize the sensationalism of them using the word city in the good.is article and I agree. But to say that it is a "total fabrication" when there's roads, tools and signs of human habitation is a bit of a stretch.

Roads, tools and habitation are signs of humans. They are not cities. There are roads, tools and houses on farms. Farms are not cities. The city part was just a lie.

Just glancing at the two articles that were posted, they seem a bit different from each other, OPs definitely has a clickbaity title, but it does mention multiple settlements. Is that a city? Not by today's standards, nor the standards of any other well recorded period of history... times change though. The town I live in has a population of roughly 250k or so but is not much of a city at all, village would be more appropriate for what is available in my mind. We have food and junk shops, but no real services... Its a bit of a shithole town though.

Thank you both for having enough discourse in the comments to make me engaged enough to learn about some ancient shit! Thanks!

A settlement isn’t even close to a city. A settlement isn’t even a village.

Strictly-speaking, there's no generally-accepted international definition of "city", something which surprised me a bit.

This has come up for me in the past in several interesting ways:

  • China tends to define "cities" using a dramatically-more-expansive definition than what the US or European countries would. China does have cities with very large population, but this definition tends to result in things that in the US would be treated more as entire regions being treated as cities.

    kagis for someone talking about this

    https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-we-mention-city-china-what-talking-xianwei-zhang

    Size of cities

    In China, the word “city” corresponds to administrative divisions with sizes of large variance. A counter-intuitive fact is that the largest “city” in China according to land area is none of the four direct-controlled municipalities (DCM). China's largest DCM is Chongqing, with an area of about 82.4 thousand square kilometers. This area is no match for the largest “city” in China: Hulunbuir. The name of Hulunbuir comes from two lakes in its territory, with the meaning of otter and male otter respectively. Hulunbuir has an area of approximately 264 thousand square kilometers. For comparison, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, where Hulunbuir locates, is about 1.183 million square kilometers, and the land area of the People’s Republic of China is about 9.603 million square kilometers. If we put Hulunbuir into the ranking of Chinese provincial administrative divisions by area, it can rank No. 9, and if compared with areas of countries, Hulunbuir can rank 70-80, smaller than New Zealand (270 thousand square kilometers), but larger than UK (242 thousand square kilometers). Thus it is no wonder that Hulunbuir is the city with largest land area globally.

  • If you want to write code to render a map, which I was doing with OpenStreetMap data the other day in R, you can't just easily say "X is a city and Y is a town".

  • The US doesn't even have any kind of accepted definition across states (or, in at least for the few states that I've looked at, an official definition within a given state).

I bet that excavating underwater for archaeology is horrible. You don't want to damage anything, and anything you do is going to throw up a cloud of silt that will hide what you're working on.

Maybe you can pump the water elsewhere or something.

EDIT: Hah! They actually are doing that, show it in a video at the end of the page if you watch through it.

Plus you have to be extra delicate while wearing underwater equipment. Must be difficult to say the least.

I don't think it's too difficult. Especially when you can adjust buoyancy to float at whichever height you want to

And you can't stay underwater for the same length, you'll get the bends. Maybe better to just scan it, what a nightmare.

Is 850 feet deep enough to get the bends? I thought that was just dives deeper than a couple thousand feet.

I chose 850 because that's the average depth of the Adriadic Sea, though it has a maximum depth of 4050 feet, so if they are in the deeper parts, that would definitely be a concern. I would think they'd use a mini sub if it was though.

850 feet? You can get decompression sickness at, believe it or not, just 20 feet.

600 feet is generally the max for commercial diving, and that requires extensive decompression.

850 feet is for record attempts, not work. I think 1000’ or thereabouts is the world record.

Fair enough. I got claustrophobic at Mammoth Cave, so I tend to stay on top of the water. Surfing/swimming is my jam, not diving.

"These are the carefully complex stone plates that were part of a four-meter wide communication that connected the artificially created island with the shore," the experts mentioned in the post.

Yet another example of how skilled pur ancestors were in building techniques. An artificially created island and a road to connect it!

Humans are creative and have been for tens of thousands of years. No, ancient civilizations were not some kind of advanced lost space faring spciety, but they did build ingenious long lasting structures long before we thought they could.

So that's how the Sea Peoples invaded... /s

By foot. Much easier. No hassle with those pesky ships and boats and such.

Readers disappointed that no underwater cars were discovered on the road

Five bucks says conspiracy-twitter is talking about this relative to atlantis.

The latest ep of the QAA podcast looked at how qanon is full-throttle on twitter at present. It was a disappointing revelation, but a funny episode. I don't use that shitty site so I was blissfully unaware. I'm cheering Lonnie running it into the ground.

Haven’t listened to Q Anon Anonymous in a bit. Sad to see that it still needs to exist.

Well, the Atlansis people are here. In before "the great flood of Noah" people.

Don't know about Noah, but the consensus is moving toward acceptance that there was a 'great flood' of sorts sometime around the end of the Younger Dryas period.

This is my favourite theory of these https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis

That hypothetical flood would have probably affected the direct ancestors of the Greeks... strange that Plato would only learn about it from the relatively remote Egyptians.

Looking at the oral stories of North American natives and comparing them to what we know of historical geological events, we see some truth to the stories. So it’s plausible some stories of the Old Testament could have some historical roots.

Big floods happen all over the world all the time…

Also true. We're talking about 2 separate flooding events. One in the black sea region, and another in Montana. As well as several other major historical floods around the world, and yes, Christians use that to account for one world flood, but the much more likely answer is that this was fairly common as the ice age ended. And we can see that it has been fairly common. As the icedams broke that held back huge amounts of water, it tended to wipe out anything and everything in the area, and people would talk about it for generations.

This myth has been getting posted for years now.