The World's Oldest Pyramid is in ...Asia?

In the Cianjur District of the West Java Province in Indonesia, there stands an oddly-shaped mountain with a megalithic stone complex called Gunung Padang on top that has captured the imagination of archaeologists. But now it appears that the entire mountain may actually be manmade! The fact that the mountain's surface was preserved better than the other eroded mountains in the area caused earthquake geologist Danny Hilman Natawidjaja to take a closer look, starting in 2011.

Natawidjaja and his team studied the mountain for years, and have announced that it is a pyramid, constructed over an old lava volcano that was sculpted into shape, then covered with sand, rocks, and megalithic stones (like those pictured above) all placed by hand. The team estimates that the construction began about 25,000 years ago, long before any other manmade pyramid, although the date is somewhat controversial. Read about this discovery at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Tiket2 via Flickr)


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It's a stretch to call this place a pyramid, and no, the entire mountain wasn't hand-built. It's an existing basalt mountain, covered in those distinctive hexagonal basalt columns. It was terraced by hand over many years, and being a mountain it is wider at the base and narrower at the top, but you'd be hard-pressed to find specific angles and faces that could define a pyramid. Graham Hancock is behind the idea that this is a pyramid, as part of his moronic theory that there was an advanced, world-spanning civilization before the last Ice Age, who taught all the emerging civilizations around the globe how to stack rocks, because they were too stupid to figure that out themselves.Even in the Atlas Obscura article, they admit it's a natural hill "sculpted into a pyramid shape," except that it's not a pyramid shape.
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