Pointing AI at archives found a forgotten meteorite, lost rhinos, and more

>To make this kind of research accessible, I’m open-sourcing the workflow I created for this investigation as a small toolkit, Antiquity, enabling anyone with a question and a coding agent to conduct similar historical archival investigations.

https://github.com/jessewaites/antiquity

If I sat down to read just the Dutch East India Company pages myself, at two minutes a page, eight hours a day, five days a week, it would take me about 70 years. And that’s before the newspapers. My homebrew AI lab got through the entire archive in a single twelve-hour overnight run.

Makes me wonder how much the author himself learned about the Dutch East India Company. I suspect very little, if anything. Something about these exercises reminds me of junk food: empty calories and all that...

IMHO: The rotating rhino, meteor impact, and animated flowchart is totally unnecessary cruft that makes it look almost satirical. If this keeps up, in time, this "AAA effects" stuff is going to look like the 90s "under construction" banner gifs.

That was a fascinating read, I really enjoyed it. Literally like exploring lost knowledge. Great work and a great write-up.

I also liked the aesthetics of it and the little effects (meteorite and volcano, but please fix the rhino and the text flowing around it while it rotates).

I wonder what else could be found in such archives. Some ideas: - Locations or routes of sunken ships and their missing cargo?

- Some pirate stories, maybe about a now-forgotten but once-legendary pirate captain?

- Unusual weather events, like snow in the summer?

(edit: formatting)

Recent and related (by HN's own https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=benbreen!)

Using Opus 5.5 to discover a new eyewitness record of the dodo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49926917 - Oct 2026 (79 comments)

Very cool.

I'm working on a similar project for contemporary political opinion media. Every podcast, blog, oped, or show cut into little pieces with the structure, speaker, quotes and nouns pulled out and cross-referenced. I bring it up because I wonder if this kind of heavy-weight preprocessing is worth bringing to historical documents as well. It would be much more expensive, initially, but afterwards allows questions get answered even cheaper than they are in your current system. It may be worth collecting interested parties and co-investing in the structured parsing.

Also modern transcription and historical document scanning have a similar shaped problem - dealing with misspelled words and trying to infer their corrections from context.

Okay, for those of you that do not enjoy fun, I just added a button at the top of the page to turn off the special effects.

I love this, one major friction I’ve seen to human coordination and advancement has been the journals in different languages

Many people don’t notice, but even Wikipedia has no normalization between articles in different languages. The language button there acts like its showing you a translated version of the article but its actually a completely different Encyclopedia and community of editors with no cross reference to the other language’s article and references at all. Articles that are stubs on the English page may be massive fully fleshed out articles in another language, and nothing native to the site or anything I’ve seen will tell you that there is more information in one variant

LLM’s can find the word associations and compare them in all languages, even if it itself doesn't innately know language

and there would be so much low hanging fruit here like this engineer found

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