I sometimes wonder: shouldn't archaeologists wait before cracking open specimens until science has advanced to the point where we can make much better measurements, perhaps even without cracking open the specimens and spoiling them in the process? And how do you determine the best time to do so?
Haaretz (deep-linked) has more details that some have brought up.
"Asked what it’s like to excavate a thousand-year-old toilet, Nagorsky explains that in the interim, the waste became dirt. They’re simply digging in dirt. It’s fine."
Dating of the egg is so far incidental, done by relational strata:
"That lamp was of a type only made in the late Abbasid period, Nagorsky explains – about 1,000 years ago. And thusly, they dated the chicken egg to that time."
No one has ever interpreted the question as "which came first, the chicken or the fish egg?"
It's not interesting even when you don't intentionally misinterpret it. If a chicken egg is an egg from which a chicken will hatch, then the egg came first by definition. If a chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken, then the chicken came first by definition.
The attribute of "chickenness" is a sorites paradox. So even if you allow the interpretation of "egg which will become chicken" vs "egg laid by a chicken" (which is quite clever, I hadnt encountered that) you are still stuck with marginal difference between mother and child/egg in overall "chickenicity."
Chickens are a fun example to use here, given the culinary cliche that unfamiliar meats taste to varying degrees "kind of like chicken". So I guess any individual chicken would be very close in flavor to the Standard Chicken, whichever one that is.
> even if you allow the interpretation of "egg which will become chicken" vs "egg laid by a chicken" (which is quite clever, I hadnt encountered that) you are still stuck with marginal difference between mother and child/egg in overall "chickenicity."
But that has no effect on the answer to the question. Given the definition, it is not necessary to identify the first chicken in order to know whether that first chicken hatched from the first chicken egg (definition 1) or laid it (definition 2).
What's the newsworthiness here? Thousand-year-old eggs are already a common delicacy in China. When preserved properly they not only stay intact, but are also edible.
You are probably thinking of century eggs, also known as thousand year eggs and many other names. The name isn’t literal; they are made within weeks or months and I seriously doubt they’d remain edible after 1000 years (nor would they be affordable for your average cook).
I'm not actually sure if this is in jest, but for the unaware, "Thousand-year" eggs do exist, but are not actually that old. They are fermented for a few weeks/months.
I'm amazed there was still yolk in there! Although I'm sure it's probably decomposed I would still love to see a picture of 1k year old egg yolk!