terça-feira, maio 09, 2006
A história de sempre:
World’s media duped over “pyramid” find, experts claim
Updated May 8, 2006
Special to World Science
The world’s newspapers and other media outlets have been duped into reporting claims that evidence of a pyramid has turned up in Bosnia, a group of archaeologists says.
Last month, major news organizations worldwide reported that archaeologists had unearthed stone slabs that they described as part of an ancient pyramid buried under a huge hill in Bosnia-Herzegovina. World Science also carried a brief article on the claims.
The find, if real, would represent the first known stepped pyramid in Europe.
But a group of experts say they’re shocked that so many prominent news organizations have fallen for the story.
They say the reports would have people believe, absurdly, that Stone-age humans built a pyramid bigger than any in Egypt.
The critics add that the project’s director is an amateur who compares himself to Indiana Jones and believes human ancestors inhabited a distant star cluster. They also warn that the excavation could damage real archaeological relics at or near the site.
Some of the doubts are to be detailed in an article in the upcoming July/August issue of Archaeology, a magazine of the Boston-based Archaeological Institute of America.
The claim, “which is simply not possible, has been accepted as a major discovery,” the magazine’s executive editor Mark Rose, himself a trained archaeologist, wrote in magazine’s current online edition at www.archaeology.org. “How could this happen?”
The answer, Rose wrote, may be that the tale seemed to fit a storyline that journalists and editors love: “amateur/maverick confounds establishment with great discovery.”
