Scientists Reopened the Mount Padang Debate — The New Evidence Is Shocking

Scientists Reopened the Mount Padang Debate — The New Evidence Is Shocking In March 2024, a scientific journal retracted a paper claiming that a pyramid more than 25,000 years old lay buried inside a hill in West Java, older than Göbekli Tepe, older than Stonehenge, older than every pyramid in Egypt. For the critics, that closed the case. However, in November 2025, a new government-backed team digging into the same hill announced carbon dates from four metres down that reach back to around 6,000 BC, and this year they say they are going deeper than twenty metres.My name is Marcus Reed and the hill is called Gunung Padang. The people who live around it have treated it as sacred for generations. What the new team says it has found so far, and what it is digging toward right now, has dragged one of archaeology's ugliest fights straight back into the open.So what did they actually find? The team is led by Ali Akbar, an archaeologist from the University of Indonesia, working for Indonesia's Ministry of Culture. In the autumn of 2025, after about three months of excavation, they opened several points around the fifth and highest terrace of the site. At roughly four metres below the surface, they hit something they hadn't expected.