[ugh]

Are there no buildings older than 6102 years because every building inevitably crumbles or because the buildings that existed 6102 years ago inevitable crumbled?

Agriculture isn’t that old and there just wan’t any need for permanent buildings before agriculture arrived.

It doesn’t seem completely out of the question for the Pyramids to survive another 2,000 years to reach 6,000 years. (Ok, that might be a bad point to make, given that there is nothing inside the pyramids anymore.)

[arethuza]

"Agriculture isn’t that old"

Agriculture is way older than any surviving building, back to about 9000BC:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture

[ugh]

Sure, but considering the scales involved the need for buildings is relatively recent.

[arethuza]

Just to clarify - I was talking about oldest surviving buildings as we were discussing time capsules.

There are archaeological sites where large amounts of construction had been carried out that are much older than 3500BC e.g. Çatalhöyük in Turkey:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCk

And, of course, Jericho:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho