What Will Remain Standing in 10,000 Years?
I live in what was once called the “New World”, versus the “Old World”. In the Americas we looked East to Europe, Asia and Africa as the “old”. Regardless, differences in the ages are relative. While we may count time and build our lives around time, it is really nothing we can see, touch or smell. We H. sapiens have created it as our own. While other animals may be sentient, as far as we know, time is not an issue.
Depending upon where we live we can look around and may see human-made structures varying in age from a few days to hundreds of years. It is impossible for me to believe that the structure that I live in, the city where I reside will exist for more than a few decades. For that reason, I have done a quick search on Google and located these interesting data at Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_known_surviving_buildings
What will be standing of our culture 10,000 years in the future? Whether the inhabitants of the 10 structures I have shown below would have given that a thought, I have no doubt they would be amazed that anything of their lives has remained for us to see. I hope you will find this interesting and if you want to delved deeper, go to the link, above.
Thanks for taking your time to look in on my Medium page.
Zack Florence
“The following are amongst the oldest buildings in the world that have maintained the requirements to be such. Occupation sites with older human made structures such as those in Göbekli Tepe do exist, but the structures are monuments and do not meet the definition of building (which can be seen above). Many of the buildings within the list contain primarily bricks, but most importantly maintain their walls and roof. There are numerous extant structures that survive in the Orkney islands of Scotland, some of the best known of which are part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site.[2] The list also contains many large buildings from the Egyptian Age of the Pyramids.”
Age: 10000–7500 BC
Place of worship: Located in southern Turkey. The tell includes two phases of use, believed to be of a social or ritual nature by site discoverer and excavator Klaus Schmidt, dating back to the 10th–8th millennium BC. The structure is 300 m in diameter and 15 m high.
2. Tower of Jericho, West Bank, Palestine, Asia
Age: 8000 BC
Tower: it is an 8.5-metre-tall (28 ft) stone structure, constructed of undressed stones, with an internal staircase of twenty-two steps.
3. Çatalhöyük, Turkey, Asia
Age; 7500–5700 BC
Settlement: very large Neolithic and Chalcolithic proto-city settlement in southern Anatolia
Age: 7000 BC
Settlement: A Neolithic archaeological site situated on the Kacchi Plain of Balochistan in Pakistan. It is located near the Bolan Pass, to the west of the Indus River and between the modern-day Pakistani cities of Quetta, Kalat and Sibi.
5. Durankulak (archaeological site), Bulgaria, Europe
Age: 5500–4100 BC
Settlement: The Durankulak Archaeological Complex unites three sites: Tell Golemija ostrov (the Big Island), the necropolis and the fields. On the Tell Golemija ostrov there are settlements from the Early Chalcolithic — Hamandjia III-IV culture, the Late Chalcolithic — Varna culture, ritual pits and sacrificial pylons from the Proto-Bronze and Bronze Ages — Chernavoda I and III cultures, fortified Late Bronze Age settlement — Koslogeni culture (Sabatinovka-Noua-Coslogeni “cultural complex”), ancient buildings with a cave temple of the goddess Cybele and an early medieval proto-Bulgarian settlement with several rotundas, which existed from the 9th to the beginning of the 11th century AD. The total thickness of the cultural strata is 3.2–3.5 m. The settlement mound has seven stratigraphic horizons.
6. Solnitsata, Bulgaria, Europe
Settlement: Believed to be the oldest surviving town in Europe, Solnitsata was the site of a prehistoric fortified (walled) stone settlement (prehistoric city) and salt production facility approximately from the 6th–5th millennium BC;[5] it flourished ca 4700–4200 BC.[6][7][8]
Age: 4800 BC
Passage grave: Located in northern Finistère and partially restored. According to André Malraux it would have been better named ‘The Prehistoric Parthenon’. The structure is 72 m (236 ft) long, 25 m (82 ft) wide and over 8 m (26 ft) high.[9][10]
8. Tumulus of Bougon, France, Europe
Age: 4800 BC
Tumulus: The tumulus forms what is almost an artificial hillock of more than 30,000 m3 (1,100,000 cu ft), (60 m × 125 m × 10 m, (197 ft × 410 ft × 33 ft)).[11][12].
8. Anu ziggurat of Uruk, Iraq, Asia
Age: 4000–3800 BC
Ziggurat: A massive White Temple was built atop of the ziggurat. Under the northwest edge of the ziggurat a Stone Temple has been discovered.
9. Monte d’Accoddi, Italy (Sardinia), Europe
Possibly an open-air temple, or a step pyramid: A trapezoidal platform on an artificial mound, reached by a sloped causeway. New radiocarbon dating (2011) allow us to date the building of the first monument to 4000–3650 BC, the second shrine dating to 3500–3000 BC.”[15]
10. La Hougue Bie, Jersey, Europe
Age: 4000–3500 BC
Passage grave: An 18.6 m (61 ft) long Neolithic passage grave with 12th century (medieval) chapel above [16] and World War II structures.[17][18]
I hope that you have enjoyed this brief look at the past 10,000 years of human construction. Again, if you choose to go to the wiki link, there is much more.
