The pyramids of Egypt are staggeringly ancient. By the time of Cleopatra, they were already thousands of years old. But new research claims that another pyramid might have them all beat, potentially rewriting the history of human civilization.
A team of researchers say in a new study that Gunung Padang, a pyramid in Indonesia, is at least 16,000 years old, roughly 10,000 years older than the pyramid of Djoser in Egypt, long thought to be the world’s oldest.
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The researchers, who hail from a collection of universities and institutions in Indonesia, say this makes Gunung Padang “potentially…the oldest pyramid in the world.” In contrast, ancient Egyptians are believed to have begun construction on the Djoser pyramid roughly 5,000 years ago. The new research indicates that Gunung Padang is a highly complex, prehistoric pyramid that sheds “light on the engineering capabilities of ancient civilizations during the Palaeolithic era,” also known as the Stone Age.
Gunung Padang is a pyramid-shaped mound of terraced earth adorned with ancient stone built on top of an extinct volcano. It has long been acknowledged as an ancient site, but just how old has been a matter of some debate. Most estimates have placed it under 2,000 years old, but Indonesian geologist Danny Hilman Natawidjaja—one of the study’s co-authors—has long claimed that the site is much older. A decade ago, Natawidjaja’s claims caught the attention of then-President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who set up a task force to study the pyramid, which included Natawidjaja.
Natawidjaja’s claims are controversial because they suggest an unknown Stone Age civilization created a monumental pyramid. ”People think the prehistoric age was primitive, but this monument proves that wrong,” he said in 2013. Since then, the team’s work has been revealed in piecemeal. Last month, they published a study in the peer-reviewed journal Archaeological Prospection that concludes the oldest parts of Gunung Padang are 27,000 to 16,000 years old, based on a range of tests including electrical resistivity tomography, ground-penetrating radar, seismic tomography, and core sampling among other methods.
Using these techniques and aided by a landslide on one side of the structure that researchers say revealed a new and much earlier layer of the pyramid’s construction, the paper’s authors conclude that Gunung Padang was built in stages over millennia. The authors explain:
“According to the analysis, Unit 3 [the oldest layer] is estimated to have been constructed during the remarkable timeframe of 25,000 to 14,000 BCE. Following this period, there was a hiatus spanning from 14,000 to 7,900 BCE before Unit 3 was ultimately buried between 7,900 and 6,100 BCE. Remarkably, approximately two millennia later, the construction of Unit 2 took place between 6,000 and 5,500 BCE. Another significant hiatus occurred from 5,500 to 2,100 BCE, followed by the construction of Unit 1 between 2,000 and 1,100 BCE. Lastly, an intriguing excavation of Unit 2 and subsequent soil fills transpired between 1,393 and 1,499 CE.”
The researchers write that “this study sheds light on advanced masonry skills dating back to the last glacial period,” and “challenges the conventional belief that human civilization and the development of advanced construction techniques emerged only during the warm period of the early Holocene or the beginning of the Neolithic, with the advent of agriculture approximately 11, 000 years ago.” Rather, they say that the evidence from Gunung Padang indicates that advanced construction techniques existed before agriculture was adopted.
Natawidjaja and his co-authors write that more research is needed to uncover more information about Gunung Padang, and researchers from around the world will surely be eager to independently assess the claims included in the paper. Regardless, it’s a fascinating proposal about what human existence was really like in the time before recorded history.
