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Scuba diver accidentally discovers prehistoric industrial complex in Mexico
- sradman 6y agoOriginal 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
- gboone 6y agoNews report with additional footage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu8o6tr-86k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu8o6tr-86k
- joachimma 6y agohttps://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1760020035814/ https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1760020035814/ This one has the original english voices.
- egwor 6y agoVery 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 6y agoCave 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.
- pdoege 6y agoA 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 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 6y agoWow, 36% carried no lights at all? I've only been cenote diving but can't imagine doing it without a light.
- nickysielicki 6y agoI love how menacing / spooky this common sign is: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Vortex_Spring_cave_warning_sign.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Vortex_S...
- grawprog 6y agoI 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.
- renewiltord 6y agoAlmost all death signs are pretty blunt.
- grawprog 6y agoNot 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.
- rtkaratekid 6y agoVery 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 6y agoWikipedia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas
- cpach 6y ago“Guns, Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoThat’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 6y agoI 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?
- gregjor 6y agoOne possible way, but the one best supported by evidence. The west coast of North America continues to yield evidence of human settlement and migration, sometimes just offshore. Genetics also supports the out of Siberia hypothesis.
- rainworld 6y agoDavid Reich‘s Who We Are and How We Got Here.
- amelius 6y agoI wonder what the working conditions were like.
- SiempreViernes 6y agoAn 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.
- BurningFrog 6y agoHuman 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.
- okiedokiepokie 6y agoWait. Are you telling me the seas have been rising since the ice age and not just in the last 100 years?
- datenhorst 6y agohttps://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
- SubiculumCode 6y agoMan-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 6y agoThe comic addresses this.
- SubiculumCode 6y agoOhI missed that somehow. Thanks for pointing it out.
- soneil 6y agoThe 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland 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.)
- prennert 6y agoWow 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 6y agoCenotes 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 6y ago> “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 6y agoCairns 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 6y agoYeah 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 6y agoDepends 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
- BelleOfTheBall 6y agoCan 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?
- rurban 6y agoThose 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-filmed-in-yucatan.106166/ https://www.scubaboard.com/community/threads/the-cave-movie-...