Friday, 11th June 2004 (3264 views)

Scientists have discovered that craftsmen in ancient China had complex machinery to create jewellery a long time before it was originally thought.

According to Dr Peter Lu of Harvard University in the US, spiral grooves on items such as 2,550 year old jade rings could only have been created with a precision "compound" machine, something which was not even thought to have been invented at this time.

Dr Lu explains in Science magazine: "The complex machine that created these spiral grooves may also be among the ancestors of the crank in China... sculptures to have mechanised a variety of agricultural processes such as milling and winnowing."

The burial rings found in hoards and tombs date from the so-called 'spring and autumn' period of 771 to 475 AD.

Before these results, the earliest known references to such machinery was in the First Century AD, according to BBC News Online.

 

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