6,500-Year-Old Oaks Found in Czechia Become a Natural Archive and a Piece of World Art
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A unique cluster of oak trunks roughly 6,500 years old has been discovered in Czechia — on a flat, seemingly unremarkable plot of land where not even geological surveys had previously detected a single buried tree. According to Noha, the researcher behind the find, some of the ancient trunks later became part of the "Forest of Civilizations" project and were showcased at the Expo 2025 world fair in Osaka, Japan.
How the trees ended up underground
According to Noha, the local landscape looked completely different 6,500 years ago: the Olše River of that era, by current estimates, flowed about three kilometers from its present course, and further upstream there may have stood an extensive forest, predominantly of oak. Trees gradually fell into the river — through bank erosion and natural windthrow — and the current carried them along the riverbed for decades until a natural barrier stopped them. During subsequent floods, the trunks were buried under layers of sediment, and cut off from air, part of the wood survived intact under the right conditions to this day.
A natural archive of the ancient climate
The trees grew in an era when none of today's states or borders existed, and direct records of the weather or river levels from that time simply don't exist. "I think of every one of these trunks as a natural archive of its era," says Noha. Carbon and oxygen isotopes yield data on water regimes and growing conditions, while chemical and anatomical analysis reveals shifts in the environment. According to the researcher, what makes the find especially valuable isn't a single trunk but an entire cluster of oaks from one location — this lets scientists compare trees against one another and reconstruct the broader history of the landscape. Some questions remain unanswered: acorns were found inside one of the trunks, pieces of amber turned up nearby, and specialists are studying how surrounding minerals have affected the wood's structure.
From "rotten wood" to world art
At first, the discovery was met with skepticism. "For many people, it was just black, rotten wood," Noha recalls. He was even suspected of fraud and asked what the material had been dyed with. But gradually the wood found its way into major museums and into the hands of artists and architects — Noha has taken the find to dozens of countries, gained access to closed collections and storage facilities of major world institutions, and in London he once held in his hands a fragment of a door made from wood that hasn't grown on Earth for more than a thousand years.
The turning point came with the "Forest of Civilizations" project and its journey to Expo 2025: 133 trunks, symbolically representing different countries and organizations, were shipped to Osaka. Architect Sou Fujimoto and artists including Tony Cragg, Lorenzo Quinn, Vlastimil Beránek, and Jaroslav Prošek helped the ancient wood cross the line from scientific find to contemporary art. "It's a single forest, a single root system, and a symbol of the connection between civilizations," Noha believes. In his view, oaks six and a half thousand years old have been handed a paradoxical mission — reminding today's nations that their borders are astonishingly young and fleeting compared to nature.
A €45 million valuation and "gold for grandchildren"
Ahead of Expo, the project's value had to be transparently established for tax, customs, and insurance purposes. According to Noha, using a comparative method recognized by the relevant Japanese authorities, the project's minimum value was set at around €45 million. This isn't the market price of the wood itself, but a valuation made specifically for the project's needs; high-quality ebony was used as the comparative benchmark.
The question of value also changed attitudes toward the material itself: while people once looked mainly for ways to use it, Noha now increasingly argues that it should be preserved untouched. "There's simply nothing to replace subfossil oak with. A new tree can grow, but no one will ever again create material that is six and a half thousand years old — that millennia-long process can't be repeated. This is gold for our children. Diamonds for our grandchildren," the researcher says with conviction. He believes each future generation of scientists will have more advanced technology than the last, meaning the most valuable part of the find may turn out to be precisely the wood no one touches today: "Perhaps it holds information for which we don't even know the right question to ask yet."
Source: ekolist.cz
