> As today’s world faces rising sea levels driven by climate change, the researchers hope to shed light on how Stone Age societies adapted to shifting coastlines more than eight millennia ago.

Unfortunately I don't expect there is any particularly reusable solution to be uncovered. Ancient peoples facing rising tides almost certainly just walked a bit inland and built new huts there. They probably thought nothing of it. They were a far more physically mobile culture, without great dependence on immense, immovable infrastructure - nor on rigid land ownership rules.

Our culture's migration will be entirely different.

• skeezyboy

  today at 11:18 AM

  > Our culture's migration will be entirely different.

  yeah, weve got even better technology, itll be even less of a hassle

  • johndunne

    today at 12:11 PM

    I’m not sure the people who own property next to ‘at risk’ coastlines will agree. As a whole, society may continue but there’s a lot of people at risk of losing their property as a result of rising sea levels. Probably decades from now.

• eigart

  today at 10:52 AM

  I think the rigidity of land ownership will be put to the test because of climate change.

• VeryNosy

  today at 10:42 AM

  Damn, eight millenia ago the sea levels changed constantly. I wonder what kind of cars they drove and how much they were flying. At least they didn't eat meat.

• ehnto

  today at 9:07 AM

  Rigid land ownership seems to be the source of a great deal of our troubles.

  • today at 11:19 AM

  • inglor_cz

    today at 9:52 AM

    Now try non-rigid land ownership, where land and buildings can be expropriated in the name of nebulous greater good.

    Been there, done that, it is worse than the alternative. People will stop cultivating anything, because why bother if a random officer can just take things from you at will.

    Western regulations about land appropriation are strict for a reason, and they always require just compensation for a reason. That is the only way to prevent powerful people from just grabbing what they want, cloaking the thieving act in word bubbles about common prosperity.

    • diggan

      today at 10:39 AM

      > Now try non-rigid land ownership, where land and buildings can be expropriated in the name of nebulous greater good.

      Maybe there could be some balance instead of "Either everything can be owned, or nothing is!".

      It isn't impossible to move cities if it's really needed and someone is footing the bill, even in a democratic Western country that is famously highly regulated, like Sweden. Since a mine in the north is expanding, they have to move the entire city (paid by the mine's operator in this case), building by building, which of course isn't without complaints, but it's a thing that actively being done as we speak. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cde3xp4xlw9o

      • mc32

        today at 10:56 AM

        That’s a limited population being moved for high value resources. This option does not scale for large populations. It’s easier and cheaper to rebuild.

      • inglor_cz

        today at 10:45 AM

        I don't really mind takings for very good compensation. If you want to uproot people in the name of X (say, a railway that cannot really change its path, or a very valuable mine), pay them some low multiple of the current market price of their property and off they go. The part with the market price helps them buy property elsewhere and the extra part is sugar to compensate for injured feelings. (It is not easy to abandon a home if your family lived there for generations, and we should account for that.)

        But such situations are relatively rare. Perhaps the mine in Kiruna is worth it and the corporation/government can pay for the compensations. Same for vital ground communications (highways, railways).

        If it isn't, though, then let the ore in the ground and let the people live where they built their homes.

        Most of the time I hear ideas about "flexible ownership" etc., upon further discussion, the person starts talking about outright expropriation from people they don't like.

        • sentinelsignal

          today at 11:57 AM

          Yeah i agree. Theres a very thin layer between these ideas and outright crazy.

    • gosub100

      today at 12:30 PM

      The concept of borders is relatively new. Up until a few hundred years ago, countries simply didn't have them. Battles would start simply because "we saw those other guys again! Stop em!"

    • today at 9:59 AM

• welferkj

  today at 9:47 AM

  >nor on rigid land ownership rules.

  Land ownership was formalized about as soon as there was a reason for anyone to own land - i.e., as soon as any given people started doing pastoralism and agriculture.

  • adamlett

    today at 10:51 AM

    Possibly, but what we think of as land ownership today — land as a commodity that can be freely bought and sold, and as something that gives the owner near-total control over how it’s used — is actually a fairly recent development.

    In feudal Europe, land could only be “owned” by a lord, and even then it was bound up in obligations both to their superiors and to the peasants working it. There were all sorts of customary rights layered on top: in Denmark, for example, nobles had a monopoly on hunting and timber in their forests, but peasants still had rights to gather firewood, berries, nuts, mushrooms, and so on.

    Village fields were also often organized under the open-field system, where land was divided into strips. Each household got a mix of good and poor soil, and in some places those strips were even periodically reallocated to keep things fair. It’s a very different picture from modern private property.

  • inglor_cz

    today at 9:50 AM

    Even without formal land ownership, pre-modern societies were keenly aware about who exploits which scarce natural resources. There is just no way to cut scarcity out of human life experience.

    For hunters and gatherers, it helped that their population density was relatively low. But there was still competition for good hunting grounds.

This is not related to the story as such, but I live in Aarhus and this is the first I hear about it. I read three national news outlets and one specific to my local region of Østjylland a couple of times a day. I wonder if I should swap some of them. I know about black trashbags being thrown out of a window in the white house and then I find an actually interesting non-tech story about something happening right outside my house here on HN...

• adornKey

  today at 7:23 AM

  I've sometimes witnessed newsworthy events. It was very interesting to see what media made out of it. Local news was very inaccurate. In Big papers the stories were more like fiction - using some fact from the real event as inspiration. It was surprising that local papers can't even get simple local news right. Only once I think the local paper got into a little bit of trouble. They wrote some nagging critic about the performance of some school theatre - but the event had been cancelled...

  I think it is safe to say that using newspapers to wrap some garbage is where their real value shines. Reading the garbage wrap is something that people do, but I wonder why?

• bazoom42

  today at 11:40 AM

  You probably shouldnt expect the regular news media to cover ongoing archeological research unless there is some sensational find (like a viking ship in Havana).

  But if you are interested in such research (and read Danish) I can recommend the magazine Skalk (skalk.dk).

• fifilura

  today at 6:19 AM

  No, I don't think there is a reason to switch.

  This is not exactly news for people living in this area, you would have learned it at school.

  There is a vast area between Denmark and UK called Doggerland where fishermen constantly being up mamooth tusks and stone age artifacts.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland

  • fosterbuster

    today at 7:04 AM

    Doggerland is on the other side of Jutland. Aarhus is east.

    Anecdotally I was not tought about Doggerland, and I don’t think it’s common knowledge.

    • beowulfey

      today at 12:21 PM

      I don't think most people realize just how much of ancient civilization is now under water. The oceans rose 120 meters since 10,000 years ago.

      I've always dreamed of making a tool to help visualize this. It would likely be very dramatic.

• globnomulous

  today at 9:01 AM

  Not exactly related to the story or to your comment, but: is Aarhus as happy and wonderful a place as all writing about it claims it is? I know immigrating to Denmark is nearly impossible, but I keep telling my partner that if (or when) the political situation in the US deteriorates sufficiently, Aarhus should be our destination -- that or Copenhagen.

  • messe

    today at 10:02 AM

    I've lived in Aarhus for the past two and a half years, and can say that it is quite a nice city to live in. Very walkable, decent public transport (despite how much locals love to complain about it), plenty of restaurants, bars and other entertainment. I'd definitely recommend it.

    Moving here was quite a bit easier for me though, as I'm an EU citizen.

• Someone

  today at 7:48 AM

  Archaeologists tend to keep such expeditions fairly hush-hush until they’re done with their research. If they don’t, they run the risk of treasure hunters ploughing through their find, destroying information, at night.

  So, the villagers likely knew there were people working on the beach, but may not have known they were archeologists or that they found a Stone Age settlement.

  • simonh

    today at 8:39 AM

    This settlement is out at sea, about 8m underwater.

    • Someone

      today at 10:27 AM

      https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37997640:

      “Three Dutch World War Two ships considered war graves have vanished from the bottom of the Java Sea, the Dutch defence ministry says.

      […]

      A report in the Guardian says three British ships have disappeared as well.

      […]

      the three missing wrecks were located 100km (60 miles) off the coast of Indonesia, at a depth of 70m”

      • WalterBright

        today at 11:24 AM

        I never understood the war graves thing. On land, people go to great effort to recover the bodies and re-inter them in proper graves. In the sea, they get designated as graves and nothing can be salvaged.

    • 42lux

      today at 9:29 AM

      That makes it harder to protect against treasure hunters not easier.

• tangwwwei

  today at 7:22 AM

  wat do u think could be particular about the state of journalism in Aarhus or Denmark that could've caused this? i sometimes learn of interesting news about my country from external sources too that gets drowned out by more petty concerns in the social media news cycle

• lenkite

  today at 6:31 AM

  US political news has infected the entire world now sadly, esp after Global Trump Tariffs. Its like he wanted to make sure the whole world talks about him...

  • diggan

    today at 10:43 AM

    > US political news has infected the entire world now sadly

    I'm not sure if it's just because of the two countries where I grew up (Sweden) and live now (Spain), but news here seems to have always been infected by US politics, for as long as I can remember. I remember being like 9 years old and the adults around the living-room table making drunk jokes about how dumb Georgie boy was for invading Afghanistan for example...

  • wafflemaker

    today at 8:45 AM

    The truth is also that there are more noteworthy this happening in the world now. Previous world order has fallen.* New one is being formed. And Trump is kind of in the midst of it as the leader of the ex-hegemon country.

    There will be much happening for the next decade or two. New wars, new alliances. Countries agreeing (or disagreeing) on new influence zones.

    *The old hegemon (the country that leads the world and calls all the shots) has no power anymore to influence countries to do their bidding. Look at how Putin makes fun of Trump, playing a delay game, while he is trying to slowly win the war he lost (by not winning it in 3 days).

• thaumasiotes

  today at 6:40 AM

  > This is not related to the story as such, but I live in Aarhus and this is the first I hear about it. I read three national news outlets and one specific to my local region of Østjylland a couple of times a day. I wonder if I should swap some of them.

  Something that's stuck with me is the time I walked into my local bookstore and found banners advertising that a new book by Orson Scott Card was already out and available for sale then and there.

  Pretty much any other type of product (that I might buy) would have managed to publicize this to me well in advance of the day you could purchase the product.

  To your question, I think the types of content delivered by the publishers you read are unlikely to change, and if you want to start hearing about new types of things, you'll need to find sources that cover them.

• bjarneh

  today at 6:07 AM

  Seems that we focus on all the crazy stuff Trump is doing, just like we did the last time he was president, depressing stuff. All of it.

  • wafflemaker

    today at 8:57 AM

    There is this astroturf new news outlet in Poland called Infopiguła. I follow that, 9 minutes per day and that's it for politician news for me. I just ignore anything else, politicial or world, knowing I'll find out about it anyway if it's important.

    But you can also just cut out news completely. There are edutainment channels on YouTube you could follow instead. You have hacker news. I watch other sources, just not "newsy" news.

    There is one VERY IMPORTANT rule for choosing channels/podcasts/content to watch. I only watch people presenting with positive energy, in a calm manner. "Scary" way of presenting, or clickbaity titles give more followers, but I feel bad from watching them. Just like when I'm low I sometimes play an audiobook read by Eckhart Tolle. I wonder why it makes such a difference?

  • AlecSchueler

    today at 6:31 AM

    Sadly he's one of the most powerful people in the world and we can't ignore the crazy stuff he does.

    • thaumasiotes

      today at 6:41 AM

      Is one of those ideas connected to the other one? Historically, being one of the most powerful people in the world is not even a minor barrier to most people ignoring the things you do, crazy or otherwise.

      • AlecSchueler

        today at 9:47 AM

        Well yes, historically most people ignored most things, but it's 2025 now.

      • card_zero

        today at 6:50 AM

        Historically there was no journalism and everybody ignored everything that was happening. Or do you mean in more modern history?

• KingOfCoders

  today at 7:07 AM

  US culture imperialism.

Given human propensity to settle near bodies of water (exhibited even to this day), and the change in sea levels after the last ice age, the bulk of intra-ice age settlement artifacts are probably submerged within a relatively short distance from our existing coastlines. I would be personally interested in an effort to systematically investigate these areas.

• rhplus

  today at 2:58 AM

  A recent episode of The Ancients talks about how oil and mineral exploration companies have been sharing their seismic mapping data of Doggerland with archeologists:

  https://shows.acast.com/the-ancients/episodes/doggerland-the...

  Partnering with industries that are mapping areas is certainly the only cost effective way for academic to work in submerged landscapes:

  https://archaeology.org/issues/march-april-2022/letters-from...

  • kennyloginz

    today at 5:53 AM

    That’s awfully short sighted.

• flanked-evergl

  today at 5:48 AM

  The sea level rose more than 120 meters in the last 20000 years, so it won't necessarily be that short distance, but I think at least it should be easy to calculate where to look.

  • hinkley

    today at 7:09 AM

    An area with a half % slope could have an entire city below the waterline.

    I think we're going to find that much like central and parts of South America, the extent of civilization has been vastly underestimated because Nature has covered over it.

  • neuronic

    today at 10:12 AM

    Yes, even more recently the entire space between England and continental Europe used to be connected landmass, Doggerland [1]. It was home to Mesolithic people just 8,200 years ago.

    [1] https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/doggerland...

• nradov

  today at 4:42 AM

  It would be great to see more underwater archaeology, I'm sure there's a lot to find. But due to variations in local conditions it's really tough to systematically investigate: every site has to be treated individually. Plus doing anything underwater becomes at least 10× harder and more expensive. Human scientific divers can only work easily down to about 30m: anything significantly deeper requires commercial diving protocols, submersibles, or ROVs which raise the difficulty and cost even further.

  • awesome_dude

    today at 7:00 AM

    The Australians have found a few sites between Australia and Papua New Guinea/Indonesia

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-28/underwater-ancient-ab...

  • Empact

    today at 5:46 AM

    I mean something more of the sort of a survey of sea floor and subsurface which would have been coastline at the glacial maxima, boats trawling multispectral scanners to identify candidate locations. There are a few different recent systems that push in the direction of this being feasible, e.g. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/cmhrp/news/usgs-designed-tool-...

• erk__

  today at 5:24 AM

  This is not even the only stone age settlement under water in Denmark, there is at least one other I know of on Zealand, article in Danish about it: https://www.vikingeskibsmuseet.dk/fagligt/marinarkaeologi/ma...

  • willvarfar

    today at 5:49 AM

    And here's one nearby in modern-day Sweden https://www.forskning.se/2016/11/07/valbevarade-spar-fran-st...

    Sorry can't find much in English or much about it at all. Iirc I once chanced upon a meet-some-archaeologists stall set up in a town square nearby and listened to an archaeologist talking about it and showing fancy maps and diagrams that really excited me, but none of that seems to have spilled online.

  • neuronic

    today at 10:14 AM

    There are likely way more, given that continental Europe was much larger just 8,000 years ago: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/doggerland

• timschmidt

  today at 2:53 AM

  Agree strongly. Especially around the Mediterranean including the north coast of Africa and the southern horn of Africa. Ancient humans are known to have inhabited the southern tip of Africa into the last interglacial period, and human migration across and settlement in the occasionally green Sahara could explain some things.

• adastra22

  today at 5:48 AM

  Unfortunately most have probably been destroyed by dragnet fishing.

• tracerbulletx

  today at 4:09 AM

  This is probably especially an issue for early North American settlements if people crossing over during the ice age glacial maximum were traveling down the coasts right after coming over the Bering Land Bridge

  • AlotOfReading

    today at 5:29 AM

    Less than you'd think. The white sands footprints push things back far enough that virtually all coastal sites would have been destroyed by glaciers at the LGM. We're still trying to map out the specific details.

    • bjackman

      today at 6:58 AM

      Maybe if you specifically care about "the first people in North America". But even if that was really 20kYA+ (wild that this is a serious possibility now!) there's still a vast gulf of more recent prehistory that we know so little about. And there's probably loads of fascinating evidence to uncover.

• miramba

  today at 5:22 AM

  The Archeology of Europe‘s Drowned Landscapes: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-37367-2

Related BBC podcast "In Our Time" about Doggerland, a landmass which was inhabited about ~10k years ago, but is now submerged in the north sea.

https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/m0006707

• unfitted2545

  today at 7:28 AM

  Some say the inhabitants are still in their cars to this day..

Every time I read an article like this I end up in a rabbit hole of reading about ice ages, sea level changes, and how the human evolved throughout it. It’s mind boggling that only 20000 years ago the sea level was 120 meters lower and much of Northern Europe was covered in ice

• iamflimflam1

  today at 8:25 AM

  I wonder how rapidly the change occurred - were the people aware of it happening? Did they have people saying “don’t listen to Yarg! These recent floods are just normal weather…”

  • alentred

    today at 12:38 PM

    My uneducated guess is: probably not. Populations where nomadic, changes were likely slow and life expectancy was much shorter. With no writing and no record keeping it is unlikely they had means to notice the changes.

  • jorisboris

    today at 11:02 AM

    At that time time they were still hunter gatherers. So they might have been aware of their surroundings, but I presume not as much if they would have been a sedentary community.

    The first communities started to settle more or less after the ice age ended, the sea level had risen and the planet had a more pleasant climate around 10000 years ago (source: I'm not a professional on this topic, just summarising what chatgpt tells me)

  • simonh

    today at 8:45 AM

    It was a relatively sedate 2m per century a lot of the time, but there was one catastrophic Tsunami event called the Storegga Slide around 6200 BC that would have been pretty dramatic.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide

  • skeezyboy

    today at 11:24 AM

    similar doomsday predictions were made and went unfulfilled im sure, much like modern times

Not far away, but partially preserved by the mudflat, lies Rungholt. A city of ~1000-1500 (some sources say 3000) inhabitants that was drowned in the Grote Mandrenke (1362 AD). That's a very big city in that time. In my childhood we were told, while wandering the tidal flat, that we should listen closely if we could hear the church bells under the mud. Only in 2023 the whereabouts of the sunken city were definitely confirmed and mapped. "Rungholt" probably means "wrong/low wood".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rungholt

• thaumasiotes

  today at 6:47 AM

  > "Rungholt" probably means "wrong/low wood".

  This is an interesting point. Names are often older than they appear.

  I have a book on Greek mythology that takes the position that Hercules, including his name, is considerably older than most of the Greek pantheon and should be thought of as a foreign import. But the form of his name ("Heracles") looks so natural in Ancient Greek, "glory of Hera" in the same way that you see other Greeks named Agathocles or Themistocles, that the mythology around the relationship between Hera and Heracles, which is extensive, must have developed from that apparent similarity.

  Potentialities like this keep us on our toes when we look at names like "Rungholt".

  • obfuscator

    today at 7:10 AM

    Absolutely, though in this case it would be the most obvious translation, since it was a frisian settlement and "Rung" and "Holt" are both frisian words in use. It is possible that Rung here could mean stanchion/post (so for wood that makes strong posts), but unlikely so close to the sea, is it not?

    I get what you mean, though. Here is a village called Großenwiehe, easy to be translated as "Great Consecration", and that was the commonly accepted meaning. Only much later it became apparent that "-wiehe" probably came from wighæ, so "Great Fortification". And in fact the old fortifications are still visible today.

There's an episode[1] of In Our Time covering Doggerland. Recommend.

[1] https://open.spotify.com/episode/6jlHaJMCfRmsMsrqqLBY3O?si=1...

One of the fun parts of genetic genealogy is that it's always exciting to see what old DNA turns up in archeological projects like these. It's a stretch to hope for, but wouldn't a paternal-line relative from Doggerland be cool...

It's interesting to me that items are well preserved. I thought salt water was particularly damaging and corrosive.

• alexey-salmin

  today at 5:13 AM

  The salt water part is not particularly surprising to me, after all we have plenty of wooden shipwrecks from the bronze age. Wood is preserved much better in the salt water than on the ground (unless it's a desert).

  What I don't understand is how it survived the surf. 2 meters per century means that the place had spent a century in the surf line, and surf grinds everything into sand and dust and scatters what it can't grind. I would have understood a sudden flooding but this is surprising.

• pfdietz

  today at 3:16 AM

  Corroding what? This is before metals were widely used.

  • mikert89

    today at 3:25 AM

    not corroding, but all the wood/bone/soft materials basically disappear over 10k years. very little will be left

    • ccgreg

      today at 4:09 AM

      Salt water without oxygen and salt water with oxygen are different.

    • samplatt

      today at 4:16 AM

      Not wrong, but TFA mentions "8.5k years" ago as the projected time for these findings. In cold, low-oxygen water, even wood & bone is preserved fairly well.

Stonge Age settlements can be found in numerous cities around the world, above water and bustling with contemporary human activity.

• KingOfCoders

  today at 7:07 AM

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_continuously_in...

  • skeezyboy

    today at 11:43 AM

    *that we know about. Humans are maybe 100k years old, and look how good we are with wood even today. We surely had settlements all over the place made from wood that just rotted away.

On a related note, since the Paleolithic rarely comes up on HN, something that seems to rarely come up in English language content; Menhir [1] (Long stone) or standing stones, which are spread all across Europe, some very elaborately decorated, others with sight holes cut in them, others extremely large, i.e., 30-40 feet tall before they were knocked over by the invasive meme, Christianity.

They are found from Portugal all the way to Siberia, but very little is known about them following the Christian meme eradicating the indigenous cultures through the many purges and programs from 300CE on.

There are some references that imply at least in some places they were a kind of connection to the afterlife and ancestors that would turn into birds that would perch on top of the standing stone, something that is still part of indigenous beliefs and practices in parts of Asia. It's basically the indigenous culture of the Native Europeans that middle eastern Christianity destroyed and eradicated like it destroyed and eradicated the Native Americans and so many other native people and cultures around the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menhir

• jalk

  today at 5:58 AM

  The Wikipedia article suggest that they could have been erected as far back as 6000-7000 years ago - so older than Stonehenge, and therefor also older than Celtic culture. The Wikipedia article suggest that early Christians defaced and destroyed some of the stones, but knowledge about the people who erected those stones was lost way earlier than 300CE.

  • hopelite

    today at 11:42 AM

    I just used Wikipedia as a quick reference in English. There is clear evidence that the practices of ancestors worship and their ancient practices involving these stones was directly linked to Christian persecution, including documented examples of the progroms against the indigenous Europeans starting immediately following crusades and effectively being part of them.

• hinkley

  today at 7:15 AM

  I wonder sometimes if the people of Gobleki Tepe were just oddly prophetic or if cultural erasure has been going on a hell of a lot longer than we think it has.

  Something I only learned well into my adulthood is that one of the reasons you can dig down and find the foundations of one, sometimes two different cultures below the feet of cities is that they used a lot of mud bricks, and when the house started to molder and fail they would pound it flat and start over, not haul the whole thing away. So a couple times a generation a neighborhood would be higher than it was before.

  And the center of the city would be on a hill, and keep getting higher (even if expansion kept the slope roughly the same). Over time it would become more and more work to get to the middle of a city from the plains surrounding it.

• sharpshadow

  today at 6:04 AM

  Maybe you also heard about an erdstall[0] which are old tunnel systems around Europe, often the entry is accompanied by an standing stone with a hole in it. Christianity did the same here. There is one case where they filled up the tunnel and build an monastery over it. Excavations and carbon dating revealed quite old objects dating between many thousand years. Some stones especially the ones in the entry area are big and heavy cut outs, the tunnels are often cut into stone. It’s still an unsolved mystery.

  Heinrich Kusch[1] and his wife have done very interesting work regarding this.

  0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdstall 1. https://www.unterwelt-kusch.com/forschung/erdstallforschung/

  • hopelite

    today at 12:23 PM

    Yes, I am aware of it, but thought I would limit the topic. It’s amazing when you start building a mental model of just how pervasive and expansive this whole system and lost, destroyed culture gets. I do find most explanations for the various “tunnels” rather dubious, especially the more “modern” seemingly medieval ones, but it’s all a very interesting topic. The indigenous European history and culture is immensely suppressed.

• vasco

  today at 5:43 AM

  What about the indigenous people the guys with the menhirs killed? Why are menhir guys indigenous, but whoever killed them, not indigenous?

  • namenotrequired

    today at 8:47 AM

    Quote me the passage where he said they weren’t?

    • skeezyboy

      today at 11:44 AM

      its implied in the definition of the word "indigenous"

• Mistletoe

  today at 5:33 AM

  I think you are seeing this a little too 2d. The reason the Christian meme spread so well is more complex than that. A codified belief system written down, the thought of a God that loves and cares about you, a path to redemption and forgiveness for sin or mistakes, these are just some of the reasons that it has been so successful. It wasn’t always just forced on people although there was that too. It’s just a really good meme and great story when you get to the heart of it. The people meeting in secret when Christianity started and risking their life to do so weren’t forced into it at all. Like capitalism, Christianity fits a lot of human needs and desires that are hard coded in humans.

  • skeezyboy

    today at 11:53 AM

    > Christianity fits a lot of human needs and desires that are hard coded in humans.

    Which version are you talking about because there is no one definition, Christians cant even agree amongst themselves about Christianity. Anyone is free to make up their own religion, include the bible in the lore, and call it "Christian".

  • skylurk

    today at 5:54 AM

    There definitely was a moment when Christianity was a secretive cult ostensibly fuelled by brotherly love, but certainly by the time of Constantine it had become a major political force.

    My impression is that Christianity took over Europe more for political reasons than the good story. There were strong incentives for pagan rulers to "convert", and force it onto the populace.

    I agree that the good story is key to its staying power.

  • ETH_start

    today at 6:08 AM

    [dead]

[stub for offtopicness]

• focusgroup0

  today at 3:30 AM

  [flagged]

  • simonh

    today at 3:34 AM

    They’re not always or necessarily anthropogenic. That doesn’t mean they can’t be anthropogenic.

    • palmfacehn

      today at 4:12 AM

      One of the reasons why control groups are so important in science.

  • today at 3:33 AM

• SadErn

  today at 2:53 AM

  [flagged]

• today at 3:34 AM