Key Takeaways on the Gunung Padang Pyramid
Gunung Padang is an Indonesian pyramid that sits on top of an ancient volcano and could show evidence of Ice Age humans possessing advanced technology.
Since the 1980s, a number of in-depth surveys have been conducted at Gunung Padang, but researchers continue to disagree about its age. Latest research says the deepest layers of Gunung Padang are 16,000 years to 27,000 years old. That would make Gunung Padang the oldest pyramid in the world.
If true, the findings at Gunung Padang change everything we thought we knew about the technological capabilities of humans in prehistoric times. Allegedly, this is when humans were only capable of building small, temporary shelters out of wood, bone, and animal hides — not megalithic stone structures or stepped pyramids on the scale of Giza in Egypt.
Controversial findings at Gunung Padang — a massive Indonesian pyramid sitting on top of an ancient volcano — could flip everything we thought we knew about prehistory on its head. If the findings are true, Gunung Padang shows that Ice Age humans possessed advanced technology, unlike anything we could have imagined.
Nevertheless, mainstream archeologists are skeptical of these conclusions, and many have tried to discredit the geologist at the center of them. That geologist is Caltech researcher Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, who has devoted much of his life to an in-depth geo-archeological survey of this incredible site.
