Gunung Padang

Gunung Padang ("Mountain of Light") is a stepped hill in the highlands of West Java, its upper terraces covered with thousands of naturally occurring columnar basalt rocks — hexagonal and pentagonal joints formed by the cooling of volcanic lava — that have been arranged by human hands into walls, staircases, and rectangular platforms across five terraced levels. The visible megalithic structure has been known to Indonesian archaeologists since at least the colonial period and is generally dated to a few thousand years ago.

The site became the centre of international controversy after a team led by geologist Danny Hilman Natawidjaja published radiocarbon and ground-penetrating radar results between 2012 and 2023 claiming that beneath the visible terraces lies a series of much older buried structures, with the deepest layer dated to as early as 27,000 years ago — which would make it, if confirmed, far older than any other known megalithic construction, predating agriculture by tens of thousands of years. The claims, published in the journal Archaeological Prospection in 2023, drew immediate and severe criticism from archaeologists worldwide, who argued that the radiocarbon dates were taken from soil and organic material that could have migrated into older natural rock layers without indicating human construction at those depths, and that no artefacts, tools, or other unambiguous evidence of human activity had been recovered from the deeper layers. The journal issued an expression of concern in 2024 pending further review, leaving the age and nature of the deeper structures — natural hill or ancient monument — formally unresolved.