27,000 year pyramid claims offer lesson in good thinking

We have no training in Archaeology. We do like a good new story from that field, however. Hre is one from Nature Briefings, about claims that a 27 000 year old pyramid has been unearthed on the island of Java:

A paper claiming that a structure in Indonesia is the oldest pyramid in the world has raised the eyebrows of archaeologists and prompted an investigation by publisher Wiley’s ethics team. The study concludes that a structure lying beneath the prehistoric site of Gunung Padang in West Java might have been constructed as far back as 27,000 years ago — long before Egypt’s great pyramids. However, critics say that the buried layers are more likely to have occurred naturally, and that there’s no evidence people had the skills to build a pyramid at the time. The site has been linked to a fringe idea of an advanced global civilization that was wiped out 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age.Nature | 5 min read

We are in no position to judge the truth or otherwise of the claims made by the discoverers. However, the world is full of huge eye catching claims- from hikes in interest rates all the way out someone peddling an interview with the Abominable Snowman. We cannot be trained in every discipline from Economics to Zoology. But there is one intellectual rule of thumb which can help sift the wheat from the chaff;

extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

And that’s true in every field. So while the idea of a 27000-year- old pyramid is possible, it’s so far out of the bounds of our experience that experts are rightly looking carefully at every shred of evidence. And considering alternative hypotheses. Sometimes something extraordinary does go mainstream (think Geocentrism, Continental Drift and the bacterial origins of infectious disease) But to do so there needed to be the slow accumulation of careful, much-reasoned, evidence.

Anyone can make a big claim about anything. If someone says to you “policy makers have made a mistake over marginal tax rates” it may be worth discussing. But if someone says “Policy Makers are in league with Beelzebub and all his satanic crew” you are going to need a lot of facts before you even give them time of day.

#logic #reason #epidemiology #conspiracy theory #archaeology