
Scuba diver accidentally discovers prehistoric industrial complex in Mexico - aritraghosh007
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/a-canadian-scuba-diver-in-mexico-accidentally-discovers-a-vast-prehistoric-industrial-complex
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sradman
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.

[1]
[https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/27/eaba1219.full](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/27/eaba1219.full)

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BurningFrog
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.

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detritus
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.

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travisjungroth
> 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)

~~~
detritus
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... .

\- ed spelling

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detritus
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.

~~~
vidarh
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.

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prennert
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.

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libria
> “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
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.

~~~
rtkaratekid
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.

~~~
GaryNumanVevo
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

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egwor
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
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.

~~~
supportlocal4h
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.

~~~
gibolt
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

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Leherenn
Couldn't you just pull it back to go in reverse?

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ceejayoz
Every try pulling on a garden hose that's stuck on a table leg, stump, or
something else along those lines?

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SiempreViernes
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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gboone
News report with additional footage.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu8o6tr-86k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu8o6tr-86k)

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joachimma
[https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1760020035814/](https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1760020035814/)

This one has the original english voices.

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lsh123
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.

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rurban
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-...](https://www.scubaboard.com/community/threads/the-cave-movie-filmed-
in-yucatan.106166/)

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rtkaratekid
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)?

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AlotOfReading
_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.

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wjnc
Were they far removed from academic consensus when they came out, or became so
by the moving of academic perspectives?

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AlotOfReading
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.

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BelleOfTheBall
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?

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amelius
I wonder what the working conditions were like.

