Each hole is constructed- dug out and lined with rock.
These are not mining holes, nor used to store things.
If you want to store stuff, you would put these pits
along the bottom of the hill, not running a long distance
up the hill.
They tried to keep the lines somewhat straight, crossing
gullies. I can't guess what valid use they might have had,
other than religious. They seem pointless.
I wonder why the commenter discounts the idea that they were used to store things. Especially since the article gives evidence that things were stored in the holes:
"Hole soil analysis also found ancient pollens of maize – a key staple in the Andes – and reeds traditionally used for basket-making. In addition to this, there were traces of squash, amaranth, cotton, chili peppers and other crops that haven't been farmed on the arid land where Monte Sierpe sits. Because many of these plants produce little airborne pollen, it's unlikely they settled in the holes naturally."
Yeah, they're just assuming that if you wanted to store something you'd store it at the bottom of the hill.
While I'm no archeologist/anthropologist, I have seen an ancient grainery near the green river in Utah. It was about an hour long very steep half hike half rock scramble to get up to the ledge where it was at.
So maybe ancient people had reasons to put storage sites in more difficult to access locations.
It’s actually pretty common to store food at higher elevations in the historical and archaeological record, including among the Incas (but mostly in qollqas). More wind at higher elevations means less moisture, which is the biggest factor in preservation. There are plenty of examples from every era, stretching from ancient Minoans to 20th century Berbers.
> Especially since the article gives evidence that things were stored in the holes
They explain it as these holes are at the top of the mountain. Why climb the large mountain to store your grain there just to have haul it back down later? My own guess answers: safer from animals, precipitation, safe from enemies.
Storing in general could mean different things: putting baskets with grain and produce there for a minute and them someone else immediately pick it up in some bartering exchange, it's not really storing then, I guess? Or, even religious offerings can also be explained as "storing" -- they are stored in there until the "gods" (i.e. elements) destroy them (i.e. consume them) and the gods are appeased, that way ensuring good harvests and other benefits.
>Why climb the large mountain to store your grain there just to have haul it back down later?
Yes and after going on a trip to Machu Picchu a few years ago, the locals don't seem to feel gravity quite the same way most of us do these days. There was a gal on our 4 day hike that got hit pretty hard with altitude sickness a day in. A local porter about her size carried her on his shoulders for the rest of the trip, in flip flops, and the only reason he stayed back with our slow asses was so she could talk to her husband along the way.
It's the most visceral experience I've had in the levels upon levels of human capability. Really wild to see in person.
High and dry, a good place for preservation of organic material. Maybe the holes were simply to get out of the wind.
New idea: this looks the the holes on the surface of a golf ball. Maybe this was an attempt to alter the wind as it crested the hill? Would a strong wind perhaps even whistle as it passed over these holes?
That's within the range you can acclimate to. They don't feel the altitude like we do.
I've made an attempt on Kilimanjaro. We ascended the first three days with porters but no guides. Our guides met us at that camp, they had come up in one day--they did it all the time, going from the surround to the summit in one day was possible and safe. For us--out of the question. The expected outcome would be unconsciousness before reaching the summit.
From a pure endurance sports point of view, natural ability of latin americans in altitude has been successfully reached by other athletes through altitude training camps, tents simulating altitude and drugs (epo,...).
I mean it can certainly help, but this is still well within an average human's range of adaptability. Building up new muscle "easily" (and also atrophying muscle when it isn't used) is one of human kind's super powers in the animal kingdom.
You aren't going to run into any real significant physical limits from your genes until you are pushing beyond what the top 1% of other humans can do, and being able to run up and down mountains all day isn't something only a portion of the locals could hope to achieve, native to the area or not, they just gotta do it for long enough.
My first explanation would be offerings. The rarity of those crops in the area would mean they were more valuable and therefor likely to be used as offerings.
edit: Or heck, maybe they wanted to keep it away from wildlife or invaders.
This is just a little strange to me. Pollen is produced at the flowering stage, not the growing and harvesting stages, months later. While there may be pollen on a grown ear of corn, it would be there for the same reason that it is everywhere else, because it is airborne and somewhat durable?
Why wouldn't you spread out, though, instead of working in basically a line? (At least, as much as topography reasonably allows.) That way, your travel distance to any particular item increases at like sqrt(stuff), instead of just linearly.
yeah, I've been thinking about that since I read the article!
I'm wondering if the line goes along the crest of the hill, so it's basically as wide as the crest is. But there's still, why 7-8 holes wide, and why are there some groups... lots of questions to think about!
Religion always seems like the default explanation for anything without an obvious use and it seems lazy. Maybe it was a game, a rite of passage, a boundary marker, or perhaps there was a Peruvian Mr. Beast running a competition. Anyone else remember the Cards Against Humanity "Holiday Hole"?
> Religion always seems like the default explanation for anything without an obvious use and it seems lazy.
This is one of the bits I remember from reading A Canticle for Leibowitz as a kid. It's about monks in a post nuclear armageddon world. At one point they find an ancient fallout shelter with a bathroom, and they interpret it as a spiritual space where a priest would sit on the "throne" and read "holy scrolls" held by the metal bar next to the throne...
I think we make that kind of mistake when doing armchair archeology or anthropology a lot.
We can only speculate on evidence we have. The prehistoric chubby dolls (Venus figurines) from archaeological digs that many hypothesized to be fertility totems can be hypothesized to be just idealized symbols of female form as the shape changed depending upon the average temperature - ice age meant fatter dolls, temperate times meant thinner dolls.
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-mystery-of-the-enigmatic-ve...
We always want to pretend that we're better and more evolved than those knuckle draggers of ages past -- simply because someone else made a computer for us to use.
That does seem like an orthogonal question to me. That we are wealthier and better off now doesn't really say much about the raw capabilities of the people now vs then, when it's obvious that technology has a truly gigantic role in the wealth of modern times (and compounds onto itself: many technologies making developing new technology easier).
Ive heard that same criticism from working archeologists and anthropologists, especially relooking over old finds but still often used in current unexplained finds. Stick with weird holes drilled in it? Religious scepter. Stone dildo? Religious fertility symbol. Weird hermit hut foundation? Religious monk retreat.
But I think ancient peoples were far more practical and far less concerned over religion and gods than we like to pretend. Sure they might believe lightning are the gods being angry or meteors are the gods taking a dump above the earth or that it is just the nature of existence, they got no real way to explain such things. But that doesn't mean everyone spent all their extra time worrying about such things and furiously producing endless amounts of religious offerings and symbols.
Archeologists consider the ancients to be a game of Dwarf Fortress - once food and security is provided for, you turn everything else into religious trade goods for the caravan.
Here's my hypothesis from ignorance: I don't know much about South America but understand that they freeze dry potatoes on high slopes?
Perhaps they dry best in these holes, the community built them together, like building an oven or kiln, the regularity and sections of 50 holes allow to track whose produce is where; and maybe you sell them on at the same time.
Or, how about ice collection - each hole gets filled with water/snow, it freezes, the lumps are the right size for carrying back to an ice hole. Maybe they can slide them down the slope like a historical ice-cube dispenser.
Your hypothesis is probably correct. The Incas were experts at using their mountainous topography to freeze dry things. In fact the word 'jerky' comes from Quechua.
It's safe to say, since it's been proven these holes exist all over the Amazon, that they were created to catch or divert animals, to keep them from reaching their village. After finding the normal route of the animals and their crossings, the holes were possibly dug to confuse the animals and funnel them into the small foot traffic areas to be caught and killed - whether for food or to control their travel. If it would stop humans from wanting to traverse the land, animals wouldn't want to either. Also, I see "scientists" make this mistake over and over; the lay of the land now is not what it was back then, and large ravines that are there now may have been lush with greenery and completely flat. Earthquakes and landslides could have completely changed the overall landscape by now too.
> It's safe to say, since it's been proven these holes exist all over the Amazon, that they were created to catch or divert animals, to keep them from reaching their village
Are you serious? There's an absolutely massive logical leap from [these holes exist all over the Amazon] -> [they were created to catch or divert animals]. Do you have some other evidence to argue in favor of this?
I agree. I also appreciate how the commenter feels at peace with acknowledging and accepting the fact that he does not want to guess because we simply do not have enough information and may never have enough.
It’s exactly what frustrates me so much about supposed “scientists” like the one quoted in the article; they say “we don’t know what something is for” then these “scientists” offer and apply all kinds of fanciful imaginative purposes and state them with authority that people accept.
I think it should be professionally disqualifying for scientists to propose any kind of theory or fanciful and imaginative purpose unless there has been rigorous debate and there is a solid theory backed by multiple points of evidence. Making unverifiable claims based on internal imagination and biases does not help and can even cause corruption of science, as I know for a fact happens.
You only have to hear “scientists” with PhDs openly say variations of the following most egregious example; “I just draw the graph and then look for the data to support it”, to know why sciences are so corrupted in many places.
I understand why people do it, especially if it’s your life, but science is largely about the disciplining human nature, something that seems to be crumbling and failing in many ways across many domains in the American empire.
"If you want to store stuff, you would put these pits
along the bottom of the hill, not running a long distance
up the hill."
Unless you want more favorable conditions for long term storing, or in case a enemy comes and blunders what is easily avaiable at the bottom of the hill.
If you're hiding food from enemies then you're going to pack it into isolated hiding places, not jammed together with 5,000 others in a feature visible for miles around and where everyone that the enemy might decide to question knows where it is. So storage, yes, but hiding it from enemies seems unlikely.
Maybe this was almost like an early version of blockchain where earlier holes were no longer used for some reason and only new holes were used and this allowed you to continuously build up a history. In other words maybe we each row was a new year and required both sets of trading partners to participate in its creation
Huh, and there I would have assumed this was defensive architecture akin to the Great Wall of China (albeit more rudimentary). I’m guessing that was ruled out early.
My initial thought was these were probably “drilled out” probably with an animal walking in circles, almost like a horse walker but with a drill bit attachment
>I can't guess what valid use they might have had,other than religious. They seem pointless.
I agreed there are for religious purposes but certainly not pointless for them.
My hypothesis is that it is for their offerings to God, perhaps a fraction from the population fresh produced. In religion like Islam you need to set aside 2.5% of yearly income for charity from farming produces, for example.
These rectangular structures namely Mustatil (rectangle) are very common (over 1000 of them) in built in ancient Arabia and they probably also being used for religious offerings [1]. The location are normally on top of the hills or elavated places similar to this.
Fun facts, Abrahamic religions have common rectangular religious structures. The Kaaba in Mecca was originally in rectangular shape before taking the modern square footprint or iconic cube structure [2]. According to Islamic tradition it's believe to be the first house of worship ever being built in the world by Adam. It's later reconstructed and renovated by Abraham and his son Ishmael.
The ancient Jews during Moses time also has rectangular portable worship structure so-called Tabernacle containing the infamous Ark of the Covenant [3].
Recently in 2025 a unique, 2,800-year-old First Temple-period cultic structure, featuring a 220-square-meter rectangular area, was discovered on the eastern slope of the City of David in Jerusalem. This site includes a ritual altar, a standing stone (masseba), a winepress, and an oil press, indicating significant ritual activity.
I think it is unfair to specify safe here, as probably all nuclear powerplants are considered safe until they are not, including Fukushima. But plenty of European countries are either building or planing nuclear new nuclear power reactors, and Finland just opened a new reactor in 2023.
But the simple matter is thought that the economics of nuclear power simply are not delivering. They are expensive and slow to build, while at the same time wind (particularly off shore wind) and solar are getting cheaper and easier to build every year (or month even). Germany also stands out as a success story of nuclear phase-out, that by replacing these expensive to run nuclear power plant has offered the economic wiggle room to phase in renewables a lot faster then otherwise.
Compare costs, monetary risk and TTM to renewables with battery backup. Nuclear is dead as a doornail.
Look at the nuclear buildup. Vogtle in US 10 years. Hinckley Point C is estimated to be 13 years. Flamanville 3 took 17 years. All these years you put money in and get nothing out. It's a disaster for balance sheet. Instead, you can build renewables plus batteries and have it connected within a year, generating revenue.
30 years of anti nuclear propaganda. They should all be like France, what a dream to have almost all of your electricity coming from a stable, essentially perpetual source.
Because there is no place for nuclear waste in Europe? Especially not on smaller islands like Ireland. Why do Americans hate the idea of cheap renewable energy?
The Hugo and Nebula winners (and shortlists, do not forget those) aren't perfect, but they're almost always worth a look. Pretending that they're total garbage is doing yourself a disservice.
Wow, I hadn't heard about the fraud in 2024, which I looked up in response to your comment. That's troubling to say the least.
Bias, though, is going to be inevitable and the Hugos are going to represent the taste of the Worldcon voters. It seems like overall there's been a happy confluence for awhile now between their taste and general sf taste.
I've discovered three of my favorite contemporary sf authors through recent Hugos: Ann Leckie, Arkady Martine, and Tamsyn Muir. I've read other recent nominees where I was unmoved or even questioned their inclusion.
I've also read a decent selection of historical winners, by no means exhaustive or even the majority, and the worst was without a doubt Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer.
In this emerging reality, the whole spectrum of open-source licenses effectively collapses toward just two practical choices: release under something permissive like MIT (no real restrictions), or keep your software fully proprietary and closed.
I see you submitted that as a link, it deserves a lot more than the current 4 upvotes I see. What a fascinating article. It gives me much hope that dead old games are not in fact dead. If there is still a binary somewhere and current trends continue then they can probably be resurrected cheaply and with relatively unskilled people.
No, lawyers will want software patents as that's the only group that would benefit from them, apart from large litigation-happy companies that want to squash any competition.
Not sure I can follow your reasoning. Wouldn't the developer of the software who got a patent for an invention embodied in the software she developed benefit as well?
Not if the developer is employed at the time as contracts will usually mean that the company owns the patents, even if the developer was working on their own time.
The bigger issue is patent abuse - file or buy a few poorly specified patents and then use them along with litigation to shut down competitors. This generally leads to bolstering the bigger companies at the expense of smaller companies due to the costs of litigation.
Basically, software patents can turn developing software into a minefield. It can end up that only people with access to legal departments will be able to sell software.
If you listen to the people who believe real AI is right around the corner then any software can be recreated from a detailed enough specification b/c whatever special sauce is hidden in the black box can be inferred from its outward behavior. Real AI is more brilliant than whatever algorithm you could ever think of so if the real AI can interact w/ your software then it can recreate a much better version of it w/o looking at the source code b/c it has access to whatever knowledge you had while writing the code & then some.
I don't think real AI is around the corner but plenty of people believe it is & they also think they only need a few more data centers to make the fiction into a reality.
I wrote what I meant & meant what I wrote. You can take up your argument w/ the people who think they're working on AI by adding more data centers & more matrix multiplications to function graphs if you want to argue about marketing terms.
Corporate marketing is very effective. I don't have as many dollars to spend on convincing people that AI is when they give me as much data as possible & the more data they give me the more "super" it gets.
What you describe is essentially what happened, the AI result working from specs and tests was more performant than the original. The real AI you describe just rewrote chardet without looking at the source, only better.
Is there any visibility or accountability to record exactly what it did and not look at? I doubt it. So we're left with a kind of Rorschach test: some people think LLMs follow rules like law-abiding citizens, and some people distrust commercial LLMs because they understand that commercial LLMs were never designed for visibility and accountability.
There should exist a .jsonl file somewhere with exactly that information in it - might be worth Dan preserving that, it should be in a ~/.claude/projects folder.
Real AI will never be invented, because as AI systems become more capable we'll figure out humans weren't intelligent in the first place, therefore intelligence never existed.
Don't worry, just 10 more data centers & a few more gigawatts will get you there even if the people building the data centers & powerplants are unintelligent & mindless drones. But in any event, I have no interest in religious arguments & beliefs so your time will be better spent convincing people who are looking for another religion to fill whatever void was left by secular education since such people are much more amenable to religious indoctrination & will very likely find many of your arguments much more persuasive & convincing.
I mean, it sounds kinda like you're the one making religious arguments. My response is one mocking how poorly egotistical people deal with the AI effect.
Evolution built man that has intelligence based on components that do not have intelligence themselves, it is an emergent property of the system. It is therefore scientific to think we could build machines on similar principles that exhibit intelligence as an emergent property of the system. No woo woo needed.
>It is therefore scientific to think we could build machines on similar principles that exhibit intelligence as an emergent property of the system.
Sure, but this ain't it.
Actually, I think LLMs are a step in the wrong direction if we really want to reach true AI. So it actually delays it, instead of bringing us close to true AI.
But LLMs are a very good scam that is not entirely snake oil. That is the best kind of scam.
>Actually, I think LLMs are a step in the wrong direction if we really want to reach true AI.
Any particular reason beyond feelings why this is the case.
We already know expert systems failed us when reaching towards generalized systems. LLMs have allowed us to further explore the AI space and give us insights on intelligence. Even more so we've had an explosion in hardware capabilities because of LLMs that will allow us to test other mechanisms faster than ever before.
Because if it was in the right direction, then it would have been possible to amend its knowledge without going through the whole re-training procedure.
Me & a few friends are constructing a long ladder to get to the moon. Our mission is based on sound scientific & engineering principles we have observed on the surface of the planet which allows regular people to scale heights they could not by jumping or climbing. We only need a few trillions of dollars & a sufficiently large wall to support it while we climb up to the moon.
There are lots of other analogies but the moon ladder is simple enough to be understood even by children when explaining how nothing can emerge from inert building blocks like transistors that is not reducible to their constituent parts.
As I said previously, your time will be much better spent convincing people who are looking for another religion b/c they will be much more susceptible to your beliefs in emergent properties of transistors & data centers of sufficient scale & magnitude.
>friends are constructing a long ladder to get to the moon
Congratulations, you're working on a space elevator. A few trillion dollars would certainly get us out of the atmosphere, and the amount of advances in carbon nanotube and foam metal would rocket us ahead decades in material sciences. Couple this with massive banks of capacitors and you could probably generate enough electricity for a country by the charge differential from the top to the bottom.
Oh, I get it, you were trying to be clever by saying something ignorant because it makes you feel special as a human rather than make realistic statements for the progress currently being made in the sciences.
I don't think you get it but good luck. I've already spent enough time in this thread & further engagement is not going to be productive for anyone involved.
> or keep your software fully proprietary and closed.
I guess it depends on your intention, but eventually I'm not sure it'll even be possible to keep it "fully proprietary and closed" in the hopes of no one being able to replicate it, which seems to be the main motivation for many to go that road.
If you're shipping something, making something available, others will be able to use it (duh) and therefore replicate it. The barrier for being able to replicate things like this either together with LLMs or letting the LLM straight it up do it themselves with the right harness, seems to get lowered real quick, massive difference in just a few years already.
Right now you can point claude at any program and ask it to analyse it, write an architecture document describing all the functionality. Then clear memory and get it to code against that architecture document.
You can't do that as easily with closed source software. Except, if you can read assembly, every program is open source. I suspect we're not far away from LLMs being able to just disassemble any program and do the same thing.
Is there a driver in windows that isn't in linux? No problem. Just ask claude to reverse engineer it, write out a document describing exactly how the driver issues commands to the device and what constraints and invariants it needs to hold. Then make a linux driver that works the same way.
Have an old video game you wanna play on your modern computer? No problem. Just get claude to disassemble the whole thing. Then function by function, rewrite it in C. Then port that C code to modern APIs.
It'll be chaos. But I'm quite excited about the possibilities.
> You can't do that as easily with closed source software. Except, if you can read assembly, every program is open source. I suspect we're not far away from LLMs being able to just disassemble any program and do the same thing.
I have successfully created a partial implementation of p4 by pointing it at the captured network stream and some strace output. It's amazing how good those things are.
You don't even need to go down to assembly - most commercial software is trivial to disassemble calling a few EXEs. In theory this is largely forbidden by licenses, but good luck enforcing them now.
I suspect there’s a middle ground that involves either keeping tests more proprietary or a copyright license that bars using the work for AI reimplementation, or both.
I think it’s entirely reasonable to release a test suite under a license that bars using it for AI reimplementation purposes. If someone wants to reimplement your work with a more permissive license, they can certainly do so, but maybe they should put the legwork in to write their own test suite.
Or GPL. Which I’m increasingly thinking is the only license. It requires sharing.
And if anything can be reimplemented and there’s no value in the source any more, just the spec or tests, there’s no public-interest reason for any restriction other than completely free, in the GPL sense.
I think the “I maintained this thing for 12 years” weighs a lot heavier than the “and then I even went through the trouble of reimplementing it” before changing it to a license that is more open. Seriously…
I'm sorry, I don't understand this. I read it in full. If you're referring to the author dismissing GPL, my comment is, I think in converse they have missed something and the GPL is the best license, for the reasons I noted.
I don't think it changes much about licensing in particular. People are going on about how since the AI was trained on this code, that makes it a derivative work. But it must be borne in mind that AI training doesn't usually lead to memorizing the training data, but rather learning the general patterns of it. In the case of source code, it learns how to write systems and algorithms in general, not a particular function. If you then describe an interface to it, it is applying general principles to implement that interface. Its ability to succeed in this depends primarily on the complexity of the task. If you give it the interfaces of a closed source and open sourced project of similar complexity, it will have a relatively equal time of implementing them.
Even prior to this, relatively simple projects licensed under share alike licenses were in danger of being cloned under either proprietary or more permissive licenses. This project in particular was spared, basically because the LGPL is permissive enough that it was always easier to just comply with the license terms. A full on GPLed project like GCC isn't in danger of an AI being able to clone it anytime soon. Nevermind that it was already cloned under a more permissive license by human coders.
Good idea, TERRIBLE implementation. After activating only filters for "Low Effort", and "Contain Logical Fallacies" I get:
> "Who cares if it is? It's a great movie nonetheless"
3/5 Published!
> "Who cares if it is? It's a terrible movie nonetheless"
2/5 Revision requested: Calling a movie 'terrible' dismisses the enjoyment others may find in it and directs negativity at both the film and those who appreciate it.
Suggestion: "I personally don’t enjoy the movie, but I understand some people have different opinions about it."
So it's okay to generalize my opinion about it, but only if I liked it, otherwise I might hurt someone's feelings? Very double-plus-good vibe. I would never comment again on the site that uses this product.
Thanks for the feedback! We'll look into this kind of thing -- others have said the same thing, that two sides of the same coin get treated differently.
China is certainly lax, but the US doesn't allow autonomous ATTACK systems. For Attack systems it is always required that a human makes the judgement call when to attack.
Or least it didn't until the current regime.
The US does have autonomous defensive systems.
I could be wrong though, can you post your evidence? The closest I could find is loitering munitions.
Even so, a company shouldn't be forced to go against its ethics if those ethics help humans.
Drone pilots don't get any info about their target, certainly not enough to make a judgement call. If they object (or burn out) someone else is put in the chair.
People are conscripted, they put on the uniform and become legitimate targets? It might as well be a robot doing the shooting. Same difference.
The pilot becomes responsible for those outcomes. For example indiscriminately killing civilians for example is a war crime. Its easier to get an AI to commit war crimes than humans.
Perhaps but if the difference is significant I don't know. Everything changes then we try stretch rhetoric from stabbing someone with a sword to hypersonic missiles? We might hold the pilot responsible if they erase a building but I'm far less comfortable blaming them. We know the targets are actually picked by computers using metadata. The difference gets increasingly vague.
A good time to remember that the Open Library came to be thanks to the initial work of Brewster Kahle (founder of the Internet Archive) and Aaron Swartz (RIP) http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/openlibrary
https://newatlas.com/environment/5-200-holes-peruvian-mounta...
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