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by ythn 2873 days ago
> It's always amusing to find out what Americans think is old.

It's not that we "think" those buildings are old. They are the oldest. There are no older buildings. Age is relative. If you colonize a pacific island, the oldest building will be 1 year old. That doesn't mean the colonizers think 1 year is a long time.

If you want to get into a manhood measuring contest we could broaden the criteria to include native american structures.

2 comments

If you want to get into a manhood measuring contest we could broaden the criteria to include native american structures.

I don't want to get in to a content, but I am interested in how old they are. The oldest structure here in the UK is a neolithic dwelling dated to ~3700 BC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knap_of_Howar

The Americas have the likes of Watson Brake and Sechin Bajo, dated to roughly the same time as that, give or take a couple of centuries.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17678841

Well, there is Sechin Bajo from around 3,500 BC, though we know there were people in the Americas at least 8000 years before that, unfortunately their structures haven't survived (that we have found).
Taos Pueblo is on here, there aren't a lot of standing Amerindian structures from that period.