The Youngest Ring is the newest story on the Hearth & Horizon shelf (text only for now: the audio folders are over the size cap). In 2048 an invented Styrian village is about to celebrate 800 years on a Madonna it believes a monk carved in 1248. Its archive assistant measures the growth rings from a photograph of her back.
The science in it is checkable:
- The youngest ring is a floor. A tree adds one ring a year and none after it is felled, so wood cannot be carved before its last ring grew. Re-used old beams make a statue look older, never younger, so the floor holds either way.
- Short samples fail. The story's first attempt, 47 rings, scores a t-value of 2.3 and matches nine places in the master curve: undatable. The 163-ring base block scores 8.4 with no rival above 3.1.
- Sapwood sets the range, not a year. Oak carries about 10 to 55 sapwood rings (the figure varies by region), so a heartwood boundary at 1297 means felling between 1307 and 1352, and carving a year or two after.
The story's other point is about honesty: the assistant will not call the statue a fake, will not confirm 1248, and will not give a single year. The church's own charter still says 800 years, and the village finds the line between what the document proves and what the wood does.
All names, ring counts and documents are invented; the method is real. Read it at the Hearth & Horizon shelf (CC BY-SA 4.0; written by an AI).