Archaeologists Refute Indonesia’s Gunung Padang as ‘Oldest Pyramid in the World’

Some archaeologists around the world have expressed their displeasure about a research work that was released within the early months of 2023 claiming the ‘Gunung Padang’ in Indonesia to be the oldest pyramid in the world.

According to many of these archaeologists, it’s impossible to challenge the long-standing pyramids in Egypt as the oldest.

The Indonesian structure, ‘Gunung Padang’ was initially published in Archaeological Prospection and said to be built by human hands some 25,000 years ago.

An archaeologist at Cardiff University in Wales, Flint Dibble told Nature “I’m surprised [the paper] was published as is.”

The ‘Gunung Padang’ pyramid in Indonesia is believed to date back to 5000 B.C.E. However, the researchers concluded that “This finding 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. …Evidence from Gunung Padang and other sites … suggests that advanced construction practices were already present when agriculture had, perhaps, not yet been invented.”

The researchers further stated that a portion of the ‘Gunung Padang’, the lava hill which is the oldest part of the pyramid was revealed to be sculpted by human hands after conducting radiocarbon dating on the soil.

This assertion by the group of researchers is disputed by archaeologist Dibble once again.

“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 being 40,000 years old,” Dibble tells the Observer’s Robin McKie. “But that does not mean the Palace of Westminster was built 40,000 years ago by ancient humans. It just means there’s carbon down there that’s 40,000 years old.”

Meanwhile, Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, the lead author of the research and a geologist at Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency, has said that his team will work tirelessly to prove their research right.