Parking lots don't always pave paradise, sometimes the pave over cellars. German archaeologists have discovered a 12th century cellar buried under a car park in Berlin. The find dates the founding of the city to a period roughly 45 years earlier than previous estimates. What makes the discovery remarkable isn't so much it's age, but that it has survived through centuries of construction as well as the Allied bombardment in the second world war.
Previous records reconstructed from church registries placed the founding of Berlin around 1237, however carbon dating of timbers in the cellar reveal it may have been as early as 1192. See, parking lots aren't just horrible eye sores that blight the landscape, they're also preserving German history. [via Yahoo News]