Stone Age settlement found under the sea in Denmark

> 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.

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

>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.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

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

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.

> Our culture's migration will be entirely different.

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

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

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.

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!"

>>Unfortunately I don't expect there is any particularly reusable solution to be uncovered.

Mad that people can write statements like this when the Netherlands exists: https://www.netherlands-tourism.com/netherlands-sea-level/

Maybe the current system is the historical balance.

We have government subsidized insurance in the USA on coastal properties. The rest of us will pay for it.

I don't think it's fair to pretend the only options humans have are the extremes of private and state ownership. Greed and the weight of capitalism under rail expansion in the US completely obliterated at least 15-20k years worth of Indigenous "non-rigid land ownership", being the apex system of human power consolidation and all that.

Native American nations and tribes didn't "own" land in the way that European colonizers did, under a doctrine of private property, written deeds and legal systems. Even under tribal territories, access was fluid.

America and its land was held communally by tribes and was generally understood in terms of use rights. If your nation, family or tribe cultivated a field, you had rights to that field as long as you actively used it. And stewardship of the land was seen as something to care for, not a commodity.

And this was the way things were in America up until a few hundred years ago.

These solutions didn't come from the Stone Age, though.

> Then, you're arguing for feudalist land ownership customs?

This is a really bad-faith reframing of the parent comment.

Yes, but the OP was talking about now and in the future.

Its certainly not existential. If anything itll probably spur some kind of new invention wed be glad to have (think WW2 and fertilizer)

How much of other people's tax dollars do you expect to spend to safeguard the bad purchases of land (soon to be water) owners?

Rising sea levels aren't new, it's ancient. Buying coastal properties always carries risk.

Society at large should not have to keep bailing out people who make poor decisions like this.

>>Society at large should not have to keep bailing out people who make poor decisions like this.

I get your point, and I agree to a certain extent, but do you apply this same approach to other bad decisions such as EG overeating causing obesity, drug taking etc?

I think the problem is researches feel under pressure to make research of immediate relevance to get funding etc. Its value is it tells us about people and history.

There are far more relevant examples in how more recent cultures dealt with things like land being lost to erosion or desertification or shifting rivers etc.

Control of borders was nowhere near as tight as today, given how underdeveloped technology was compared to today, and in some places (deserts, forests) the border was more of a very wide strip of no-mans land than just a line.

But places like the Roman Empire absolutely had "hard" demarcations in some places, not just standard country borders, but also internal borders.

For example, when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he legally crossed into Italy by doing so and thus triggered a war. Rome itself had pomerium, a city demarcation whose crossing had legal consequences as well.

If you entered the Roman Empire peacefully, and you had something to tax or apply duties to, you would be confronted with officials in the closest suitable place.

That sounds like border to me.

Parent comment was talking about what we might learn from Stone Age evidence. The Netherlands' technology and methods already exist.

That's just another name for war.

No one "owns" land, they just protect and area that they claim is theirs.

It's a small town of 17k and they expect to be done "moving" (really just building a whole new town 3km away) by 2100. That's not a scalable process.

For a more likely scenario, see Japan. Demographic crash (which is already happening all over the developed world) followed by mass migration to urban centers with economic forces dooming or favoring a city depending on it's circumstances (looking at you, Miami).

City walls and later regional walls are some of the oldest structures that still exist (some still in use today after 1000s of years)

Borders are very much not a new concept. Nations are new-ish but not the idea of owned and protected land.

War has almost always been over resource control...

To defend myself a little, I never said rigid land ownership was not still what I would prefer. But tying significant value to land and allowing individuals to hold it has some downsides.

> Then, you're arguing for feudalist land ownership customs?

>This is a really bad-faith reframing of the parent comment.

How so? Very respectfully, perhaps you should read with more care.

See here:

>those strips were even periodically reallocated to keep things fair.

Which stands alone as an argument for feudalist customs, but I also argue that it frames the rest as an argument-in-favor. Such as this, seemingly positively highlighting community "customary rights".

>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:

Critique my answer, but accusing a bad faith argument doesn't hold up.

No one who reads for comprehension would credibly interpret the post as anything but an argument for feudalist customs. To be generous: even if the over-arching intent possibly is to change modern legal customs via any necessary argument.

That may be, but highlighting feudalism is a morally perilous way to go about it.

I disagree with the perspective entirely, but if someone is going to advocate for it then they should find a less morally backwards method than highlighting the ostensible fairness of the feudal era.

I'm honestly not sure which point you're making in this thread. Are you saying that government should somehow make people whole for the loss of their coastal property? Or are you making the point that the government has no business interfering with the property rights of others? There seems to be a tension here, because I don't see how you could do the latter without also doing the latter — i.e., making coastal property owners whole requires taking someone else's property (either money or real property) and giving it to them. Or maybe you'd propose that we resettle them onto federal lands? (Even in that case, taxpayers bear a significant opportunity cost.)

The point was very clearly not "feudal lords should come back and that system was good".

The point was "even the feudal lords realized you have to have some concept of shared/common purpose lands or things go bad fast".

Much more expensive next time as we're not only subsidizing people's insurance but subsidizing moving them somewhere else. Orders of magnitude higher cost I imagine.

> Rising sea levels aren't new, it's ancient. Buying coastal properties always carries risk.

40% of the world’s population lives within 100 kilometers of the coast[1]. If one person makes a bad purchase of land, the problem is theirs. If 3 billion people make bad purchases of land, that's a problem for everyone in the world.

Probably we can't blame most of those people for much beyond being born where they were.

[1] https://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/natlinfo/indicators/methodolo...

I think for a lot of people, their deeded land is in eventually in terms of lat/long, and if the water swallows their land or their land falls in the sea, they're pretty much SOL. Depending on the rules of their locality, they may keep ownership of the land that's now underwater: it may effectively cease if underwater land is not subject to private ownership, or it may continue but not be of value because you may not be able to exclude other people from the land (or the waters above it) or develop it.

For some though, the deed may be defined in terms of the coastline, and then they're going to have an interesting legal battle. But this isn't without precedent; coastlines and waterways change and things defined against them adapt.

My original point was that it is easy for people to advocate for the government to take people's property away, when they have no property of their own or no skin in the game.

My other point was just a wider one on moral hazard, and if it applies to coastal property (in that people bear their own costs) should it apply to EG obesity (where people should bear the cost of healthcare issues). If not, why is property a separate case?

Border walls and dykes are quite an ancient concept. Yours. Ours. Keep out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasanian_defense_lines -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limes_(Roman_Empire)

No country I am aware of uses lat/long for property deeds

My deed is for:

That portion of the Northeast quarter of Section X, Township Y North, Range Z East, W.M., in Blank County, Washington, described as follows: The Southwest quarter of the Southeast quarter of the Northeast quarter of said Section. Except for some bits that aren't relevant.

That's not in terms of lat/long per se, but the section and townships are effectively equivalent to lat/long. If the shoreline moves, my property doesn't. Technically everything is relative to this stone ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willamette_Stone

There were some premodern societies where land possession was very fluid. But. There were plenty of others where land ownership worked almost exactly like today's systems. The oldest clay tablets talk about buying and selling land, systems of laws protecting land ownership, court cases involving land disputes, and surveyors laying out stone boundary markers that were meant to stay put for centuries. Incan quipu cords were records of who owned which piece of land. Asian rice terraces have been individually owned for thousands of years. This urban legend that private property is not an ancient concept is really wonky.

You're painting a false picture of pre-Colombian history. Indigenous groups fought wars over control of territory, sometimes escalating to genocide.

> There were some premodern societies where land possession was very fluid.

Yes, commons, rotating field systems, and similar arrangements show that.

> But. There were plenty of others where land ownership worked almost exactly like today’s systems.

Not quite. Transactions existed, but they were embedded in systems of obligation and sovereignty — kings, emperors, or lords claimed ultimate rights. That’s a different structure from modern absolute private ownership.

> The oldest clay tablets talk about buying and selling land, systems of laws protecting land ownership, court cases involving land disputes, and surveyors laying out stone boundary markers that were meant to stay put for centuries.

Those records exist, but even in Mesopotamia rulers could reallocate or confiscate land. Ownership wasn’t as secure or absolute as a modern freehold title.

> Incan quipu cords were records of who owned which piece of land.

Quipus tracked obligations and allocations. Land under the Inca was held communally and redistributed, not privately owned.

> Asian rice terraces have been individually owned for thousands of years.

Some land was inherited and sold, but there were also systems of redistribution (for example, the Chinese equal-field system). That’s not the same as permanent, alienable freehold.

> This urban legend that private property is not an ancient concept is really wonky.

It’s not an urban legend. Property has always been a bundle of rights that varied across societies. The modern model of land as a freely tradable commodity giving the holder near-total monopoly is comparatively recent.

”Unfortunately I don't expect there is any particularly reusable solution to be uncovered.” Scientist might write that in a PR piece or a grant proposal but I can guarantee you that no one thinks that.