[tree_enjoyer]

>The 3,500-year-old city, named Peñico, is believed to have served as a key trading hub connecting early Pacific coast communities with those living in the Andes mountains and Amazon basin.

...

>Researchers say the discovery sheds light on what became of the Americas' oldest civilisation, the Caral.

Oldest civilization is a bit of a stretch. Earliest surviving structures is a stretch, but it's one we know about, so I guess they have to base it off that. More and more evidence is showing that humans were in the Americas farther back in time. While they weren't the builders of of fine stonework and megalithic structures like the Olmec (that we know of), there were certainly civilizations and cities before humans suddenly started building the massive pyramids and cities we have uncovered so far. There's a lot of secrets still hidden in the South American jungles.

[TSiege]

This site (~1475 BCE) is older than the Olmecs (1200-400BCE) and is associated with another city, Caral, which is even older than them (3000-1800BCE) and both are much farther south than Mexico is compared to the Bering Land Bridge.

Caral at 5000 years old is quite old! For additional context the Pyramids of Giza are ~4600 years old and Stonehenge is ~5100 years old. Given that it's in Peru this does not counter your narrative. But Archaeology is a Science and they cannot definitively say there is an older city without discovering it. It also might be unlikely to find what would be qualified as a "City" that is older. We've certainly found much older human settlements in the Americas, but megalithic building and cities is harder to say. Perhaps we'll find packed earth ones somewhere, but Peru really did have the jump on what would term "complex societies" in the Americas

[dmix]

> Complex society in the Caral–Supe arose a millennium after Sumer in Mesopotamia, was contemporaneous with the Egyptian pyramids, and predated the Mesoamerican Olmecs by nearly two millennia.

[MangoToupe]

> Archaeology is a Science

Archaeology is a collection of arbitrary-but-largely-agreed-upon definitions. That doesn't make it a science. The entire focus on whether or not this is a civilization (or indeed why such a determination matters) is a great example of why you should abandon consensus at the door.

[AlotOfReading]

I'm not sure you've ever seen multiple archaeologists in a room together if you think they agree on definitions, or that agreeing on definitions is sufficient to end their arguments.

Usually we say archaeology is a "big tent" field, where anything that's useful can find a place rather than relying on prescriptive definitions of what should and shouldn't be used. If this gives you flashbacks to Feyerabend's epistemological anarchism, you've got the idea.

There are definitely scientific things within archaeology and many archaeologists who spend their days doing activities indistinguishable from what goes on in adjacent geology and biology labs. It's not uncommon for archaeologists to hop back and forth from the biology and anthropology departments either. There was even a movement called processualism in the 50s-70s to fit archaeology within the scope of a traditional science that's widely regarded as a failure.

Of course we would also have to ask what a science is. The traditional hypothesis->experiment "scientific method" is used in archaeology, but doesn't really apply to historical events. We can generalize that a bit to the Cleland's "smoking gun" idea for historical sciences (so we don't need to fully throw out popper) and indeed it's quite a popular perspective today for the "best" way to do archaeology. It's just not the the totality of methods used by the people we call archaeologists.

[MangoToupe]

I don't disagree on any particular point; i just dislike the dismissive attitude writing off archaeology as a science.

[oneshtein]

I was very surprised when I saw ancient cement kiln in Peru, very similar in size and technique to freshly built one (20 years ago) near to my parents town, but labeled as «a religious structure fit with stones».

As I see here[0], cement stucko on top of natural stone was pretty popular technique back then.

[0]: https://odysee.com/@hiddenincatours:3/megalithic-saqsaywaman...

[madaxe_again]

Ah, but that’s ritual cement

[MangoToupe]

Making cement is a ritual, yes.

Only the gods can guess at what "religious" is supposed to mean outside of modern context of course.

[kevin_thibedeau]

For fertility.

[Razengan]

According to archaeologists every object is either a religious object or a "fertility" fetish, because that's all that humans could think about yesterday.

[Kye]

I forget which sci-fi show it was, but there was a scene with an archaeologist digging up a modern bar. A beer mug was described as a "ceremonial goblet."

[throwup238]

Remember these are archaeologists using the word "civilization" as a term of art within their field. There's no universally agreed upon definition but in general people use the scale model [1] (you can see the scales that different authors have developed at the link).

It's not like we don't know about a bunch of different peoples that existed even earlier (i.e. Toca da Tira Peia is ~22 kYa), but the evidence we have of them is basically a few burial mounds and maybe some domestic structures, and that does not rise to the threshold of a civilization for the intents and purposes of archaeology.

[1] https://www.sociostudies.org/journal/articles/140526/

[ErigmolCt]

I think we're still just scratching the surface of pre-Columbian history

[Oarch]

City is also a bit of a stretch.

[varjag]

Capital masonry structures including temples and possibly pools/water communal reservoirs? Yeah no it's a city, as much as it was as thing 5k years ago.

[detourdog]

They mention an irrigation system which implies a certain amount of organization.

Does anyone know of a catalog of ancient irrigation systems. I’m curious about the variety of geographically dispersed irrigation techniques of the ancient world.

[o11c]

Wikipedia has some examples in [1], though it's prose, annoyingly. The earliest dates it has are 6000 BC for Mesopotamia, 4500 BC in India.

But what I find more interesting is rice in China, for which irrigating is radically different both in form and in economic impact. Rice scales largely by manpower rather than land as most crops do. The oldest date Wikipedia gives is 4330 BC (seems too precise) in [2], though I expect paddies are less likely to be preserved in the first place than other kinds of irrigation.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrigation#Ancient_history

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddy_field

[ricksunny]

In context of possible early Peruvian civilizations, definitely don't read the below; it's obviously an undersubstantiated pseudoscientific rabbit-hole not worth your curiosity and that your productive workday can not afford.

https://tridactyls.org/

(maintained by one Gonzalo Chavez https://x.com/gchavez101 )

[TSiege]

This is pseudoscience nonsense spread by some huckster and it's not worth anyones time and is disrespectful to the people of Peru. It's a modern hoax

> "They're not extraterrestrials. They're dolls made from animal bones from this planet joined together with modern synthetic glue," said Flavio Estrada, an archeologist with Peru's Institute for Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences. "It's totally a made-up story," Estrada added.

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/scientists-assert-ali...

[Rumudiez]

> Joshua McDowell said: 'The bodies studied by Estrada were not related to any specimen that we have studied. They were folk dolls made to look like tridactyls confiscated at the airport.

[an0malous]

The dolls in that article were confiscated in the mail and are made for tourists. The creator of those dolls has explained this already, and they are unrelated to the bodies discovered near Ica.

Here’s an X-ray comparison between the two where it’s very obvious that there’s a difference between the modern dolls and the archaeological discoveries:

https://x.com/_stranger357/status/1805272924640682036

Even if you’re incredulous that these bodies were living creatures, no one disputes their carbon dating of 500-1500 years old and this has been confirmed by multiple labs. It’s not possible to construct bodies from biological material that is that old, so if they were constructed it would have to have been done by ancient Peruvians. This begs the question of why ancient Peruvians were making constructions of beings that look remarkably similar to modern aliens as described by UFO experiencers:

https://x.com/_stranger357/status/1804973689567326435

The archaeological discoveries are being studied by the University of Ica and other South American scientists across many disciplines. The South American cultures also have a long history of depicting tridactyl beings in their artworks, there are hundreds of examples but here’s one:

https://x.com/_stranger357/status/1789875845542076808

So it’s really quite ridiculous to suggest this is disrespectful to Peruvians. Their own culture describes these creatures, and their scientists are the ones promoting the authenticity of the bodies. You’re just propagating ignorance.

Skepticism has turned into a religion, the rational perspective here is that we have a genuine mystery that needs further investigation.

[Aloisius]

Show me a peer reviewed paper about these mummies.

It is hard not to be skeptical when all the evidence appears to come from the person who "discovered" them and who has a long documented history of hoaxes from a skinned monkey that was claimed to be an alien to epoxied bat remains with eyes painted with phosphorescent paint which was claimed to be a "demon fairy."

[an0malous]

Jaime Maussan did not discover them, a Peruvian grave robber and French explorer did.

There is no conclusive peer reviewed paper, but just because something that would be the greatest and most controversial discovery in the history of mankind hasn’t met the highest standard of evidence yet doesn’t mean it’s false. I’m arguing against the flippant dismissal of this story, I’m not against reasonable skepticism and further investigation.

[Aloisius]

Looking up the grave robber, Leandro Benedicto Rivera Sarmiento aka Mario, brings up some very interesting articles.

At least according to this news article, Peruvian authorities claim the remains and that were modified at St. Louis Gonzaga University with university officials using various animal parts and charges were made against the grave robber for, among other things, fraud.

https://elbuho.pe/2023/07/ica-fiscalia-incautara-falsas-momi...

[dunefox]

You're linking to random twitter posts, with one of them mentioning a random reddit user with "throwaway" in his name, but "Skepticism has turned into a religion"? Please link to any credible source, just one.

[an0malous]

Here is the breast plate depicting a tridactyl being from the “random Reddit user”:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Colombia,_quimbaya,_...

Here is a website with the carbon dating reports from multiple reputable paleo labs, it includes the PDFs from the labs themselves with their names and letterhead: https://www.the-alien-project.com/en/results-analysis-nasca-...

Here is a 2023 hearing where dozens of South American scientists across various relevant specialties present their findings and argue for the bodies’ authenticity: https://youtu.be/MwZkXwuMdsw

Here is the first 2018 hearing conducted by the Peruvian Congress where their scientists concluded the bodies are authentic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2xN41immWE

[Aloisius]

> Here is the breast plate depicting a tridactyl being

Ok, ignoring the fact that various cultures drew all sorts of things from lion-headed people to feathered dragons so someone drawing little more than a stick figure hardly means it's real, but that could easily be a three toed sloth which have three very long claws on their hands and feet.

Never mind that the Nazca lived like 1500 miles away from the Quimbaya.

> Here is a website with the carbon dating reports

That shows a large difference in age between body parts from one of the mummies. In one of the reports, it shows a 6000 year age cap between the skin and the bone.

One DNA analysis says it contains DNA from multiple humans and that there isn't evidence the hand and left foot from the same mummy belong to the same person.

This all screams hoax. It looks as if someone stitched together multiple mummies.

> 2018 hearing conducted by the Peruvian Congress where their scientists

One of the two only actual scientists, Jose de la Cruz Rios Lopez, published a paper saying the skull of one of them likely from a llama: https://www.iaras.org/iaras/filedownloads/ijbb/2021/021-0007...

[mistrial9]

on the other hand, I enjoyed "The Lost World" adventure fantasy book quite a lot as a kid, and now it seems there is science for certain dinosaur era creatures in some places.. so maybe fantastic nonsense has a place in a spectrum, as long as it is identified as "speculative" or whatever