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"Pottery jugs from between the eighth and second centuries B.C. bear administrative stamps that changed with the political situation. Unbeknown to the people firing these jugs, the act of heating locked information about the Earth's geomagnetic field into minerals present in the clay. Because the stamps provide precise information about when the pots were fired, the study allows a detailed look at geomagnetic changes over 600 years."

https://www.livescience.com/57868-earth-magnetic-field-spike...




This is one of the most amazing things about humans to me. I marvel at how it's possible to get so much information about our universe by observing so little. Astronomy is another field that I'm really impressed with. It's possible to infer things about galaxies, stars, planets, etc. just buy observing some light coming from them to our little blue planet. Absolutely crazy.

How many such techniques we haven't even discovered or technology is not there to observe such things?

I really enjoyed reading Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark that explores such things.


I always love reading the crazy new techniques for extracting text from rotten old paper and papyrus. I distinctly remember reading a few months back an article about someone detecting trace chemicals from an old pocket bible or something, and deduced the owner had liver disease or something equally insane. wish I could find that article!


I was just about to post the link to this New Yorker article in response to GP's question. I believe this is the one you're referring to:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/26/do-proteins-ho...

Under the right conditions, proteins can survive for millions of years. In recent years, proteomic studies of art works and archeological remains have yielded biological information of startling clarity, revealing gossamer-thin layers of fish glue on seventeenth-century religious sculptures and identifying children’s milk teeth from pits of previously unrecognizable Neolithic bones.


Yes! Thank you, it was somehow impossible to Google this.


Sherlock Holmes would be envious of such abilities.


I also really liked Our Mathematical Universe.

You’d probably like this short story which is about exactly what you’re describing: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien...


Regarding astronomy, the more amazing things are what we've been able to predict by mathematical inference before we had the technology to validate the predictions.


on similar lines, imho, mendleev’s periodic table is also quite amazing. it is now close to 150 years old !!!

from a random page on the web

‘’’

Mendeleev realized that the physical and chemical properties of elements were related to their atomic mass in a 'periodic' way, and arranged them so that groups of elements with similar properties fell into vertical columns in his table.

Gaps and predictions Sometimes this method of arranging elements meant there were gaps in his horizontal rows or 'periods'. But instead of seeing this as a problem, Mendeleev thought it simply meant that the elements which belonged in the gaps had not yet been discovered. He was also able to work out the atomic mass of the missing elements, and so predict their properties. And when they were discovered, Mendeleev turned out to be right. For example, he predicted the properties of an undiscovered element that should fit below aluminum in his table. When this element, called gallium, was discovered in 1875 its properties were found to be close to Mendeleev's predictions. Two other predicted elements were later discovered, lending further credit to Mendeleev's table.

‘’’


> what we've been able to predict by mathematical inference

Or purely mathematical intuition.


Double pottery awesomeness today between that and this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18869653


>"Pottery jugs from between the eighth and second centuries B.C. bear administrative stam ... the stamps provide precise information about when the pots were fired"

How do they know the dates are correct? Carbon dating doesn't work for those years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_plateau


Because of the stamps - they can relate them to texts to figure out when those administrations were in power.


Right, but since when are ancient texts reliable sources for historical dates?


... because they wrote down the dates?

Calendars are not a recent invention. People have been dating texts for as long as there have been texts. Especially texts related to trade and accounting.

If the pot says "made in the 4th year of king such-and-such", all you have to do is find out when that king took office, which is probably on a monument somewhere, if not in dozens of other texts, since a new administration is a pretty big deal that lots of people would write about.


Different civilizations had different calendars at different times, the calendar would often restart with each new king, some kings would be erased from history because they lost a war, etc. I doubt it is as easy as you say.


Eh, but some of the texts are pretty good at pointing out both useless as well as well liked rulers, and contains long lists of "Z, son of Y was king of X for K years, he did not fear $deity and was useless and died and his son was king after him", in between all the success stories.

Correlating them to other historic texts, filling in the missing parts, removing thing one doesn't care about etc is the job for historians.


I don't understand the high regard historians are being held given here. It is like just because they have extremely messy/biased data to deal with their conclusions are held in an even higher regard than that of science.


There's a whole discipline of experts who spend their whole lives studying this stuff. It's awful arrogant for an amateur to assume they're all full of shit.


Just because someone tries as hard as they can and does the best they can doesn't mean they are right. The available info may simply be flawed (GIGO).


Yes but the best people to judge what's garbage and what's not are the experts.

Look I'm done with this thread. I've made my point, and your comment history shows you only post this sort of pseudo-intellectual nonsense. You represent everything that's wrong with this site.


Nah, I just have the proper skepticism. You know, the idea behind science: Nullius in verba


No, that is not how skepticism works. There is a humongous body of knowledge on the topic, and all of it is very well supported with an abundance of of evidence.

Being too lazy to visit a library and educate yourself on a topic is called "willful ignorance", not skepticism.

"nullius in verba" means you don't accept theories on authority alone. It means that you don't formulate a conception of gravity by thinking about elements for a while and then declaring that you figured it out, as Aristotle did, but by considering testable possibilities and performing experiments, as Newton did.

"nullius in verba" does NOT mean you can throw out all of Newton's work as "words words words" because you don't feel like reading it.


> It is like just because they have extremely messy/biased data to deal with their conclusions are held in an even higher regard than that of science.

Yes! If someone can actually make sense of something that was incredibly messy or biased that is a real reason for celebration :-)


Historians are usually pretty good at what they do, and aren't just taking ancient calendars at their word.

On top of that, we also have astronomical records to serve as anchors for other dates. We can figure out when eclipses happened, when each planet was visible, and so on. If ancient texts record an eclipse during the reign of King Foo, and we know when there was an eclipse visible from that area, we can interpret any other events in Foo's time around those definite dates.


They're as reliable as they are, and knowing how much that is is in the purview of an entire academic discipline.


One text is an anecdote. Thousands of independent texts weighed together form our understanding of history.


Are these more accurate than carbon dating? Meaning - if we knew definitively that a pot was baked on a particular date - then use that as the baseline for checking another object, can we build a magnetic timeline and use it to date other things? Like bones?


It sounds like they calibrated the magnetic field data to written history (ie, the bible and other religious texts).

Carbon dating doesn't work for these years because there is a plateau in the reference curve. [1]

The earth must have had a weaker magnetic field (correlates with a low in sunspot activity), or there were lots of solar flares, or a supernova, near the beginning to create more c14 in the atmosphere than usual. Alternatively, the ocean "released" a bunch of old carbon to dilute the atmospheric c14 near the end of the period, thus making those years look older.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_plateau [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_reservoir_effect


Magnetostratigraphy is used to cross-check ages of bones. Similar to how pottery records the Earth's magnetic field in clay, layers of lava containing ferromagnetic minerals (such as magnetite) can provide chronological orders. This dating methodology is called archaeomagnetic dating.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281738965_An_introd...


THank you - thats exactly what I was interested in.




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