![\"Robenhausen](\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/robenhausen-door-panel.jpg\")
Instead of cutting a plank from a trunk, its maker split the outer wood from a large silver fir and pressed it flat. Van Willigen calls that “a very effective way to quickly produce boards that are both wide and thin.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two samples at ETH Zurich<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Over the decades after 1868 the door’s age stayed open, given the site’s long occupation. Villages came and went at Robenhausen from about 3,700 to 1,000 B.C., which left both the Neolithic and the Bronze Age in play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tree-ring dating can fix timber to an exact year, but it needs many growth rings. This panel, because of how it was made, does not have them. Radiocarbon dating, which reads the decay of carbon-14 in organic material, offered another route.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1998, two small wood samples went to the radiocarbon lab at ETH Zurich. The result pointed to around 3,700 B.C. and to one of the earliest houses at the site. Palafittes assigns the door to the Pfyn culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everyday wooden objects rarely last, which is why a 3,400-year-old folding chair from a Danish burial mound<\/a> draws so much attention. Waterlogged ground improves the odds because it holds very little oxygen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Decay does continue down there, and a study of waterlogged wood from La Marmotta<\/a>, a Neolithic village under Italy’s Lake Bracciano, found erosion bacteria and wood-degrading fungi at work. Only microbes adapted to oxygen scarcity can grow there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Excavation brings its own risk, since wood that dries too fast can crack and shrink. A degraded piece “can lose shape and collapse,” the U.S. National Park Service warns<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Robenhausen also yielded woven textiles, fishing nets, carrying nets and parts of a Neolithic loom, Palafittes reports. Italy’s Gran Carro produced a similar piece of ancient fabric beside a submerged loom<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Organic finds tend to decompose first at archaeological sites, the Milwaukee Public Museum notes. That loss explains the value of wooden spears and bark trays from Barcelona<\/a> and of Swiss doors alike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Robenhausen belongs to a UNESCO World Heritage property of 111 pile-dwelling sites around the Alps, and 56 of them lie in Switzerland. Drought, construction, wave action and tourism all threaten these places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “What has survived for thousands of years is in danger of being lost in just a few years,” the Palafittes preservation page<\/a> states. Falling groundwater can dry some sites out completely at times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Farmland adds pressure where peat has been drained. Managers have bought or swapped such land and rewetted it, which lifts the groundwater for wildlife and buried villages. England’s Fens offer a cousin of that idea in a flooded rice trial on peat soils<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nowhere does the museum crown this as Europe’s oldest door. Its wording is “one of the oldest.” Excavations have since found another Neolithic door at Lake Pf\u00e4ffikon and two at Zurich’s Sechsel\u00e4utenplatz, and the account gives no dates for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Its figures also leave some slack, because the text offers no error range for the 1998 samples and calls the door more than 5,500 years old, while 3,700 B.C. works out to about 5,700.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How anyone treated the wet board after 1868 goes unmentioned too. The full history appears on the Swiss National Museum blog<\/a>, published January 17, 2019, and modified December 17, 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Photo: Swiss National Museum<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A fir door from around 3,700 B.C. ranks among the oldest preserved doors in Europe, according to the National Museum … <\/p>\n![\"Line](\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/pfyn-house-reconstruction.jpg\")
Slow rot in oxygen-poor mud<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Drained peatlands and low lakes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
A title the museum avoids<\/h2>\n\n\n\n