What Is The Oldest Thing You Own?

A Freeper | 2/15/2016 | jy8z

[jy8z]

I saw this question posed by a fellow FReeper in answer to another Freeper today. I thought it would make for an interesting topic. I do not remember who it was so I can't attribute it to them.

[Swordmaker]

Meteorites are older than any rock original to earth. They're believed to be as old as the solar system, around 5 billion years.

Black diamonds are considered the rarest of the fancy colored diamonds. . . or were.

I wear a rose gold and Tungsten Carbide 15.45 carat Black Diamond ring and my girlfriend wears a yellow gold 6.5 carat Black Diamond ring with 28 champagne diamond ring. She and I designed these rings as our "un-marriage, commitment rings" because at our ages, we did not want to complicate our respective estates.

Designs by Swordmaker and Kathy,
Builds and Photo credit: AK Jewelers, Sacramento, CA

No black diamonds have ever been found or mined with regular white or colored diamonds. Because of their Hydrogen content, It is thought they all come from a single source, a giant asteroid, which was a single black diamond, estimated to have been a kilometer in diameter, that was born in the center of a supernova that occurred before the Earth was created. This black diamond asteroid is thought to have hit the earth between 2 billion and 2.5 billion years ago right between where Africa and South America were joined as part of a super-continent (it may have been what triggered their separation). That would make Black Diamonds among the oldest stones on Earth.

Up until about ten years ago, all black diamonds except three were the size of a pea or smaller and were found strewn along the ground in Central South Africa and in central South America, or were panned out of streams in both places. Most were about the size of a grain of sand. These you still see in jewelry stores today as pave black diamond Jewelry with itty bitty stones. These are thought to have been shards that broke off the main body of the asteroid as it hit the Earth long ago.

The three large black diamonds were the 667 carat Black Orloff, about the size of half an egg in the Russian Czar's scepter, the 68 carat Small Orlof, also in the Russian Crown jewels, and a 37 carat smaller stone which is mounted in a ring. However, about ten years ago large black diamonds started appearing that were not under the control of the DeBeers Diamond Cartel or the Russian Diamond merchants. Apparently someone dug into a lode of large format black diamonds in Africa, perhaps even the main body of the huge asteroid and started selling them. These are being cut in India and Israel.

I bought quite a few when they were pretty inexpensive several years ago. . . but they are now going up rapidly. A very large one I bought which at 91.86 carats puts the historic Small Orlof and that other 37 carat black diamond that were #2 and #3 in the world ten years ago completely out of the running as large Black Diamond records. I just got it out on my safe and took some photos of it for you.

91.86 carat black diamond, 1.127" in diameter.

But my ~92 carat round cut black diamond is not even in the running for the top 25 largest black diamonds today!!!! I was looking at one that weighed in at an amazing 225 carats! Another I saw was over 450 carats! I decided to bypass it because I can't figure out what to do with the one I have that is an 1.127" in diameter as it is! The 225 was only 1.275" in diameter, not that much bigger, just heavier. Gear shift knob? Cane topper? That size diamond is just too damn big for jewelry. It's too pointy on the back for a pendant. Besides, I gave my girlfriend a smaller, better one for a pendant with multiple stones. Got any ideas???

[The Duke]

Before leaving the family farm to start my career in distant Florida in 1981 I wanted a keepsake; so I went to an old, unused cattle barn we had, picked up an antique copper fire extinguisher that had been cast aside decades earlier, and threw it in my trunk.

I've since restored it and use it as an ornamental doorstop.

[MHGinTN]

Oh wow. Thank you/

[fso301]

A 1938 5 dollar silver certificate.

[Cboldt]

Manmade object, coin from ancient Rome.

Lots of rocks, gemstones, probably millions of years old.

Real estate, a piece of the earth, billions of years old!

[Personal Responsibility]

A Flash comic book from 1962

[eyedigress]

I see some falling barns in NC from time to time.

My job is 100% travel. I wonder how hard it would be to ask the owners to look around.

Regular doors go for 225 retail.

[Chickensoup]

European a relic box minus the relic, probably 1500s

American item? toss up between a dropleaf plank table made with one tree plank and a set of shelves from my mil’s 1710 farmhouse.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

I have a vase made at the end of the bronze age. And an electrum coin minted in Anatolia about 700 BC.

[Lower55]

“I have a rock. Picked it up when I was a kid.”

The winner...

[MHGinTN]

Can you post a picture of the table? That would be a really nice piece. Settlers in the 1700s were felling Chesnut trees with lumber that large.

[ETL]

Very interesting post! Lot to absorb there at nearly 12am on east coast. Will try to get back to this tomorrow.

You do fantastic work, btw! :)

Re: Designs by Swordmaker and Kathy

[DesertRhino]

“The hydrogen atoms in my body. They’re over 13 billion years old.”

Your posts annoy me almost daily. But I have to admit, THAT was good. I take my hat off to you. You just won the internets for the whole day. I am going to be polite to you the next three threads at least.

[ETL]

Your posts annoy me almost daily. But I have to admit, THAT was good. I take my hat off to you. You just won the internets for the whole day. I am going to be polite to you the next three threads at least.

Lol! Well, maybe if you weren't such a staunch supporter/defender of KGB Putin we would get along better.

[RitchieAprile]

Kar 98K waffenamt 42 dated 1940

[Intolerant in NJ]

Old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.....

[texas_mrs]

I have a Civil War cannonball and bullet. Painful just to imagine being struck by either.

[Disambiguator]

I have an S&W “lemon squeezer” that belonged to my mother’s father’s father. It was manufactured around 1900. We also have some pretty old furniture, and at least two sewing machines that date to 1910-1915.

[blackpacific]

“Meteorites are older than any rock original to earth. They’re believed to be as old as the solar system, around 5 billion years.”

The Earth is part of the Solar System, so why would a rock from the same system of necessity be older?

[Swordmaker]

According to paleontologists, the oldest hard bodied life forms only date back to the beginning of the Cambrian, roughly 550 or so million years ago. Or did you mean the "Platystrophia" was about 100 million years more recent than the trilobite?

I'm going by what my Grandmother wrote on the box she sent the two items in. What she called a platystrophia looks something like a clam with three rising and lowering main lobes to the shell which have sub-lobes in them. It sort of looks like a fat Shell oil sign only with three folds folds across the shell from side to side. I did take them both to University of California at Berkeley when I was about 10 years old and the guy there confirmed what they were, but did not, as I recall, confirm the age, if we talked about it at all. Then again, that was 56 years ago. He did say the Trilobite was a particularly fine specimen. It's curled up, sort of biting its tail, not spread out flat.

With my Grandmother's handwriting the 585,000,000 could just as easily have been 535,000,000 years. LOL! She used a fountain pen and her hands were pretty shaky. . . but what was 50 million years give or take to an 8 year old boy? I'm pretty sure she wrote the other fossil was a hundred million years older than the Trilobite.

Thanks for the information. . .