It was one of the most sensational science stories of 2023. Researchers claimed last month that the Gunung Padang site in West Java, Indonesiais the world’s oldest pyramid and may be over 25,000 years old.
Such antiquity would be unprecedented. Stonehenge and the oldest great pyramids of Egypt are only a few thousand years old, while the previous record holder, Turkey’s Göbekli Tepe stone monuments, is believed to be around 11,000 years old.
But Gunung Padang may be more than twice the age of these ancient megaliths, the authors say in a paper Archaeological Prospecting. “Evidence from Gunung Padang suggests that advanced construction practices were already present when agriculture was perhaps not yet invented,” they claim.
The claim made headlines worldwide, but has since led to a fierce backlash from many archaeologists, who say that none of the evidence presented by the team justifies their conclusions about the unprecedented antiquity of Gunung Padang. They argue that the settlement there was probably built only 6,000 to 7,000 years ago.
“The data presented in this article provide no support for his final conclusion – that the settlement is extraordinarily old. Yet that’s what drove the news,” said Flint Dibble, an archaeologist at Cardiff University. “I am very surprised that this paper was published as it is.”
The exclamation has since had the editorship of Archaeological Prospecting, which is published by Wiley, to launch an investigation. “The investigation … addresses concerns raised by third parties about the scientific content of our paper. We are actively addressing these concerns,” the paper’s lead author – geologist Prof Danny Hillman Natawidjaja of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency – admitted last week.
Controversy was fueled by the discovery that the paper had been proofread by controversial British author Graham Hancock. He argues that a once sophisticated, ancient culture – later destroyed in a cosmic incident – brought science, technology, agriculture and monumental architecture to the primitive people who populated the world after the last ice age. Gunung Padang could be an example of their handiwork, he suggested in his Netflix series, Ancient Apocalypse.
Most scientists scoff at these ideas. “He invokes myths, fanciful and often incorrect interpretations of archaeological sites,” geologist Marc Defant said in one review of his show. 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 are developing their own ancient culture and sophisticated crafts.”
Natawidjaja told the Observer last week that he considered Hancock’s ideas to be “a reasonable working hypothesis”.
Nestled among banana palms and tea plantations, almost 3,000 feet above sea level and 75 miles south of Jakarta, Gunung Padang consists of a series of stone terraces sitting atop an extinct volcano. Pottery fragments indicate that the site is several thousand years old.
However, Natawidjaja and his team argue that their use of ground-penetrating radar shows that beneath the main building there are several deeper man-made layers with the lowest – a hardened lava core – showing signs of being “carefully sculpted”.
The team reports that soil samples extracted from material drilled from the hillside deep below the site have been dated as 27,000 to 16,000 years old, with later additions thought to be around 8,000 years old. The team concludes that Gunung Padang bears clear evidence that its construction can be traced back to 25,000 years or more, at a time when the planet was still in the last ice age.
But the claim was rejected by Dibble and others. They point out that Natawidjaja and his team provide no evidence that the buried material was made by humans. They say it could be more than 20,000 years old, but was probably of natural origin as there is no evidence of any human presence – such as a bone fragment or artifact – in the soil.
“If you went to the Palace of Westminster and dropped a core seven meters into the ground and pulled up a soil sample, you might date it as 40,000 years old,” Dibble said. “But that does not mean that the Palace of Westminster was built by ancient people 40,000 years ago. It just means there’s carbon down there that’s 40,000 years old. It is extraordinary that this paper was published.”
Natawidjaja defended his team’s work. “The observations that form the cornerstone of our study are supported by careful exposure analysis, trench wall logging, core drilling studies and integrated comprehensive geophysical surveys,” he said. Observer last week.
This has not been accepted by other researchers. “This claim involves making a huge, huge leap from the data they have, which is kind of intriguing at best, to a huge conclusion about a pyramid buried deep underground,” Farley said. “It is really very weak and I think it is very reasonable that this paper is investigated. It was not worthy of publication and it would not shock me if it was eventually retracted.”
