[HN Gopher] Scuba diver accidentally discovers prehistoric indus...
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Scuba diver accidentally discovers prehistoric industrial complex
in Mexico
Author : aritraghosh007
Score : 208 points
Date : 2020-07-04 08:02 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nationalpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nationalpost.com)
| BelleOfTheBall wrote:
| 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?
| rtkaratekid wrote:
| 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)?
| ascotan wrote:
| Wikipedia?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas
| raun1 wrote:
| Here's a nice article on Kelp Highways and Cultural
| Diffusionism! https://grahamhancock.com/davidga6/
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| _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.
| wjnc wrote:
| Were they far removed from academic consensus when they came
| out, or became so by the moving of academic perspectives?
| raun1 wrote:
| 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.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| 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| outdated by the 70s, let alone by when he published GG&S.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.
| nachexnachex wrote:
| First migrants by Peter Bellwood
| cpach wrote:
| "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| 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.
| losteric wrote:
| 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?
| rainworld wrote:
| David Reich's _Who We Are and How We Got Here._
| e-_pusher wrote:
| "1491" goes into great detail on this subject - highly
| recommended.
| sradman wrote:
| Original paper [1]. Ochre was being extracted from underground
| cave systems on the Yucatan ~10 kya. The caves are now flooded as
| sea levels were still rising after the last glacial maximum.
|
| [1] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/27/eaba1219.full
| gboone wrote:
| News report with additional footage.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu8o6tr-86k
| joachimma wrote:
| https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1760020035814/
|
| This one has the original english voices.
| prennert wrote:
| 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.
| lsh123 wrote:
| 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.
| libria wrote:
| > "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.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| I wonder what the working conditions were like.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Human history during the ice age mostly remain to be explored,
| because all the coastal settlements and cities are now under
| water.
|
| I expect a lot is still there and fantastic discoveries await
| once we figure out how to get to it.
| sradman wrote:
| 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 Yucatan 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.
| okiedokiepokie wrote:
| Wait. Are you telling me the seas have been rising since the
| ice age and not just in the last 100 years?
| datenhorst wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/1732/
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| 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.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| The comic addresses this.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| OhI missed that somehow. Thanks for pointing it out.
| soneil wrote:
| 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.
|
| [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.)
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Northern Scandinavia is still rising 5-9 mm /year.
|
| https://slate.com/technology/2017/08/why-sea-level-is-
| fallin...
| soneil wrote:
| It sounds like that's roughly the same rate as Scotland,
| so I'd assume exactly the same thing over a wide area - h
| ttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthnews/6226537/E
| ng...
|
| 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.
| detritus wrote:
| 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.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| > It's right there, entirely unseen.
|
| 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)
| dghughes wrote:
| 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.
| Morizero wrote:
| The Doggerland portion of the North Sea has yielded
| prehistoric artifacts.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| 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
| api wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > 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.
| narutouzumaki wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| jacobush wrote:
| Alexandria burning is a myth, but otherwise, yes, I agree
| with your argument.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| egwor wrote:
| 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.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| 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.
|
| A bit like mountaineering I would say.
| nradov wrote:
| While I'm not a cave diver myself, with proper training and
| equipment it's possible to eliminate virtually all of the
| risk.
|
| https://www.gue.com/diver-training/explore-gue-courses/cave
| belorn wrote:
| 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.
| joejerryronnie wrote:
| 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.
| pdoege wrote:
| A bit more info.
|
| "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.
| jmiserez wrote:
| Wow, 36% carried no lights at all? I've only been cenote
| diving but can't imagine doing it without a light.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| I love how menacing / spooky this common sign is:
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Vortex_S.
| ..
| grawprog wrote:
| 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.
| joejerryronnie wrote:
| It's also a bit unsettling that, despite the very blunt
| message of the sign, the Grim Reaper is summoning you to
| proceed.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| well he has a bit different agenda compared to most
| living folks
| renewiltord wrote:
| Almost all death signs are pretty blunt.
| grawprog wrote:
| 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.
| supportlocal4h wrote:
| 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.
| pdoege wrote:
| One such drone is the Sunfish
| https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/this-ai-
| guided-d...
|
| 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/
| travisjungroth wrote:
| 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.
| FlyMoreRockets wrote:
| > It would likely need to be fully autonomous.
|
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| novok wrote:
| Tethers also get tangled and will probably hit a bunch of
| crap you don't want to be hitting.
| gibolt wrote:
| 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
| Leherenn wrote:
| Couldn't you just pull it back to go in reverse?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Every try pulling on a garden hose that's stuck on a
| table leg, stump, or something else along those lines?
| qchris wrote:
| 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.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| 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.
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