A 27,000-year-old pyramid? Controversy hits an extraordinary archaeological claim

8 November 2023

The massive buried structures at Gunung Padang in Indonesia would be much older than Egypt’s great pyramids — if they’re even human constructions at all.

Dyani Lewis

NEWS
28 November 2023
A 27,000-year-old pyramid? Controversy hits an extraordinary archaeological claim
The massive buried structures at Gunung Padang in Indonesia would be much older than Egypt’s great pyramids — if they’re even human constructions at all.
Dyani Lewis
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A view of Gunung Padang, a megalithic site located near Cianjur, Indonesia
Gunung Padang is “an amazing, important and cool site”, but whether it is the world’s oldest stone structure is contested.Credit: Ali Trisno Pranoto/Getty

A headline-grabbing paper1 claiming that a structure in Indonesia is the oldest pyramid in the world has raised the eyebrows of some archaeologists — and has now prompted an investigation by the journal that published it, Nature has learnt.

The paper, published in the journal Archaeological Prospection on 20 October, garnered headlines around the world. Its central claim is that a pyramid lying beneath the prehistoric site of Gunung Padang in West Java, Indonesia, might have been constructed as far back as 27,000 years ago.

That would make it much older than the first colossal Egyptian pyramid, the 4,600-year-old Pyramid of Djoser. It would also mean that it pre-dates the oldest known megalithic site, Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, which was built by stone-masons around 11,000 years ago. And it would completely rewrite what is known about human civilization in the area. “The pyramid has become a symbol of advanced civilization,” says paper co-author Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, a geologist at the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) in Bandung, Indonesia. “It’s not easy to build pyramids. You need high masonry skills,” he says.

It’s exactly such claims that have left many fellow researchers cold. Lutfi Yondri, an archaeologist at BRIN, says his work has shown that people in the region inhabited caves between 12,000 and 6,000 years ago, long after the pyramid was supposedly built, and no excavations from this period have revealed evidence of sophisticated stonemasonry.

More:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03546-w

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PUBLISHED
November 3, 2023

World’s Oldest Pyramid Was Built 25,000 Years Ago Inside This Mountain
We thought it was just a hill. Now we know better.

author
BEN TAUB
Freelance Writer

People began building Gunung Padang during the Palaeolithic period.



Image credit: ghanimurtafa/Shutterstock.com

If you thought the ancient inhabitants of Egypt or South America were the first to build pyramids then think again, because new research indicates that the earliest man-made conical monument may have been constructed in Indonesia as far back as 25,000 years ago. Known as Gunung Padang, the site had previously been mistaken for a natural hill, yet extensive fieldwork has revealed that the entire structure was in fact built by human hands over the course of several millennia.

Located in Cianjur District, West Java Province, Gunung Padang is a megalithic complex that sits atop an eye-catching hill. It was only in 2018 that archaeologists first theorized that the entire mound may actually have been artificial, and that Gunung Padang - which means “Mountain of Enlightenment” - encompasses much more than the visible stone structures sitting on its surface.

This startling claim was made by a multidisciplinary team of researchers who had spent three years surveying the site between 2011 and 2014. And while many experts were initially unconvinced, the researchers have now published a detailed account of their investigations, providing concrete evidence to support the idea of Gunung Padang as the world’s oldest pyramid.

“Radiocarbon dating of organic soils from the structures uncovered multiple construction stages dating back thousands of years BCE, with the initial phase dating to the Palaeolithic era,” write the authors. “This study strongly suggests that Gunung Padang is not a natural hill but a pyramid-like construction,” they continue.

Using a variety of techniques including electrical resistivity tomography (ERT), ground-penetrating radar (GPR), and seismic tomography (ST), the researchers were able to build a picture of the hill’s internal features as well as the chronology of its construction. Core drillings at seven different points revealed that the pyramid was built in four distinct stages over thousands of years.

More:
https://www.iflscience.com/worlds-oldest-pyramid-was-built-25000-years-ago-inside-this-indonesian-mountain-71414