[HN Gopher] Archaeologists discover and crack a thousand-year-ol...
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Archaeologists discover and crack a thousand-year-old chicken egg
Author : drdee
Score : 40 points
Date : 2021-06-14 20:48 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| maxk42 wrote:
| Utterly amazing that the contents were still liquid. I hope we
| learn some interesting things from the DNA!
| sharikone wrote:
| And that's why archaelogy is not for me - I wouldn't share the
| excitement for finding a 1k old egg in 1k old human poop
| pp19dd wrote:
| Haaretz (deep-linked) has more details that some have brought up.
|
| "Asked what it's like to excavate a thousand-year-old toilet,
| Nagorsky explains that in the interim, the waste became dirt.
| They're simply digging in dirt. It's fine."
|
| Dating of the egg is so far incidental, done by relational
| strata:
|
| "That lamp was of a type only made in the late Abbasid period,
| Nagorsky explains - about 1,000 years ago. And thusly, they dated
| the chicken egg to that time."
|
| High-res image with the crack(s):
| https://img.haarets.co.il/img/1.9888354/233647132.jpg
|
| No description of the yolk yet that I could see.
| jakeva wrote:
| > While much of the egg's contents leaked out, some of the yolk
| remained, and the researchers preserved it for future DNA
| analysis.
|
| I'm amazed there was still yolk in there! Although I'm sure it's
| probably decomposed I would still love to see a picture of 1k
| year old egg yolk!
| chrisco255 wrote:
| So the egg really did come first after all.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| well yeah, but we knew that long ago. fish, dinosaurs, etc.
|
| and this one was long after chickens.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| No one has ever interpreted the question as "which came
| first, the chicken or the fish egg?"
|
| It's not interesting even when you don't intentionally
| misinterpret it. If a chicken egg is an egg from which a
| chicken will hatch, then the egg came first by definition. If
| a chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken, then the chicken
| came first by definition.
| jandrese wrote:
| The whole question is a proxy for the evolution question.
|
| If God put chickens on the Earth then they came first
| obviously.
|
| If chickens evolved from some close but not quite chicken
| ancestor then the first chicken hatched from an egg with a
| beneficial genetic mutation.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Maybe God put chicken eggs on the Earth.
| klyrs wrote:
| A chaotic neutral god would put one chicken and one
| fertilized egg on the earth, just to confound
| philosophers
| kortex wrote:
| The attribute of "chickenness" is a sorites paradox. So
| even if you allow the interpretation of "egg which will
| become chicken" vs "egg laid by a chicken" (which is quite
| clever, I hadnt encountered that) you are still stuck with
| marginal difference between mother and child/egg in overall
| "chickenicity."
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
| mbg721 wrote:
| Chickens are a fun example to use here, given the
| culinary cliche that unfamiliar meats taste to varying
| degrees "kind of like chicken". So I guess any individual
| chicken would be very close in flavor to the Standard
| Chicken, whichever one that is.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Fun take and it really points to one of the problems of
| making species distinctions.
|
| The very nature of evolution on macro organisms is very
| gradual changes.
|
| Reminds me of the futurama joke around the "missing
| link"[1].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICv6GLwt1gM
| zozbot234 wrote:
| What's the newsworthiness here? Thousand-year-old eggs are
| already a common delicacy in China. When preserved properly they
| not only stay intact, but are also edible.
| indispensible wrote:
| I'm not actually sure if this is in jest, but for the unaware,
| "Thousand-year" eggs do exist, but are not actually that old.
| They are fermented for a few weeks/months.
|
| *Relevant info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_egg
| stevula wrote:
| You are probably thinking of century eggs, also known as
| thousand year eggs and many other names. The name isn't
| literal; they are made within weeks or months and I seriously
| doubt they'd remain edible after 1000 years (nor would they be
| affordable for your average cook).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_egg
| jaywalk wrote:
| All I can think about is the smell. Both of the "soft human
| waste" that was surrounding the egg, and the contents of the egg.
| quesera wrote:
| Likely dessicated and low on volatiles.
|
| Might spring back to odiferous life if reconstituted, however!
| amelius wrote:
| I sometimes wonder: shouldn't archaeologists wait before cracking
| open specimens until science has advanced to the point where we
| can make much better measurements, perhaps even without cracking
| open the specimens and spoiling them in the process? And how do
| you determine the best time to do so?
| sharpneli wrote:
| They generally do. As per the article this time was an
| accident.
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