Oldest Pyramid Found Not in Egypt or Americas, but in Indonesia(atlasobscura.com) |
Oldest Pyramid Found Not in Egypt or Americas, but in Indonesia(atlasobscura.com) |
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)
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.
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.
Link to the relevant section of the video of this debunking series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iCIZQX9i1A&list=PLXtMIzD-Y-...
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".
It's so dumb.
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.
I'm no fan of Hancock, but I've long thought about how much of our history we're simply blind to because it's not right in front of our eyes.
• 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.
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.
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
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.
Petroleum and gas came much later.
Edit: 435 years worth of recoverable coal in the United States alone, of which 53% is recoverable by surface mining.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/how-much-coal-is-le...
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
fossil fuel exploitation for mass production of steel in blast furnaces was widespread in song china 800 years ago but didn't lead to the industrial revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Song_dynasty#St...
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
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
But in this case it fairly certainly is. Either by lack of scientific rigor, if not worse.
Doesn't make much sense from an archeological standpoint, and there are concerns from the geological standpoint too it seems:
Ex: https://www.reddit.com/r/geology/comments/17t81dg/question_r...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Hole
Edit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining
"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."
Maybe time to take the L and move on?
The Big Hole is absolutely miniscule in comparison - 42 acres - and mining for diamonds is a lot more lucrative by volume.
You're not digging out https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Bannerak... by hand.
The question isn't "is there stuff to burn", it's "is there enough to burn to bootstrap a self-sustaining industrial economy". Our industrial revolution took place in a time where oil bubbled to the surface in Texas, coal could be dug up from rich surface seams with a shovel, and copper as pure crystals.
Before we started using coal as an energy source, wood was a popular source, but that was far from sustainable. See for example the graph in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestry_in_the_United_Kingdom...
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.
That has been shown to be possible for wind (https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/10/wind-powered-facto...), but it will have to be different from what happened in the Industrial Revolution.
You don't, though.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/how-much-coal-is-le...
53% of the recoverable coal reserves in the United States can be recovered with surface mining.
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've mined out all the easy copper, too.
Coal mines of that depth nothing special, even with 19th Century steam technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining
"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."
In the 19th Century?
Steam engines that burn part of the extracted coal. What else?
> by the late 19th century the seams were becoming exhausted
Those particular seams, maybe. They're not the only seams, dude.
I think we're done here.
