Pyramid Older than Civilization

Gord_in_Toronto

Penultimate Amazing
Gord_in_Toronto
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Jul 22, 2006
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Very interesting if confirmed.

Buried pyramid in Indonesia may be older than civilization itself

New dating suggests structure at Gunung Padang was built during the last ice age, making it millennia older than the Great Pyramids.
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More details here:

Digging for the truth at controversial megalithic site

There is some dispute:

But these views are loudly disputed. A petition signed in April by 34 Indonesian archaeologists and geologists and submitted to Yudhoyono agrees that the upper part of Gunung Padang is ''the largest megalithic structure in south-east Asia'', but the experts are deeply suspicious of the Arif team's methods and motives, and the geological flag-waving it is trying to invoke.
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Research continues. ;)
 
AH, well. A pyramid older than Civilization is nonsense. Perhaps a civilization older than we have known of up till now, but ... stone structures are intrinsically hard to date.

I'd let he Champaign stay in the rack for now.

Hans
 
Haven't heard of this thing, other than here.
The hysterical exaggerations aside, that's actually very interesting! (Unless like the Mexico-Peru alien corpses, this is a scam beginning to end.)
 
A brief look suggests the following headline would have been appropriate:

Publicity-loving geologist still trying to get people to accept a loony theory 10 years later, with no additional evidence obtained in the interim.
 
Mike! said:
That's just silly, they were long dead by then.
Mega-fauna would be the obvious likely suspects. Giant sloth maybe?
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Sloths? I don't think so. They move so slowly that they would have had to have started building during the last Ice Age. Just does not seem reasonable. :duck:
 
MRC_Hans said:
AH, well. A pyramid older than Civilization is nonsense. Perhaps a civilization older than we have known of up till now, but ... stone structures are intrinsically hard to date.

I'd let he Champaign stay in the rack for now.

Hans
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100%.

When a man-made structure is discovered that appears to be "older than civilization itself", and if that age is subsequently confirmed by passing rigorous scientific testing, then the result is that we now understand civilization is older than we had thought.
 
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Mike! said:
That's just silly, they were long dead by then.
Mega-fauna would be the obvious likely suspects. Giant sloth maybe?
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Giant sloths were confined to the Americas. Gigantopithecus would be a better fit, particularly given the opposable thumbs.
 
"Older than recorded civilization" is an interesting find, written up by a reporter who isn't a moron. Obviously the baseline for "recorded civilization" is reset immediately thereafter, but there is a nice window of opportunity for legitimately sensational journalism between the two events.

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Personally I'm convinced that one of the first things that people do after setting up a civilization is to build a pyramid or other megastructure of some kind. You can't have pyramids without civilization, but also you can't have civilization without pyramids. There's a giant, tower-shaped hole in our collective heart, and we set about filling it the moment we're generating enough surplus wealth to fund the project.

So however old the oldest pyramid is, human civilization is probably only about a thousand years older than that, at most.
 
MRC_Hans said:
AH, well. A pyramid older than Civilization is nonsense. Perhaps a civilization older than we have known of up till now, but ... stone structures are intrinsically hard to date.

I'd let he Champaign stay in the rack for now.

Hans
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That's how I immediately assumed it. If the period of the pyramid is prior (sounds like dialogue from a Danny Kaye movie) then I'd say that the issue is when we assume civilization began.
 
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