When Context Is Key: “Hunger Stones” Go Viral, But The News First Broke In 2018

For the past week, stories have been circulating on the internet about the re-emergence in certain Czech and German rivers of so-called “hunger stones” – rocks embedded in rivers during droughts to mark water levels and warn future generations of the likely famine and famine. hardships when the stones became visible again. The coverage is largely fueled by a 11 august tweet noting in particular a stone, inscribed with a solemn warning: “If you see me, cry.”

hunger stones (hunger stein) are really something with a long and fascinating history. And Europe is in the midst of a historically severe drought — severe enough that water levels may indeed be low enough for the rocks to reappear. But that August 11 tweet and accompanying coverage are actually repeating a series of news stories from 2018, when the hungerstones resurgence in the midst of That the extreme drought of a year in Europe made headlines.

It’s hardly a blatant case of misinformation, but it does provide an illustrative example of why including context is so important in the digital age, even in a relatively simple tweet raving about newly acquired knowledge.

The stone referenced in the August 11 tweet is located on the Elbe River in Děčín, Czech Republic, one of the oldest such monuments in the region. The earliest legible date is 1616, but older engravings marking the drought of 1417 and 1473 were wiped out over the centuries by anchoring ships. Other drought years carved into the stone include 1707, 1746, 1790, 1800, 1811, 1830, 1842, 1868, 1892, and 1893. It is possible to see this particular stone for some 126 days a year, thanks to its construction of a dam built in 1926 on a tributary of the Elbe.

The stone also has an inscription probably added in 1938: “Neplač holka, nenaříkej, když je sucho, pole stříkej” (“Girl, don’t cry and moan, when it’s dry, water the field”). Another Elbe stone can be found near Bleckede, with the inscription Geht dieser Stein unter, wird das Leben wieder bunter (“When this stone sets, life becomes more colorful again”).

A 2013 paper examining the history of drought in the Czech region from 1090 to 2012 relied in part on hungerstones as “epigraphic records” of past droughts, complementing evidence from annals, chronicles, diaries, tax records , religious documents, letters, printed manuscripts and modern instrumental data. (Apparently, in 1393, the drought was so severe that it was possible to cross the Vltava River on its bed, and the water was “as green as grass.”)

Frankly, that article is worth reading alone for the historical anecdote about a priest named Prokop Diviš, who is known for serendipitously building one of the earliest grounded lightning rods. Diviš set up his “weather instrument” in his rectory in June 1754. It was composed of several tin boxes and over 400 metal spikes, and Diviš thought it could dispel storms. (The scientific community at the time was less than impressed with his theories.)

Five years later, in the fall of 1759, local villagers demanded that Diviš remove it, believing it to be the cause of that summer’s drought. The authors suggest that the priest’s personal enemies had incited the crowd. The following March, the villagers broke the chains holding the instrument, and the next night a thunderstorm knocked it over. But their victory was short-lived. There were so many thunderstorms that summer, damaging the fields and vineyards, that the villagers asked him to reinstall his weather instrument. “His response was not positive,” the authors wrote.

When Central Europe was again besieged by drought in 2018, the Elbe plummeted to its lowest level in more than half a century, and news reports began to circulate about the re-emergence of some of the hunger stones. The Associated Press, NPR, Smithsonian and Atlas Obscura were some of the outlets that covered the story.

So why has the story resurfaced now? Kim LaCapria, writing for Truth or Fiction, thinks it started with an August 10 post on the r/todayilearned subreddit, linking to the Wikipedia article on hungerstones “just as a point of interest.” Perhaps not coincidentally, two days earlier, low water levels in Lake Mead due to the extreme megadrought resulted in the discovery of yet another set of human remains — the fourth body found to date. So, as talks about drought and climate change circulated on the air, they created the perfect conditions to rekindle interest in the hungerstones, sparking a new wave of news stories like this one.