Original paper [1]. Ochre was being extracted from underground cave systems on the Yucatán ~10 kya. The caves are now flooded as sea levels were still rising after the last glacial maximum.
Very impressive. I’ve gone cave diving before, and it was ana amazing sense of accomplishment. The idea of squeezing into a tight tunnel, under water, is not my idea of fun (I once got a bit stuck caving when my helmet somehow wedged against the ceiling). The skill required to do this safely is very impressive, which makes this all the more impressive. I think that with modern technology areas like these will become more and more (virtually) accessible.
Cave diving ain't safe in any meaningful way. You just try to get best at this activity, minimize the known risks, and for the parts you have no control of, just hope for the best. Plenty of folks, very experienced and well equipped, die doing it every year.
I like the straightforwardness of it. There's no euphemisms, no soft language, no sugar coating. It's just straight up, 'stop or probable death'. It's rare to see such blunt signage in general these days.
Not so much. They tend to use phrases such as, 'warning extreme hazard, enter at own risk' or 'risk of serious injury or death ahead' or something along those lines. Much more 'lawyer-talky'. This is very blunt and direct by comparison.
I once saw a show on iceberg cave diving. It was similar to regular underwater cave diving except that the “cave” can shift and flip while you’re inside it.
I'd love to read more of people using underwater drones. Smaller-than-a-football kind of drones. To boldly go where no modern human has fit before.
I imagine building out supply lines for refueling, developing sophisticated position tracking methodologies, and lots of other neat problem solving with no risk to human life.
I thought about this a lot while cavern diving in Mexico. It would likely need to be fully autonomous. Radio penetration is just about nothing in caves and lines get tangled. There are also dry sections in some caves, so you'll need a robot that can climb or fly. Super interesting challenges. I'll take a wild stab that human exploration of underwater caves will be over in 20 years.
It seems a lot could be accomplished with a tethered probe. A tether solves a couple of problems, namely power and data retrival. Granted, a tethered probe is unlikely to climb or fly.
Tethered probes aren't viable for cave exploration. The tether would get blown around by the water and snag on everything. Human cave divers have to keep their guidelines taut and tie them off periodically to rocks. Probes don't have enough manipulator dexterity to do that in a cave environment.
Could be done with a snaking wire/tube. Battery could be housed at the source. Would need ability to make it through dry parts and go in reverse, but should be physically feasible. Financially is another story
I actually work with underwater ROVs, and in general, I think that this sort of a thing is a long way away. For one, most vehicles that small use an onboard battery, and it is really easy to burn that capacity if there's even a slight current. Plus, cables themselves have a large amount of drag, which means that for any distance, the thrusters that can move an ROV under short-distance conditions quickly become under-powered as any flow takes that cable.
Even if they could be fully autonomous, there's still a bunch of issues, since caves in general and submerged ones in particular are GPS-denied environments. Acoustics like USBL equipment probably wouldn't work in a cave, instances of underwater VSLAM are still pretty nascent, and inertial navigation system with a low-enough error accumulation rate are almost universally export-controlled by their respective countries.
It's definitely an interesting problem, though, and I honestly think that progress in the area is going to be made because folks that aren't experts in caving end up getting interested in it. For example, I'd imagine this kind of a problem is something that space agencies are also really interested in, since there's a lot room in the middle of their respective Venn diagrams.
Stone's DepthX AUV is a fully autonomous unit that was intended as a proof of concept for mapping Jupiter's moon Europa. https://stoneaerospace.com/depthx/
There are many different types of caves, and some can be relative safe with multiple exists and a lot of space to move in.
That said, proper training and equipment can not eliminate a lot of the risk involved. Equipment can always fail, people can get stuck, and the environment is often such that a single minor wrong movement will causes clear water to become instantly zero visibility. Diving in old mines has also risk of collapse and unless you are diving rebreather you are also introducing new air into the environment.
Exploring a new unexplored mine like the one in the article is risky even for the most trained and well equipped divers.
Very interesting! Bit of a tangent question, but does anyone know of good resources to read upon current theories of human migration (such as the migration to North America mentioned in the article)?
That’s a great book, but it’s from 1997. I think some theories have changed in 23 years. For example, the Siberia-Alaska land bridge theory is just one possible way humans got to the Americas.
I felt his book was more arguing against racist notions of developmental inequality by painting a picture of how systemic and environmental factors influence societal evolution. We've learned more but the central thesis holds..
That said, do you know of a more current layman-accessible book on the topic?
One possible way, but the one best supported by evidence. The west coast of North America continues to yield evidence of human settlement and migration, sometimes just offshore. Genetics also supports the out of Siberia hypothesis.
First Peoples in a New World is a wonderfully approachable introduction. If you want something a bit more modern and technical, there's New Perspectives on the Peopling of the Americas.
Other people have mentioned Graham Hancock and Jared Diamond. These authors are fine as entertainment, but they're pretty far removed from the academic consensus.
Hancock was far removed when he first came onto the scene in the mid 90s, and is slowly finding his theories more and more supported.
I'm the one that mentioned him elsewhere in the thread. It's sad to me that he gets so much shit in scientific circles when he's quite reserved with making truth claims, instead making hypotheses that are unfortunately misaligned with current theories and so derided as pseudo-science or bullshit.
Diamond's particular brand of geographic determinism was outdated by the 70s, let alone by when he published GG&S. I'm not sure Hancock has ever been in the same zip code as consensus, let alone ballpark, but criticizing him brings enough people out of the woodwork that I'm trying to word things more carefully.
An underwater surveying class that was practising mapping out a cave finding an unmapped passage doesn't really fall into the concept of "accidental discovery" to me.
For sure it was a lucky discovery because they weren't especially looking for new passages, but it can't really be said to be accidental in the sense of the vela satellites detecting GRBs for instance.
Man-made climate change is certainly happening, and happening fast. But To be fair, we'd have to admit the temporal resolution of our sampling of prehistoric temperatures may be somewhat temporally smoothed, hiding the possibility of rapid fluctuations prehistorically. Not an expert, just spitballing.
The end of the ice age would have had two appreciable effects on water levels. One, is that the ice went somewhere. The other, is that the huge amount of weight being relieved from the land actually caused land masses to move[0].
In the example I'm most familiar with, the island of Great Britain essentially see-saw'd. Relieving the northern half of the island of this unimaginably massive weight caused the northern end of the island to rise, and the southern end of the island to sink reciprocally.
So even without glacial melt to content with, some areas that were low-lying during the ice-age would have become submerged post-ice-age.
The example I find most fascinating (I'm British, so still using GB & locale as examples) is "Doggerland"[1] - the theory that what is today an underwater topology named Dogger Bank, was previous an island, and before that the land bridge between GB and the continent. There's a strong chance there's prehistoric archeology to be found in the middle of the North Sea.
Yes, sea levels have moved before - as part of one of the largest and most defining geological events in human history.
Which makes sense really, since we're on the same tectonic plate. Geographically there's not a huge difference between Scotland and Scandinavia. They're the parts of northern Europe that were torn up by glaciers.
It does make me wonder, tongue in cheek, who's reciprocally sinking on that side though. I know a few people who'd be disturbingly proud to find out that Sweden and Finland are sinking Denmark.
I've been saying this for years - especially as humans are essentially a littoral species (culturally, at least - I'm not referring to the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis!). Most of our ancient history lies just off shore under a very few tens of metres of water. It's right there, entirely unseen. With recent post on HN referring to 'spontaneous' cultural developments within a tight timeframe around the world, I wonder how many answers could be wrought if we were ony able to see a lot more from a little off-shore.
I doubt that. I've never heard of an ancient discovery offshore. A thousand years of salt, life and waves will turn most things to mush. These caves do a special job of preserving things. They have little movement, little life and freshwater sections.
Edit: I didn’t do a great job of expressing myself. I’m sure that offshore ancient discoveries have happened (as some replies have pointed out). The comment I replied to seemed to be suggesting that all of our ancient history is just waiting to be discovered off the shore. It’s not. In all the diving I’ve done around the world, in all the treasure hunting stories I’ve read, no one has found anything ancient offshore. (And then I learned about some today)
The Black Sea was flooded when the narrow section of land the Mediterranean from the sea collapsed (possible origin of Great Flood myths) 12,000 years ago. There are many archaeological sites on the now flooded coast many tells and preserved ships due to the cold, oxygen-free, and salt-free freshwater.
Heracleion was the primary Egyptian port before the development of Alexandria, and was discovered offshore of Alexandria in 1999: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleion
I see someone's mentioned Heraklion/Alexandria, as well as Dogger bank in the North Sea - add to the list Dhaskalio in Greece, Yonaguni in Taiwan, Mahabalipuram and Dwarka in India, as well as ruins in Crete and even the Caribbean (can't find link).
I think the point I was trying to make is that there clearly are examples and I don't think that we've barely even begun looking.
You're right that healthy sea waters aren't ideal for preservation of human-derived metals and organics, but then silting and run-off from tributaries leads to preserving types of environment, sat in geographic areas of interest to humans anyway. That aside, stone - a material much used in ancient times - is fairly durable.
When you were diving, were you actively looking for signs of ancient human activity, or might it have entirely slipped you by even if you stared straight at it?
I'd suggest the littoral region is the next frontier of archaeology, because clearly a lot of our history was on-shore, and that on-shore is now off-shore... .
Moreso: I think when we start digitally encoding these environments - much as we have over ground in South America, using LIDAR to discover previously unseen, but right in-sight structures such as those of the Maya - we'll realise there's a lot of our old culture not far off.
Drone submersibles with high resolution sonar doing fully-realised coastal scans would, I'm sure, yield hugely interesting results.
- ed: drone wouldn't need to be submersible. that would just be cooler.
22 years ago I worked on a communications relay app to make up one tiny part of a control system for an autonomous submersible used for mapping.
My part was a relatively unimportant add-on - the system relied on a 2400bps acoustic link from the submersible to a small ship that needed to stay right above to get a reliable link.
To allow relaying data real-time to shore or a bigger ship nearby I was contracted to write code to pass the data stream reliably over a 9600bps GSM data connection (it was intended for testing and demos in coastal regions, not for production use).
Ended up using a slightly modified z-modem protocol that kept the session alive across redial.
But the best part of that contract was to get to go out and see the real system in operation.
Given what results they had back then I wonder what the state of the art in that field looks like now - the biggest problem with automating this seemed to be the tight tolerances for communication with the submersible.
You won't be able to make it small and cheap if it needs to be tethered (dragging a heavy cable), but if untethered like the one I got to see, maintaining a reliable enough and fast enough connection becomes a challenge instead.
I get the impression archeologists are incredibly resistant to pushing history back or otherwise enlarging it.
This resistance seems to go beyond appropriate scientific caution and into the realm of unscientific dogmatism. There was a thread here a few days ago about Graham Hancock. I do think he's a bit of a crank, but I get the sense he gets a lot of traction because he's one of the few who will even talk about certain things.
(Reminds me of how the alt-right and even worse ideologues get traction because they are the only ones who will talk about the economic collapse of the American center. Their ideas are bullshit, but everyone else pretends it's not happening.)
Other fields of science seem to have no problem with discovering that things are much bigger than they thought. Astronomers discover that they were undercounting the number of galaxies by two logarithmic factors? Neat! Archeologists don't seem to greet enlargement of their domain this way.
Maybe it comes from religious and cultural chauvinism or residual religious literalism. Deepening the historical narrative might mean the Mesopotamians were not "first" or that history vastly predates the historical accounts of many religious texts.
The fact that entire cultures rose and fell so long ago might also make us uncomfortable. It reminds us of our collective mortality. I see this with many Americans wanting to pretend that native Americans were just the most primitive hunter-gatherers, not that they had sophisticated cultures with history and ideas... that could vanish in a very short span of time and barely be remembered.
I think that’s an unfair assessment. It’s difficult for anyone to fundamentally challenge their thought processes with the near absence of facts.
When you consider that the flood myth is almost a universal story across cultures, and that human population was dramatically smaller, and left behind little, it’s difficult to Have a position on pre-history.
I recall taking classes on this era in college, and the professor spending time talking about what we don’t know — which highlighted the importance of small details of ancient cultures that allow us to infer knowledge.
In the last 30-40 years more discoveries have been made that challenge even our understanding of Ancient Greece, we’re learning and eventually people will reach consensus about new discoveries.
It's probably my thread from yesterday you're referring to.
There's a pretty big divide here between what archaeologists/anthropologists say to the public and how they interact within their communities. There's a lot of reasons for this that I'm more than happy to go into (e.g. preventing looting, caution about the use of our works to justify bigotry, or simply because there's a lot we don't know). This essentially manifests as "the safest thing to communicate is the basic consensus." It's also the easiest thing to provide layperson accessible resources for. Internally though, the fields are quite aggressive about challenging popular narratives. That's pretty much the best way to make a name as a young researcher and grad classes tend to settle into a debate format, where you take turns trying to rip (sometimes each other's) arguments apart.
Secondly, if we're going to point out issues in an entire field, it helps to be specific. No one can actually respond to the assertion that "archaeologists don't talk about things I haven't named." Like, do I list a bunch of things that have been rewritten over time?
Finally, archaeology is hard and the record just doesn't answer a lot of the questions we want it to. The field as a whole is moving back from resolving big questions and producing grand narratives to answering little questions and small narratives the record allows us to support. These aren't the things the public asks about, so there's quite a large gap mostly filled by the kind of people too ignorant to realize why there's a gap. The challenge that we need to do a better job filling it was Jared Diamond's most interesting idea, in my opinion.
> not that they had sophisticated cultures with history and ideas
The trouble is the lack of writing. Even when there is writing, there was mass illiteracy, people may not have written much, and what books and accounts that were written were lost.
This is true for about all civilizations up until the printing press. Consider how little we know about the Vikings, Arthurian England, etc.
I think we do need to reconsider the weight we give to writing as an a priori factor and it’s supposed suitability and effectiveness at storing ancestral knowledge and history and conserving its quality.
I will try to find the source(s) later if there’s interest, but remember reading articles on Aboriginal Storytelling that used to be only considered folklore until it was proven that the stories, passed on orally, contained and preserved a variety of knowledge of the land, weather and historical events of Australia dating back to when the very first Aborigines set foot unto the continent, reaching back further than virtually all known written records. Contrast this to much younger texts that even today we still haven’t managed to decode or the burning of libraries of the likes of Alexandria and Baghdad that at once wiped out huge chunks of the most valuable knowledge mankind was able to accumulate.
Consider family oral histories. How much do you know about the lives of your great-grandparents? Me, I know pretty much nothing. I do know something about my ancestors from 200+ years ago, because one was famous and has been written about. The people in between then and my grandparents - nada. Other branches of my family - zip.
We know quite a bit about many cultures predating the printing press. Ancient Egypt, Sumeria, Greece, Rome, Persia, China, India. The Bible predates the printing press, so do Homer, Aristotle, Caesar, Buddha, the Vedas, and Confucius.
Arthurian England is not documented because it’s a made-up collection of legends. The Vikings left written Eddas, poems, and a body of Norse mythology, and we actually know quite a lot about Viking history.
> Arthurian England is not documented because it’s a made-up collection of legends.
It's not documented because nobody at the time wrote anything down. Nobody knows who the kings of England were in those days. Nobody knows if the Arthurian legend is based on a real king or not.
We know several orders of magnitude about historical periods after the printing press than before, and the same goes for literate societies vs illiterate ones.
Computers and the internet means the future will know far more about us than about our parents.
Regarding Arthurian England, Bede wrote his history of England less than 200 years after Arthur supposedly ruled, and before Arthur appears in written stories. We know about Athelstan and Cnut, because people did write things down. Britain still had Roman cities at the supposed time of Arthur. There may be something to the Arthur story but it’s not accepted as history. We do know a lot about the period just before from Roman documents, and have documentation of other rulers from the period.
Written and printed records do not guarantee historical accuracy. The Lord of the Rings is just as long as the Arthur stories, and just as vivid, but not real.
> Written and printed records do not guarantee historical accuracy.
Jeez, I never said they did. They're better than a vacuum, though. Many suspicious historical accounts have been verified by later archaeological discoveries. For example, some accounts of Jamestown have turned out to be correct, and the descriptions of Richard III's curved spine turned out to be correct, and not just propaganda by his detractors.
I also know that the history of England entered the "Dark Ages" after the Romans left, not because they were literally dark, but because little is known about it. 200 years is a long time. The paucity of records:
> Nobody knows who the kings of England were in those days.
Yes, lots of people do know who they were. There was no “England” in those days, but historians know the kings and queens of the kingdoms of Essex, Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, etc. that would coalesce into England later.
It’s funny when I was in college the Battle of Badon = Arthur theory was very popular and I got the impression it had overtaken the let’s treat Arthur as a collection of myths school of thought, but I feel like myth school of thought has more steam these days
This is a little different. It was well after the last glacial maximum but the glacial waters were still trapped in the prehistoric lakes like Lake Iroquois and the Champlain Sea; the oceans rose once these lakes drained.
The caves are inland and part of the limestone karst found throughout the Yucatán peninsula and Florida. Divers have been exploring these fresh water cenotes and the attached subterranean caves/rivers for a long time. The cenotes were an important part of Mayan culture but that occurred much more recently (i.e. not prehistoric).
Salt water is not friendly to human artifacts. The cold fresh water in these systems is ideal to preserve them. This site seems like a very unique overlap in time and place. Quite a gift really.
Wow I think the Maya thought of the caves as the entrance to the world the the dead. Maybe they saw a few skeletons down there that were deposited a long time before and concluded this is where the underworld is.
I have seen reports of skeletons placed perfectly in caves that are today only accessible with proper diving gear. At that time they concluded that it was placed there by incredibly brave mayans. Maybe these skeletons are far older.
Cenotes are amazing, probably the most memorial dives I did. You don’t need to be a cave diver to experience it —- there are plenty of impressive views while staying within short distance to open water.
> “It must be ingrained in human nature to pile rocks on top of each other. There was no other way it could have got there other then a human stacking it on top.”
We gotta stop blaming Instagram for things that have been human nature for 12,000 years. Even as Hammurabi set his chisel to a tablet I have no doubt he was tempted to carve a photo of what he had for breakfast that morning to show his peeps.
Cairns are pretty important for mountaineering. GPS can be spotty between large rock faces and it’s nice to see a line of them up a boulder field. Although they have to be reset every season which is annoying.
Yeah except for all the times that people who think they know the route start setting up cairns and before you know it there are networks of poorly designated trails sometimes on the correct path but most of the time not. Sometimes they’re useful in the sense of knowing other people have been where you currently are. I’ve been mountaineering for 10 years though and there have only been a very few number of times that community cairns actually mark a path clearly and correctly.
Sorry, it’s a bit of a pet peeve of mine. I have lots of stories of getting lost because I followed cairns instead of common sense or reasonable route finding.
Depends on the route, I did the Mountaineer's Route on Whitney and they were pretty helpful, although there are probably < 100 people that do that in a season. Maybe I should get a better GPS
Can anybody shed some light on how much scientific data can be gleaned or extracted from this? I presume that millennia underwater has rendered much of the chemical data impossible to get?
Those Yucatan cave systems are by far the largest in the world and very famous amongst scuba divers. It was the home of many films, like the IMAX doc The Unexplored, Caves of the Dead 3D and the 2 Cave horror movies recently.
https://www.scubaboard.com/community/threads/the-cave-movie-...
86 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] thread[1] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/27/eaba1219.full
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu8o6tr-86k
This one has the original english voices.
A bit like mountaineering I would say.
"Safe cave diving" was coined by Tom Mount in 1976 as an attempt to educate divers about less dangerous ways of diving.
The ICURR has a slide deck discussing various statistics at http://www.iucrr.org/fatalities.pdf
Anecdotally most of my friends that died in caves died from hypoxia caused by rebreather operation, not from the hard ceiling itself.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Vortex_S...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ScarySigns/comments/c3ujlc/over_dra...
I mean, the warning about cave diving doesn't show you how you'll die, does it?
I imagine building out supply lines for refueling, developing sophisticated position tracking methodologies, and lots of other neat problem solving with no risk to human life.
It seems a lot could be accomplished with a tethered probe. A tether solves a couple of problems, namely power and data retrival. Granted, a tethered probe is unlikely to climb or fly.
Even if they could be fully autonomous, there's still a bunch of issues, since caves in general and submerged ones in particular are GPS-denied environments. Acoustics like USBL equipment probably wouldn't work in a cave, instances of underwater VSLAM are still pretty nascent, and inertial navigation system with a low-enough error accumulation rate are almost universally export-controlled by their respective countries.
It's definitely an interesting problem, though, and I honestly think that progress in the area is going to be made because folks that aren't experts in caving end up getting interested in it. For example, I'd imagine this kind of a problem is something that space agencies are also really interested in, since there's a lot room in the middle of their respective Venn diagrams.
Stone's DepthX AUV is a fully autonomous unit that was intended as a proof of concept for mapping Jupiter's moon Europa. https://stoneaerospace.com/depthx/
https://www.gue.com/diver-training/explore-gue-courses/cave
That said, proper training and equipment can not eliminate a lot of the risk involved. Equipment can always fail, people can get stuck, and the environment is often such that a single minor wrong movement will causes clear water to become instantly zero visibility. Diving in old mines has also risk of collapse and unless you are diving rebreather you are also introducing new air into the environment.
Exploring a new unexplored mine like the one in the article is risky even for the most trained and well equipped divers.
That said, do you know of a more current layman-accessible book on the topic?
Other people have mentioned Graham Hancock and Jared Diamond. These authors are fine as entertainment, but they're pretty far removed from the academic consensus.
I'm the one that mentioned him elsewhere in the thread. It's sad to me that he gets so much shit in scientific circles when he's quite reserved with making truth claims, instead making hypotheses that are unfortunately misaligned with current theories and so derided as pseudo-science or bullshit.
For sure it was a lucky discovery because they weren't especially looking for new passages, but it can't really be said to be accidental in the sense of the vela satellites detecting GRBs for instance.
I expect a lot is still there and fantastic discoveries await once we figure out how to get to it.
In the example I'm most familiar with, the island of Great Britain essentially see-saw'd. Relieving the northern half of the island of this unimaginably massive weight caused the northern end of the island to rise, and the southern end of the island to sink reciprocally.
So even without glacial melt to content with, some areas that were low-lying during the ice-age would have become submerged post-ice-age.
The example I find most fascinating (I'm British, so still using GB & locale as examples) is "Doggerland"[1] - the theory that what is today an underwater topology named Dogger Bank, was previous an island, and before that the land bridge between GB and the continent. There's a strong chance there's prehistoric archeology to be found in the middle of the North Sea.
Yes, sea levels have moved before - as part of one of the largest and most defining geological events in human history.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
(I don't want to de-stress point 1, the ice went somewhere. There's just little to expand on.)
https://slate.com/technology/2017/08/why-sea-level-is-fallin...
Which makes sense really, since we're on the same tectonic plate. Geographically there's not a huge difference between Scotland and Scandinavia. They're the parts of northern Europe that were torn up by glaciers.
It does make me wonder, tongue in cheek, who's reciprocally sinking on that side though. I know a few people who'd be disturbingly proud to find out that Sweden and Finland are sinking Denmark.
I doubt that. I've never heard of an ancient discovery offshore. A thousand years of salt, life and waves will turn most things to mush. These caves do a special job of preserving things. They have little movement, little life and freshwater sections.
Edit: I didn’t do a great job of expressing myself. I’m sure that offshore ancient discoveries have happened (as some replies have pointed out). The comment I replied to seemed to be suggesting that all of our ancient history is just waiting to be discovered off the shore. It’s not. In all the diving I’ve done around the world, in all the treasure hunting stories I’ve read, no one has found anything ancient offshore. (And then I learned about some today)
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2016/08/what-roman-ruins-rev...
I think the point I was trying to make is that there clearly are examples and I don't think that we've barely even begun looking.
You're right that healthy sea waters aren't ideal for preservation of human-derived metals and organics, but then silting and run-off from tributaries leads to preserving types of environment, sat in geographic areas of interest to humans anyway. That aside, stone - a material much used in ancient times - is fairly durable.
When you were diving, were you actively looking for signs of ancient human activity, or might it have entirely slipped you by even if you stared straight at it?
I'd suggest the littoral region is the next frontier of archaeology, because clearly a lot of our history was on-shore, and that on-shore is now off-shore... .
- ed spelling
Drone submersibles with high resolution sonar doing fully-realised coastal scans would, I'm sure, yield hugely interesting results.
- ed: drone wouldn't need to be submersible. that would just be cooler.
My part was a relatively unimportant add-on - the system relied on a 2400bps acoustic link from the submersible to a small ship that needed to stay right above to get a reliable link.
To allow relaying data real-time to shore or a bigger ship nearby I was contracted to write code to pass the data stream reliably over a 9600bps GSM data connection (it was intended for testing and demos in coastal regions, not for production use).
Ended up using a slightly modified z-modem protocol that kept the session alive across redial.
But the best part of that contract was to get to go out and see the real system in operation.
Given what results they had back then I wonder what the state of the art in that field looks like now - the biggest problem with automating this seemed to be the tight tolerances for communication with the submersible.
You won't be able to make it small and cheap if it needs to be tethered (dragging a heavy cable), but if untethered like the one I got to see, maintaining a reliable enough and fast enough connection becomes a challenge instead.
This resistance seems to go beyond appropriate scientific caution and into the realm of unscientific dogmatism. There was a thread here a few days ago about Graham Hancock. I do think he's a bit of a crank, but I get the sense he gets a lot of traction because he's one of the few who will even talk about certain things.
(Reminds me of how the alt-right and even worse ideologues get traction because they are the only ones who will talk about the economic collapse of the American center. Their ideas are bullshit, but everyone else pretends it's not happening.)
Other fields of science seem to have no problem with discovering that things are much bigger than they thought. Astronomers discover that they were undercounting the number of galaxies by two logarithmic factors? Neat! Archeologists don't seem to greet enlargement of their domain this way.
Maybe it comes from religious and cultural chauvinism or residual religious literalism. Deepening the historical narrative might mean the Mesopotamians were not "first" or that history vastly predates the historical accounts of many religious texts.
The fact that entire cultures rose and fell so long ago might also make us uncomfortable. It reminds us of our collective mortality. I see this with many Americans wanting to pretend that native Americans were just the most primitive hunter-gatherers, not that they had sophisticated cultures with history and ideas... that could vanish in a very short span of time and barely be remembered.
When you consider that the flood myth is almost a universal story across cultures, and that human population was dramatically smaller, and left behind little, it’s difficult to Have a position on pre-history.
I recall taking classes on this era in college, and the professor spending time talking about what we don’t know — which highlighted the importance of small details of ancient cultures that allow us to infer knowledge.
In the last 30-40 years more discoveries have been made that challenge even our understanding of Ancient Greece, we’re learning and eventually people will reach consensus about new discoveries.
There's a pretty big divide here between what archaeologists/anthropologists say to the public and how they interact within their communities. There's a lot of reasons for this that I'm more than happy to go into (e.g. preventing looting, caution about the use of our works to justify bigotry, or simply because there's a lot we don't know). This essentially manifests as "the safest thing to communicate is the basic consensus." It's also the easiest thing to provide layperson accessible resources for. Internally though, the fields are quite aggressive about challenging popular narratives. That's pretty much the best way to make a name as a young researcher and grad classes tend to settle into a debate format, where you take turns trying to rip (sometimes each other's) arguments apart.
Secondly, if we're going to point out issues in an entire field, it helps to be specific. No one can actually respond to the assertion that "archaeologists don't talk about things I haven't named." Like, do I list a bunch of things that have been rewritten over time?
Finally, archaeology is hard and the record just doesn't answer a lot of the questions we want it to. The field as a whole is moving back from resolving big questions and producing grand narratives to answering little questions and small narratives the record allows us to support. These aren't the things the public asks about, so there's quite a large gap mostly filled by the kind of people too ignorant to realize why there's a gap. The challenge that we need to do a better job filling it was Jared Diamond's most interesting idea, in my opinion.
The trouble is the lack of writing. Even when there is writing, there was mass illiteracy, people may not have written much, and what books and accounts that were written were lost.
This is true for about all civilizations up until the printing press. Consider how little we know about the Vikings, Arthurian England, etc.
I will try to find the source(s) later if there’s interest, but remember reading articles on Aboriginal Storytelling that used to be only considered folklore until it was proven that the stories, passed on orally, contained and preserved a variety of knowledge of the land, weather and historical events of Australia dating back to when the very first Aborigines set foot unto the continent, reaching back further than virtually all known written records. Contrast this to much younger texts that even today we still haven’t managed to decode or the burning of libraries of the likes of Alexandria and Baghdad that at once wiped out huge chunks of the most valuable knowledge mankind was able to accumulate.
Arthurian England is not documented because it’s a made-up collection of legends. The Vikings left written Eddas, poems, and a body of Norse mythology, and we actually know quite a lot about Viking history.
It's not documented because nobody at the time wrote anything down. Nobody knows who the kings of England were in those days. Nobody knows if the Arthurian legend is based on a real king or not.
We know several orders of magnitude about historical periods after the printing press than before, and the same goes for literate societies vs illiterate ones.
Computers and the internet means the future will know far more about us than about our parents.
Written and printed records do not guarantee historical accuracy. The Lord of the Rings is just as long as the Arthur stories, and just as vivid, but not real.
Jeez, I never said they did. They're better than a vacuum, though. Many suspicious historical accounts have been verified by later archaeological discoveries. For example, some accounts of Jamestown have turned out to be correct, and the descriptions of Richard III's curved spine turned out to be correct, and not just propaganda by his detractors.
I also know that the history of England entered the "Dark Ages" after the Romans left, not because they were literally dark, but because little is known about it. 200 years is a long time. The paucity of records:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Arthur#Historicity
is where the legends come from.
Yes, lots of people do know who they were. There was no “England” in those days, but historians know the kings and queens of the kingdoms of Essex, Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, etc. that would coalesce into England later.
https://www.historyofengland.net/kings-and-queens/the-dark-a...
"A West Saxon expansion westwards is halted for some years by perhaps a King Arthur one of the last Romanised Britians in England."
This seems patently obvious.
The caves are inland and part of the limestone karst found throughout the Yucatán peninsula and Florida. Divers have been exploring these fresh water cenotes and the attached subterranean caves/rivers for a long time. The cenotes were an important part of Mayan culture but that occurred much more recently (i.e. not prehistoric).
Salt water is not friendly to human artifacts. The cold fresh water in these systems is ideal to preserve them. This site seems like a very unique overlap in time and place. Quite a gift really.
I have seen reports of skeletons placed perfectly in caves that are today only accessible with proper diving gear. At that time they concluded that it was placed there by incredibly brave mayans. Maybe these skeletons are far older.
We gotta stop blaming Instagram for things that have been human nature for 12,000 years. Even as Hammurabi set his chisel to a tablet I have no doubt he was tempted to carve a photo of what he had for breakfast that morning to show his peeps.