PhD student finds lost city in Mexico jungle
173 points by janpot 8 months ago | 117 comments- bee_rider 8 months ago> “I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring,” explains Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane university in the US.
Oh, I thought he’s just gotten lost deep in the jungle (presumably looking for the free pizza that was left over from the undergrads’ seminar). But wow, 16’th page of Google, that really is uncharted territory.
- kyle-rb 8 months agoWe shouldn't be rushing to explore space when we haven't even explored our own planet's ocean, or page 16 of google search results.
- notahacker 8 months agoPage 16 of Google search results: the final frontier.
starts sketching out a funding application for a mission to explore page 17
- zeristor 8 months ago"There be dragons!"
- zeristor 8 months ago
- melling 8 months agoAt last count, we had 8 billion people on the planet. I think it’ll be fine if some people do space while others work on oceans.
Must admit this is the most overused excuse I’ve ever heard in my life.
“Hey, let’s all work on this one problem and ignore every other problem.”
- soupfordummies 8 months agoLol I think they were just having a laugh
- churchill 8 months agoBut, who's going to end world hunger though? /s
- soupfordummies 8 months ago
- notahacker 8 months ago
- jdthedisciple 8 months agoOne wonders what other mysteries are waiting to be uncovered amid the dark depths of Google search results ...
- pessimizer 8 months agoSince the 16th page of a google search is usually the end of the third repetition of the first four pages of a google search, he'd probably already missed it three times...
- chipdart 8 months ago> But wow, 16’th page of Google, that really is uncharted territory.
Would it make a difference if instead of querying google he was at the library of a Mexican organization for environmental monitoring reading obscure reports?
- textlapse 8 months agoOnly slightly less difficult than hunting down an obscure Reddit thread that is improperly red-black balanced 15 nodes in from the root and still 10 nodes away from the leaf.
- keyle 8 months agoBitdiana Jones. 16th page of Google, that's dark, humid, full of snakes. Better bring a torch!
- kyle-rb 8 months ago
- cossatot 8 months agoThe actual journal article is here (open access): https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/ru...
Based on the images, I think that the largest structure is about here: 18.891548°N, -89.323622°E. But you can't see anything in google earth (otherwise why would he have had to traverse 16 pages of google search results).
- 0xbadcafebee 8 months agoThrow a stone and you'll find a lost city in Mexico. Lost cities found so far: Acanceh, Aguada Fénix, Aké, Balamku, Balankanche, Becan, Bonampak, Calakmul, Chacchoben, Chactún, Chicanná, Chinkultic, Chichen Itza, Chunchucmil, Chunhuhub, Chunlimón, Coba, Comalcalco, Dzibanche, Dzibilchaltun, Edzna, Ekʼ Balam, Hormiguero, Izama, lIzapa, Jaina, Joljaʼ, Kabah, Kiuic, Kohunlich, Komchen, Labna, La Mar, Mayapan, Maní, Moral Reforma, Muyil, Ocomtún, Oxkintok, Palenque, Plan de Ayutla, Pomona, Punta Sur, Río Bec, San Gervasio, Sayil, Tamchen, Toniná, Tortuguero, Tulum, Uxmal, Uxul, Valeriana, Xcaret, Xelha, Xlapak, Xpuhil, Xtampak, Yaxchilan, Yaxuná, Yula, Yoʼokop.
- jacobolus 8 months agoThe larger of these are definitely not "lost" (as in, local people who are the descendants of their inhabitants have known exactly where they are, continuously since they were abandoned as places to live a millennium ago), though most of them are in the middle of the jungle.
Southern Mexico and Central America are incredibly beautiful though, and ancient ruins there are fascinating places to visit.
- dreamcompiler 8 months agoTulum for example was never "lost." It sits directly on the coast and it was "found" by Europeans (from a ship!) in 1518. The local Maya people knew exactly where it was.
Today the Maya still live in the area and they support their families by working in the tourist industry.
- dreamcompiler 8 months ago
- devoutsalsa 8 months agoCalakmul is so cool’s. So is the nearby volcano of the bats.
- jacobolus 8 months ago
- OgsyedIE 8 months agoThis link: https://i.redd.it/gm8273jvjrk71.jpg is an map (outdated though, it dates to 2019 AFAIK) of how much of the Earth's surface has been mapped by google street view.
Is there a similar map product that shows how much of the Earth's surface has yet to be surveyed with lidar (or a suitable equivalent)? I would assume that areas with zero vegetation can be covered by satellite imagery but it is possible that the resolution is poor (for example, SRTM had a 30m resolution).
- ipdashc 8 months agoThat map, while interesting, seems entirely subjective - the whole appearance of the map can be determined by the thickness that you set the street view lines to, no?
- bee_rider 8 months agoI guess you just lose the ability to distinguish between areas past some density, right? What would be a good way to improve it… maybe apply some filter, Lanzcos or whatever?
- AlotOfReading 8 months agoThe technical term is "viewshed analysis", what areas are visible from a given set of points. Any competent GIS system will have ways to do it, but peakfinder.com works pretty well as a more visually interesting demo.
- AlotOfReading 8 months ago
- bee_rider 8 months ago
- ipdashc 8 months ago
- karim79 8 months agoPlease don't tell Graham Hancock[0]. He'll claim this as more proof for his ancient ice age civilisation (for which there is no evidence).
- pookha 8 months agoSince we're going there...Graham Hancock's a philistine but I'd take his word over somebody like Flint Dibble. Dibble lied and pushed off bad information to win a debate and he did a disservice to himself and his peers. Many of whom work thankless jobs out on remote sites with no health insurance and for pitiful wages. They shouldn't be represented by a smug arrogant conman that passes off irrelevant studies on metallurgy, outright lies about ship wrecks and has to name drop and smear the civilians at any chance (I'd like to see that 15th century drawing of an island orthorectified like it's an image captured from a multispectural sensor Mr. Rogan)
- karim79 8 months agoWow, thanks for this info. It's incredible how much weight podcasts such as these provide to people who are basically either liars or just plain incompetent.
- karim79 8 months ago
- pookha 8 months ago
- alberth 8 months agoLidar has been finding a lot of lost cities.
Not discounting this finding. It's just becoming more common.
- HenryBemis 8 months agoI've been watching the Ancient Apocalypse (S2) on Netflix and I had similar thoughts on discoveries. With drones and lidars we can discover so many of these villages/towns/cities, but the challenge would be to actually send boots on the ground and excavate into getting meaningful data/findings.
At the same time, the baddies (grave robbers, looters, etc.) can use the same tech and beat us to the game.
- alberth 8 months agoNational Geographic even created a TV show 5-years ago specifically on this topic.
"Lost Cities with Albert Lin" (2019)
It's an 11-episode show where they use Lidar in each episode to find lost cities.
- Hikikomori 8 months agoThat drivel got a second season?
- a2l3aQ 8 months agoThat you Flint?
- a2l3aQ 8 months ago
- alberth 8 months ago
- HenryBemis 8 months ago
- Animats 8 months ago"It is just 15 minutes hike from a major road near Xpujil where mostly Maya people now live."
And nobody sent a drone yet? The BBC has a jungle drone team.[1]
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3P6MX7bbl0Y5SSnvJW...
- muststopmyths 8 months agoIt won't be visible to the naked eye. Maya ruins like these are covered by centuries of overgrowth. Lidar scans can spot shapes buried under this overgrowth, but from the air it'll at best look like random hills of dirt.
Maybe if there are structures comparable to Calakmul (which is close to Xpujil), you'll see some rocks on a tall hill.
- Animats 8 months agoWe can look forward to the Instagram video, "With machete and weed-whacker".
- EasyMark 8 months agoI mean if you have the coordinates? And it’s 15 minutes away, why would you need Lidar or drones? You could probably send in some inquisitive geeky nerds from the local schools to scout it out.
- Animats 8 months ago
- muststopmyths 8 months ago
- chrisbrandow 8 months agofor a $500 plane ticket and a 4 hour drive, seems like someone has surely gone there by now, just to ground-truth this. Otherwise, seems like a fun (with plenty of risks, obvs) way of being "the first" to lay eyes on this.
- whartung 8 months agoI'm guessing you've never actually been in "the jungle". It's not hospitable at all.
The other thing is that that area of Mexico is just teeming with this stuff. There's just an untold boatload of "lost cities" in there. They can't dig and map the stuff they are working on, much less any of the numerous finds that have been made in the past 10-20 years.
"Oh, yea, yay, another lost Mayan city. Woo hoo."
- AlotOfReading 8 months agoA good chunk of Central America is like this. One person I know maintaining maps of historic Maya settlements was tracking thousands of known names, most of which were positionally located by rough distance estimates from some other coarsely located feature. Many didn't even have that, just a name in some historic document.
- stavros 8 months agoThat's kind of like finding ancient stuff in Greece. You dig a hole, and there's some ancient pots and pans in there. It's gotten to the point where people who want to build houses just carry the ancient findings away in the night, because the antiquities service will otherwise deem your plot an archaeological site.
- EasyMark 8 months agoThis type of thing happens in most countries. In the USA they actually have to hire bored archeologists to check things out as part of any contract from the federal government (and a lot of state governments) on anything that might have a hint of Native American relics.
- EasyMark 8 months ago
- jaza 8 months agoIt's sad if "lost cities" are becoming so common, that they're losing their romantic-exotic-intrepid charm. If lost cities ain't got it no more, what in this world does?
- AlotOfReading 8 months ago
- Cthulhu_ 8 months ago"4 hour drive" implies you can just drive into the jungle... that's not exactly how these things work.
- kansai 8 months agoFor what it's worth, TFA does mention that the site is:
> "hidden in plain site", the archaeologists say, as it is just 15 minutes hike from a major road
- kansai 8 months ago
- whartung 8 months ago
- SoftTalker 8 months agoI love the idea that there might have been fully technological civilizations of humans on earth that have been totally lost to time. I know that the Maya were not that, but go back 10,000 years maybe, who knows?
- jfactorial 8 months agoDinosaurs lived on Earth for about 100,000,000 years, at least 50 times as long as our species. Perhaps some dinosaurs were the most advanced species our planet has ever seen.
- lupusreal 8 months agoSadly there's basically zero chance of that. We don't find dinosaur pottery sherds or cola bottles embedded in sedimentary rock anywhere.
- Rebelgecko 8 months agoI read a stat (maybe not true?) that we've only found around one dinosaur fossil for each 10,000 years that they existed. Maybe we just haven't found peak dino society yet-
if you broke humanity down into one archaeological find per 10k years you probably wouldn't think we had much of a society either.
- gitaarik 8 months agoThey didn't make pottery but they had very intellectual conversations and some very good philosophers
- digging 8 months agoThey lived so long ago, my understanding is such artifacts would be extremely unlikely to survive. We also haven't looked in that many places at that depth.
I mean it's still quite unlikely though.
- Rebelgecko 8 months ago
- lupusreal 8 months ago
- janalsncm 8 months agoMaybe not full-blown technology, but a lot of New World philosophy, art, and mathematics, and history were destroyed by the Europeans or otherwise lost to time. Maybe even medicines that we don’t know about. They didn’t have electric computers though.
- matthewdgreen 8 months ago
- ants_everywhere 8 months agoI'm not sure what "fully technological" means, but if they had made anything at scale out of durable materials like stone or ceramic we would most likely have seen some indication.
What we do probably underestimate is how advanced ancient hominids were. They mostly worked with materials that decay like wood, plants, and animal skin. But we're slowly learning that they were more advanced than we used to believe.
- EasyMark 8 months agoAny former civilization that is any sizable fraction of ours with same level of tech would have been spotted long ago. Well unless Atlantis is real somehow sunk 3 miles down
- ants_everywhere 8 months agoThen we're in agreement right?
- ants_everywhere 8 months ago
- EasyMark 8 months ago
- 8 months ago
- Cthulhu_ 8 months agoAn interesting theory (albeit likely sci-fi) is that on a long enough timescale, any existence of an advanced precursor society will have been lost by tectonic plates sliding down. But that's a timescale of hundreds of millions of years (apparently the earth is ~4.5 billion years old, human life that left traces of intelligence behind is a percentage of a percentage of that)
- stormfather 8 months agoIts the ocean plates that slide down when they hit the more buoyant continents. When continents hit they make the Himalayas.
- stormfather 8 months ago
- shrubble 8 months agoThe conquistadors praised Tenochtitlan, viewing it as an advanced city equal to the Spanish cities of the time.
- jaza 8 months agoHey muchachos, I think 5 minutes of praise for Tenochtitlan is in order.
Right, that's that done, now, onto the 3 centuries of murder, rape, pillage, inquisition, and subjugation.
- EasyMark 8 months agoYou mean like the Aztecs (and other civs) before them? Humans gonna human. I think we have to always look at the whole story and not just what’s currently popular to demonize.
- EasyMark 8 months ago
- bobthepanda 8 months agoThe floating city would've almost certainly been a marvel in its own right.
- jaza 8 months ago
- StanislavPetrov 8 months agoConsidering that the seas were hundreds of feet lower, and most settlements are built on coasts and waterways for transport and food harvesting purposes, it is very likely that anything left before the last ice age was destroyed by rising seas and any remnants are far offshore.
- superxpro12 8 months agoIs "love" really the right descriptor here? The implications are truly depressing.
- ks2048 8 months agoNo need to get depressed about an idea with zero evidence.
- keybored 8 months agoConsidering what terrible stewards of the the Earth and of each other we are, depressing is also a wrong descriptor.
- SoftTalker 8 months agoYes, it would be a sobering reminder on how essentially powerless we are in the face of global calamity. You see this recognized in religions and in pre-technological societies, but few of us in the modern era do.
- ks2048 8 months ago
- melling 8 months agoThat means we squandered almost 10,000 years of human history before humans became an advanced civilization. We could have invented flight, discovered antibiotics, etc five thousand years ago.
- bee_rider 8 months agoMost of the clocks we’re racing against are ones we invented in the last 200 or so years. So the other 9,800 years weren’t really squandered, the clock really wasn’t ticking so much back then.
- melling 8 months agoThat sort of makes absolutely no sense. Just killing time here? No one said anything about racing the clock.
- melling 8 months ago
- bee_rider 8 months ago
- spaceman_2020 8 months agoThe oldest city that we’ve found to date was buried - intentionally - under a mound of earth.
There could be dozens of these sites
Lidar the planet
- jfactorial 8 months ago
- elphinstone 8 months agoI wonder if tomb raiders and other artifact thieves are using the same methods and arriving faster.
- dylan604 8 months ago“I was on something like page 16 of Google search "
whoa, I had no idea there were that many pages in a google search. that's some serious googlefu to get that kind of a result. I guess it definitely says something about the researcher too to continue on that deep.
I'm expecting that comment to have been hyperbolic though
- columbus567 8 months agoImagine putting that on a resume for a postdoc
- discovered lost Mayan city
- potato3732842 8 months agoFlock will hire him as a consultant when they develop their upcoming "fine people for unpermitted garden sheds" service.
(joking, but sadly not joking)
- SoftTalker 8 months agoCities and counties have been using traditional aerial photography for that for a long time now.
- vips7L 8 months agoI have friends who work in InsuranceTech and they use satellite images of houses when someone apply for home owners insurance. They've said it flags people with trampolines all the time.
- vips7L 8 months ago
- SoftTalker 8 months ago
- 77pt77 8 months agoIt's going to get as common as
> New exoplanet discovered
Very soon.
And therefore unworthy of barely being mentioned.
- amelius 8 months agoI was imagining what Indiana Jones would look like in this day and age.
- maxerickson 8 months agoJuvy record for the train thing, working as a waiter in the city the detention center was in.
- maxerickson 8 months ago
- jll29 8 months agoI was going to say: that's a thesis result sorted - check.
- potato3732842 8 months ago
- Oarch 8 months agoSighs and resets the 'Days since we discovered a lost city using LiDAR' counter back to zero.
- bkandel 8 months agoHow is this by accident? He was specifically looking for datasets for this purpose and found a good one, then loaded it into a program to find man-made structures.
- ghssds 8 months agoHow many cities are lost every year? Can finding those cities help alleviate the housing crisis? Won't the inhabitants of those cities complain about disrupted postal service? I have so many questions!
- advisedwang 8 months agoOnce again, the sensationalized "discovery" of a "lost" by people that fly over with lidar and never talk to the locals.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/did-recent-expedit...
- dang 8 months agoI appreciate the link but your comment isn't in keeping with the site guidelines, which include:
"Don't be snarky."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- mitthrowaway2 8 months agoCan the locals draw a map of these lost cities? Or are they just aware that there are many lost cities, but without knowing exactly where they are?
And for that matter, if the locals did know the specifics but weren't spreading that knowledge, then it still can constitute a discovery.
"Discovery" can mean revealing knowledge that was previously known to insiders, eg. if I say "I discovered an underground smuggling ring and reported it to the police", you probably wouldn't argue that "you didn't discover anything; the smugglers already knew about it".
- romwell 8 months ago>"Discovery" can mean revealing knowledge that was previously known to insiders, eg. if I say "I discovered an underground smuggling ring and reported it to the police", you probably wouldn't argue that "you didn't discover anything; the smugglers already knew about it".
Just wanted to say how much I'm enjoying this point.
Newspaper Headline:
Discoverer of Underground Smuggling Ring Proven a Fraud: Ring Leader Says He Discovered It First"
- romwell 8 months ago
- jklinger410 8 months agoWow archaeology should be rife for disruption if you can just go around and ask locals. Seems like anyone with gumption could be the next great scientist.
Or maybe one of those locals could be. I wonder what stops them?
- 77pt77 8 months agoLocals lie.
Like a lot!
They even pretend to be able to read ancient languages/scripts when in reality that are just making stuff up.
- lupusreal 8 months agoThis, but unironically.
> Or maybe one of those locals could be. I wonder what stops them?
They're living their lives, rarely becoming academics in the relevant field, assuming that local rock ruin is known to somebody outside of their community, or if not, then assuming nobody cares anyway.
You can probably find a lot of undocumented ancient stuff by asking shepherds in areas known to be territory of ancient poorly documented civilizations.
- 77pt77 8 months ago
- OgsyedIE 8 months agoWhat is the proportion of villages where surveying the locals will lead to documenting an abandoned city that is otherwise only known to the locals?
If only 2% of villages have an undiscovered profitable heritage, then 98% of surveys will show no results, which makes it difficult for anthropological surveys to compete with lidar for grant funding, especially when lidar is still new enough to seem "sexy" and "sci-fi".
- dylan604 8 months agoThrow in some AI processing of the LIDAR data, and watch those funding dollars flood in!!
- AlotOfReading 8 months agoTo put into context how few funding dollars there are in archaeology, the NEH currently has $800k available for archaeological field research proposals. That's the largest "funding agency" pool for generic field research.
This same funding agency that doesn't directly fund computer research also has $2.5M available for proposals specifically targeted to starting collaborations researching AI alignment. They have another $3.5M for the actual collaborations themselves, and an additional $2.2M for AI work that "contributes to scholarly research in the humanities".
- AlotOfReading 8 months ago
- dylan604 8 months ago
- EasyMark 8 months agoHow about “discovered it for the world at large” I think there have been many cases where the locals knew about a lost city or even took stones for their farms from it for X purposes. Still it lets the government there know about a new lost city they can properly check out (or leave alone)
- empath75 8 months ago"Discovery" probably isn't the right word, but the important part isn't knowing that something is there, the important part is telling the rest of the world about it.
- dang 8 months ago
