The Yucatán peninsula is remarkably flat. I've walked to the top of Ek Balam, and you can just see little of green all around the surrounding landscape; I suspect a number of them are uncleared (not undiscovered) Mayan structures. The forest is quite dense, but these are fairly obvious.

They are often left undisturbrd for a number of reasons, including that archeological techniques are fundamentally destructive. Leaving sites for future people to explore also leaves intact knowledge that future technologies may be better able to uncover.

If it was already published a year ago, what are the chances that was already in the training data?

The first thing I saw when I tried to follow this link is a captcha. So it's no wonder that the agent wasn't able to find this. We are siloing our knowledge unnecessarily.

This is a good example of the difference between an LLM providing a theorem and a person deducing theorem, and all the juicy knowledge we get from truly understanding things: the Google SWE found something he thought was undiscovered. He asked AI to make an image what it might've looked like and speculated that it was used by the local elite.

But Dr. Estrada-Belli found something that was undiscovered. Finding this structure wasn't his number one goal - it was the side effect of a larger anthropological assessment that allowed him to improve estimates about population density of the north versus south, how Mayan homes and farms are distributed, what this means about social relationships between the elite and common people, how different regions were interconnected, etc.

Interestingly, one of Dr. Estrada-Belli's primary conclusions is not that these structures were only used by "the local elite," but that the closeness of residences and farms to these community sites suggests that the elite and the common people actually had a much closer and nuanced relationship than we previously thought. That's the opposite conclusion you'd get from the Google SWE's assessment.

Knowing that a Mayan site exists is one thing. Understanding what it means is another.

Clicked the GP link and I got a “this post is private” page. Clicked your link and got a Cloudflare page that hangs and I can’t move past. That’s the Internet in 2026

Did his Gemini AI agents just use Google search, find the publication, check the coords, and claim it as a discovery? Ha