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RupertSalt • yesterday at 10:51 AM • 3 replies • view on HN

Okay, my fault for skipping a lot of stuff in the middle, but a question began to burn in my mind. They have determined the full inscription, calculated the Olmec date, and correlated it to our Gregorian reckoning. The end of the article says:

  So, while 32 BC seemed awfully early for the Olmecs to carve this stone, there’s no way they could have done it later. (Or earlier, for that matter.)
But I am not sure if this resolves the burning question: what makes everyone believe that the inscription corresponded to the current date? Certainly, that is a common custom when erecting a monument, but what if Olmec logic said "let us commemorate this auspicious event that occurred 300 years ago!" or "Let us anticipate the far future in 5,000 years from now!" for example.

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MarkusQ • yesterday at 10:01 PM

As I understand it, the Olmecs were around maybe 1500BC to 300BC or so at the outside. Yet the article says "32 BC seemed awfully early for the Olmecs to carve this stone". WTF? Early? They'd been mostly gone for hundreds of years by that point.

If anything, assuming they carved it earlier and included the data of the eclipse as a forecast make as much or more sense. But the article is full of points like this, that seem superficially reasonable unless you look at them a little more closely.

nraynaud • yesterday at 11:06 AM

Seems to be an eclipse at that date, if they weren’t able to predict them, they had to have seen it.

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mwban • yesterday at 11:03 AM

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