This is the third time an article about this pyramid has made it to the front page in several weeks. It’s almost certainly BS.
The authors used the SHCal20 radiocarbon dating calibration curve but tested volcanic soil samples. C14 depleted CO2 and carbonate minerals dissolved in groundwater coming from Mount Gede a few miles away will make the samples look significantly older than they actually are.
SHCal20 is meant to be used with drilled samples from bulk material like bone and fossilized plants, not soil samples that are exposed to the elements for thousands of years. C14 concentrations in the atmosphere vary significantly, over time, especially around volcanically active regions so they need to make their own calibration curve for that specific area to get any kind of accuracy.
It doesn’t sound like carbon dating was the only, or based on their words even the main, method used. The claim to have used stratigraphy as well and say they need follow ups with carbon dating to be certain.
I think where I have seen people take issue is that there seems to be a push for "10000 year old pyramid". In short the measurements are correct the conclusions wrong.
They split things into 4 big layers, unit 1,2, ancient soil fills and unit 3. With unit 1 the most recent, also split into more find layers. Unit 1 goes to 2000 BCE roughly, 2 to 6000 BCE and then ancient soil 7000-8000 BCE and unit 3 13000 BCE+.
Unit 1 has clear megalithic structures and masonry work.
Unit 2 is more debatable, with stones and possible mortar remnants showing possible masonry work. But it is mostly some long stones and gravel, all with shapes that can occur totally naturally.
After that, ancient soil and Unit 3, from what I could read evidence of proper construction work seems more tenuous, if existant at all. Basically stones and soil.
Basically what the paper finds is some surface level masonry work and some deeper level stones they interpret as masonry while it is VERY debatable. Then they take a deep drill, date it to the paleolithic, and frame it as "paleolithic construction". But what most archeologists are reading is "recent construction with possible traces of humans in the area before"
> For example, this study demonstrates that the geophysical layers do not necessarily align with the lithological stratigraphy as depicted from borehole data. The discrepancies highlight the need for caution when interpreting the results and emphasize the importance of considering multiple factors and approaches in the analysis.
Which makes sense, since it's a jungle on a volcanically active island. That's a perfect recipe for a very active and varied geology, the kind that would bring up ancient carbon. The errors are likely correlated.
I think it's all just a bunch of wishful thinking - the interpretations they make are very tenuous.
Miniminuteman goes over "10000 year old Indonesian pyramid" too in his 4h or so debunking of Graham Hancock ancient civilization Netflix series (the usual "big archeology doesn't want you to know about this prediluvian ancient Atlantean civilization").
>(the usual "big archeology doesn't want you to know about this prediluvian ancient Atlantean civilization").
Which is cartoonishly absurd. Imagine how much easier applying for grants would be if you could write "we may find a 10 000 year old civilization with computers and tech rivaling, possibly even surpassing our own". That's so much better than "we're trying to discover whether 3000-year-old copper picks were usually curved at 5 degrees, or closer to 10 degrees. We suspect it's 7ish".
Yes. Archeologists are often frustrated they can't get funding or enough time at specific locations, not a huge cabal thathas access to the world history abd hides it from everyone. And most discoveries are much more mundane (even though still exciting IMHO) that what people would expect, as you said.
This site is one of the building blocs that Graham Hancock uses to paint an alternate prehistory, involving a forgotten antediluvian civilization that was supposedly responsible for transmitting esoteric seeds of civilization to such disparate places as North America, Mesopotamia, Central America, Polynesia, Indonesia and more. He builds on older, fantastical stories about Atlantis, the lost continent of MU and others and has quite a following.
He is most certainly wrong about most of it. But the notion that prehistory still holds a lot of amazing things waiting to be discovered, much of it buried deep in the oceans after the sea rise that occurred after the glaciers of the last ice age melted away just 10.000 years ago or so is most probably true.
parent's comment seems to denigrate the site itself by associating it with someone named Hancock (who I have non idea who that it is). The article doesn't mention this individual at all. Two things can be true:
• something (an object, a site, a finding) can be amazing
• someone can have over-indexed on how amazing that thing is ahead of available evidence.
Language matterd because this type of guilt-by-association induces a backlash on studying existing evidence and investing in further evidence-gathering (whether supportive or falsifying) efforts. Scientists are all too sensitive to stigmatised or even potentially-stigmatised (watchword: 'controversial') topics b/c their career fundability prospects from grants are at stake.
It's not really a pyramid, just an ancient volcanic core where people deposited stones on top of it for long periods of time. There is no indication of architecture, engineering or organized work crews being involved in the construction. It may be the world's largest cairn/tumulus but definitely not the oldest pyramid.
Exactly. There might be some traces of human passage dating 10000 years ago. But basically what we have is: surface-ish level construction, then a bunch of stones they interpret as old masonry but that is more likely natural, with deeper possible human traces as organic material, such as even a hunter gatherer that made a fire here one night. They use that to conclude to a paleolithic construction site.
Kinda like going to a European church, finding a bunch of stones and gravel under for 30m. Finding one silex around the same depth ans thus concluding European paleolithic people 10-20000 years ago were building complex edifices.
I've always found the definition of "civilization" a bit self serving. In particular, the "hierarchical" part. I find it interesting that the rule of the few over the many is baked into a particularly important concept.
Well that feels more like it's the side-effect of the English word "civilized" being used to mean "genteel and proper", and also "pertaining to large-scale societies with monumental architecture, agriculture, etc." It doesn't seem to controversial that social hierarchies are associated with all of the world civilizations we know about - I suppose that could lead to arguments about them being intrinsically better, or just necessary to organize large groups of people?
I think one implication of there being ancient advanced societies before 10,000 years ago is that it shows that radical eco-primitivism will never be a viable strategy for dealing with resource depletion. This is because advanced society will always reemerge eventually. We either figure out a way to be sustainable in a high technology fashion now or we try it again in 50,000 years.
As they briefly mention in the article, the dates provided are, to say the least, debated.
Contrary to what they seem to imply the consensus is that the pyramid is much more recent than 10000 years. As a general better be weary of all those "ancient civilization" articles, as they often either fall under bad science, if not straight up conspiracy.
What happened here in short is that they found some organic material dated roughly 10000 years by drilling under the pyramid. Ex: ashes or similar. Instead of concluding that 10000 years ago some humans did a fire here, and that thousands of years later other humans people decided that was a good spot to built a pyramid, they concluded those had to be the same humans. It is like finding Celtic artifacts under the Eiffel tower and concluding it had to be built 2400 years ago
We’ve burned all the easily available fossil fuels though. So there won’t be another Industrial Revolution on the same blueprint as the one we experienced. The next one will be much more difficult.
I read somewhere that the Earth now has so much more fungi that substantial new fossil fuel deposits won’t develop even over hundreds of millions of years. If that’s true, we were lucky bastards to have chanced on the only easily accessible massive fuel resources in this planet’s entire history.
Abiotic oil is a pretty well developed theory. Lab experiments have show that temperature and pressures present in the earths core will form hydrocarbons from carbon and water. There's also all the extensive work by Gold on the deep hot biosphere. Also, the entire atmosphere of Titan is hydrocarbons for example, so it's not like hydrocarbons need life to exist. However, abiotic production is perhaps a few billion barrels of oil globally a year. Not close to enough to sustain our current civilization, but enough to try again in 10 or 20 thousand years.
hydrocarbons are energetically stable on titan because it's oxygen-deficient, a reducing environment. earth's surface is, by contrast, an oxidizing environment
the deep hot biosphere is unrelated
abiogenic petroleum prooduction is still not as well understood as you suggest
Yeah, oil and coal in the quantities we found them were the result of a very specific set of physical and biological circumstances for the planet. It’s happened once. There’s a good chance it will never happen again in the remaining 900ish million years that the planet can support large, complex animals.
Particularly peat, which notably forms in peat bogs at a rate of 1mm per year, on the surface. If society collapses then a millennium later there'll be a metre-thick new layer of the stuff in some areas.
If we had to start from that point again, there still would be lots of coal, but mostly not in places that are as easily accessible as what was there in the 1800s. If you have to manually dig a few hundred meters down to even reach coal, and (likely) wouldn’t even know where to dig, would you even consider starting digging?
Oil and gas similarly would be problematic. There’s very little at or near the surface left.
So, likely, the jump would have to be from wood to wind, solar or nuclear.
Is there, though? Perhaps discovering electricity (I.e. electric generator and motor) inevitably leads to industrialization. We don't know, since we invented both complex water-powered textile machines and steam engines well before we invented electricity, so we don't really know how a complex medieval society would have reacted to it.
Also, if civilization collapses it's still fairly likely that a powerdrill will survive (not necessarily functioning, but intact enough that people will look at it and play with copper spirals). Actually, so will internal combustion engines probably, although that won't do much without the requisite metallurgy.
We're doing deep underground mining for coal, mountain-top removal mining, and stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288 ("surface" mining, technically) to get at it even today. How much readily accessible surface coal is left?
Note that your link says "include only the coal that can be mined with today's mining technology". A fresh industrial revolution likely wouldn't start with "today's mining technology".
As the reference also says, 53% of it is recoverable by surface mining. Bagger 288 is only notable for being a big shovel. It doesn't do anything that couldn't be done by guys with smaller shovels. 30 meters deep is nothing. The Big Hole in South Africa was dug to 240 meters deep by hand.
"By 1856, the average depth in the Borinage was 361 meters (1,184 ft), and in 1866, 437 meters (1,434 ft) and some pits had reached down 700 to 900 meters (2,300 to 3,000 ft); one was 1,065 meters (3,494 ft) deep, probably the deepest coal mine in Europe at this time."
For the better. The future society will develop technology at a slower pace, and their technology will be naturally constrained by sustainability concerns from the get-go. We've turned 'medieval' into a pejorative during the Enlightenment period (17th, 18th centuries) predominantly for political reasons. Think red vs blue false dichotomy in contemporary politics. From a spiritual, technological and cultural perspective the Medieval age wasn't quite the dark pit of despair its political enemies made it to be. Visit a village e.g. in the French country side, there is something deep inside us that recognizes it as more organically fulfilling than either Industrial towns, or Contemporary sprawls.
this is an interesting point of view, but after thinking about it for several years, i think it's mistaken. some of the reasons can't be put into words, but here's what i can explain
geothermal energy (so-called egs) and solar are each individually far more abundant than fossil fuels ever have been; wind energy is comparable to fossil fuels and easier to harness. hydropower is a smaller resource but still one that's sufficient for industrialization
contrary to kris de decker's wishful thinking, medieval and early modern holland didn't have an industrial revolution either, despite wind power
the industrial revolution still hasn't reached much of the planet; consider how many people still subsist on agriculture or unskilled, non-mass-production urban labor, in places like my own country (my experience here is the part that's hard to put into words) but most especially in the regions where fossil fuels are most abundant
the hard part of the industrial revolution was probably science, liberalism, and capitalism; superstition and kleptocracy are the human default
The pyramid of Gunung Padang began construction in the deep past, study claims - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38181200 - Nov 2023 (40 comments)
Gunung Padang - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37760981 - Oct 2023 (24 comments)