Mayonaze wrote:Or it could arise independently. As I think Jared Diamond pointed out in Guns Germs and Steel, the domesticaltion of plants and animals occurred in different locations and different times without inter-cultural (?) contact in all cases.
I would actually expect heating technology to be more advanced....or at least a tad more important....in a cold climate. In Rome, they mainly used it to heat their public baths. That's nice but I don't think they were worried about freezing their buns off.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
Sometimes we (Homo) loose our smarts too. In The Discoverers, Boorstin pointed out that some Renaissance-era discoveries were actually re-discoveries of knowledge developed in ancient times then lost. For instance, I think he said that the Greeks knew the world was round, knew the circumference within about 10% and had a system of latitude/longitude in 2 BC.
As a keen student of Sci-fi I often wonder what our world would be like if the Roman empire had not collapsed in the way that it did.
We certainly stood still, and even lost much, as you point out Mayo for many many years.
Another invention, movable metal printing type, occurred in a number of places at almost the same time (around 1450), in totally unrelated events.
That happens too.
Sometimes an invention is simply in the air. The time is right. And ripe. A number of conditions come together and a brainwave is looking for a target human to seed. And per chance it hits more than one human. BINGO! New invention! In various places at the same time.
The random factor.
That era, BTW – from 1450 to 1550 – gave us some brilliant minds: Leonardo DaVinci, Desiderius Erasmus, the Medici, Thomas More, Machiavelli, a.o.
Last edited by Rokcet Scientist on Mon Jun 25, 2007 3:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
That is one of the interesting things about modern inventions RS, nearly all them were worked on at the same time in different locations.
Flight, jet engines, rockets, motor cars, locomotives, the list goes on and on, so why not in antiquity?
Evidence is coming out now that Europe began farming independently of the middle east, as did of course, south America.
I think I first read it in Jr. High. I've read it at least three times since and still have a copy on my bookshelf. (I retire in a couple of years.) Interesting things to say about both the upside and downside roles of religion in society.
Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels -- bring home for Emma ...
Classic. I need to get another copy. I think I lost mine when I moved.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
What are believed to be the world's oldest underfloor stone-lined-channel heating systems have been discovered in Alaska's Aleutian Islands in the U.S. The heating systems are remarkably similar to ondol, the traditional Korean indoor heating system. The word ondol, along with the word kimchi, is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. The ondol heating system is widely recognized as Korean cultural property.
According to "Archaeology", a bi-monthly magazine from the American Archaeological Society, the remains of houses equipped with ondol-like heating systems were found at the Amaknak Bridge excavation site in Unalaska, Alaska.
The leader of the excavation, archaeologist Richard Knecht from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, said in an interview with the Chosun Ilbo on Monday that the team began the dig in 2003. Radiocarbon dating shows the remains are about 3,000 years old.
Here's more on the underfloor heating system in the Aleutians. Michelle posted this in the Archaeologica News. This article says that the system was probably developed independently from the Korean technology, but I have my doubts.
This is what gunny was refering to in his post.
From the Korean newspaper in our News section.
Ancient 'Ondol' Heating Systems Discovered in Alaska
What are believed to be the world's oldest underfloor stone-lined-channel heating systems have been discovered in Alaska's Aleutian Islands in the U.S. The heating systems are remarkably similar to ondol, the traditional Korean indoor heating system. The word ondol, along with the word kimchi, is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. The ondol heating system is widely recognized as Korean cultural property.
According to "Archaeology", a bi-monthly magazine from the American Archaeological Society, the remains of houses equipped with ondol-like heating systems were found at the Amaknak Bridge excavation site in Unalaska, Alaska.
The leader of the excavation, archaeologist Richard Knecht from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, said in an interview with the Chosun Ilbo on Monday that the team began the dig in 2003. Radiocarbon dating shows the remains are about 3,000 years old.
Until now the oldest known ondol heating systems were built 2,500 years ago by the Korean people of North Okjeo in what is now Russia's Maritime Province. The Alaskan ondol are about 500 years older, and are the first ondol discovered outside the Eurasian continent.
Professor Knecht said four ondol structures were discovered at the site. Other ondol structures were found in the area in 1997 but it was not known what they were at the time.
According to Knecht's data, the Amaknak ondol were built by digging a two- to four-meter-long ditch in the floor of the house. Flat rocks were place in a "v" shape along the walls of the ditch, which was then covered with more flat rocks. There was also a chimney to let the smoke out.
Professor Song Ki-ho of the department of Korean history at Seoul National University looked over the Amaknak excavation report. "All ancient ondol are one-sided, meaning the underfloor heating system was placed on just one side of the room. The ondol in Amaknak also seem to be one-sided," he said.
As the ondol of North Okjeo and Amaknak are more than 5,000 kilometers apart, Knecht and Song agree that the two systems seem to have been developed independently.
This theory is backed up by the fact ondol have not been found in areas between the two locations, such as Ostrov, Sakhalin or the Kamchatka Peninsula, and because the Amanak ondol are significantly older than those of the Russian Maritime Province.
If I read this right the Aleutian ones are the inverted V, Korean style. Wern't the Roman ones square? But, if these are the Korean style, and older than the ones in Korea, that means the technology was moving UPSTREAM dosn't it? Dosn't the current go west to east up there? Isn't that one of the reasons given for that route for the peopling of the Americas? Who were these smart people going the other way?
BTW, I have never been to Alaska. I only know it by maps. I would love to visit, in the summertime. My comment on the need for bridges was not based on any knowledge of local needs or politics. Bridiges are political. Just look at the plaques to see who they are named after. And, as some one who praticed it much better than I do said, "all politics is local." If building a bridge is what it takes to fund a find and examination an archaeologica site, lets build more!
There are enough discovered but un-excavated resources up here to keep a great many archaeologists busy for a long time if only the funding were available. Often, we just recon a site, provide a summary of the results to the State Archeo Office and move on. It is almost always cheaper/quicker to move a development project to avoid a site than to fully excavate it.
I am struck by how many more Aleuts there must have been in pre-Russian times than there are now. We are finding artifacts, house pits and whole villages in places where we and present day Aleut Natives would not have predicted. As forbidding and monotonous as the weather in the Aleutians is, it is a biologically very productive place. Sort of how I imagine England, except a little colder.
Depends on which part of 'England' you mean Mayo. Our climate varies from sub-tropical to polar, and from warm/wet to dry/cold.
I've known temperatures that varied from -26C to in the high 30Cs.
Take your pick.
I don't speak C but I get your drift. I don't speak M either which didn't use to be a problem but is coming up more and more often these days. I think the world is shrinking. Looking ahead, are the Chinese metric?
