from Hacker News

Oldest Pyramid Found Not in Egypt or Americas, but in Indonesia

by bcaulfield on 11/11/23, 5:18 AM with 46 comments

• by dang on 11/12/23, 10:17 PM

  New evidence strongly suggests Indonesia's Gunung Padang is oldest known pyramid - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38186510 - Nov 2023 (40 comments)

  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)

• by civilitty on 11/12/23, 2:57 PM

  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.

• by AStrangeMorrow on 11/12/23, 5:49 PM

  Also this thread on the topic, debating the claim from a geological standpoint' https://www.reddit.com/r/geology/comments/17t81dg/question_r...

• by stareatgoats on 11/12/23, 3:18 PM

  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.

• by ush on 11/12/23, 3:28 PM

  Maybe it was one single global Pyramid builder company building pyramids in different parts of the world. So a global pyramid scheme :-)

• by narrator on 11/12/23, 3:50 PM

  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.