The sensational report that the Indonesian Gunung Padang is 25,000 years old is rejected by archaeologists around the world
This is one of the most sensational science stories of 2023. Researchers claimed last month that Gunung Padang in West Java, Indonesia, is the oldest pyramid in the world and could be more than 25,000 years old.
Such antiquity would be unprecedented. Stonehenge and the oldest primary pyramids in Egypt are a few thousand years old, while the previous record, the stone monuments of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, is thought to be around 11,000 years old.
But Gunung Padang would possibly be more than twice the age of those ancient megaliths, the authors say in a paper in Archaeological Prospection. “The knowledge gathered at Gunung Padang suggests that complex structural practices were already being provided when agriculture was probably not yet developed. invented,” they say.
The claim made headlines around the world, but has since sparked a backlash from many archaeologists, who say that none of the evidence presented through the team justifies their conclusions about the unprecedented antiquity of Gunung Padang. They argue that the settlement probably built only between 6,000 and 7,000 years ago.
“The knowledge presented in this paper does not reach its final conclusion: that the colony is extremely ancient. Yet this is what made the headlines,” said Flint Dibble, an archaeologist at Cardiff University. “I am very surprised that this article was published as is. “
Since then, the protest has forced the editors of Archaeological Prospection, published through Wiley, to publish an investigation. “The research. . . It responds to considerations raised through third parties in relation to the clinical content of our article. We are actively engaged in addressing those considerations,” the paper’s leader, Professor Geologist Danny Hillman Natawidjaja of Indonesia’s National Agency for Research and Innovation, admitted last week.
The controversy was fueled by the discovery that the article had been reviewed by the arguable Briton Graham Hancock. He argues that an ancient, once-sophisticated culture, later destroyed in a cosmic incident, brought science, technology, agriculture, and monumental architecture to the primitive peoples who populated the world after the late glacial period. Gunung Padang may be just one example of his work, he warned in his Netflix series, Ancient Apocalypse.
Most scientists deride these ideas. “He invokes myths, fanciful and often incorrect interpretations of archaeological sites,” said geologist Marc Defant in one review of his programme. Or as Bill Farley, an archaeologist at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, put it: “A theory that says a group of ancient sages taught us everything we know simplifies history to a crude level and also robs Indigenous people of the claim that they developed their own ancient culture and sophisticated crafts.”
Natawidjaja told the Observer last week that Hancock’s concepts are “a moderate hypothesis”.
Nestled among banana palms and tea plantations, almost 3,000 feet above sea level and 75 miles south of Jakarta, Gunung Padang is made up of a series of stone terraces that sit on top of an extinct volcano. Pottery fragments suggest the site is a few thousand years old.
However, Natawidjaja and his team argue that their use of ground-penetrating radar shows that below the main building there are several deeper man-made layers with the lowest – a hardened lava core – showing signs of having been “meticulously sculpted”.
The team reports that soil samples extracted from curtains drilled into the deep slope beneath the site date to between 27,000 and 16,000 years ago, with subsequent additions estimated to be around 8,000 years old. The team concludes that Gunung Padang provides transparent evidence that its structure can be traced back to 25,000 years ago or more, to a time when the planet was still in the last ice age.
But this claim has been denied by Dibble and others. They point out that Natawidjaja and his team provide no evidence that the buried fabrics were made by humans. They say it may be more than 20,000 years old, but it’s probably plant-based because there’s no evidence of human presence, such as a bone fragment or artifact, in the soil.
“If you went to the Palace of Westminster, threw a seven-metre carrot on the ground and took a soil sample, you could date it to 40,000 years ago,” Dibble said. “But that doesn’t mean the Palace of Westminster was built 40,000 years ago by ancient humans. It just means there’s 40,000-year-old carbon out there. It is normal that this article has been published.
Natawidjaja defended her team’s paints. ” The observations that shape the cornerstone of our study are supported by meticulous exposure analysis, trench logging, core surveys, and comprehensive, embodied geophysical surveys,” he told the Observer last week.
This was not accepted by other researchers. “This claim involves making a huge, huge leap from the data they have, which is at best sort of intriguing, to a huge conclusion about a pyramid buried deep beneath the ground,” said Farley. “It is really, really weak and I think it is very reasonable that this paper is being investigated. It was not worthy of publication and it would not shock me if it is eventually retracted.”