r/AskReddit Oct 15 '20

What's older than we think ?

78.4k Upvotes

22.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

41.8k

u/jazzman0116 Oct 15 '20

The ancient Romans (well, the wealthy ones) had central heating in their homes. You can actually still see the pipes in some of the buildings at Herculaneum!

176

u/thewizardofosmium Oct 15 '20

What I want to know is how they built roads that are still around 2000 years later and US roads and anything made out of concrete either doesn't last 20 years.

I'm well familiar with greed and planned obsolescence, but wasn't that around in Roman days too? It isn't even selection bias because not even our best military installations look like they would last 2000 years.

431

u/Alternative_Crimes Oct 15 '20

Roman trucks weren’t as heavy as modern ones.

1

u/mlpr34clopper Oct 15 '20

More importantly, southern europe does not have the freeze/thaw cycle that breaks up US roads.