{"it":{"id":"RUS-GSH","kind":"site","sub":"Asia","name":"Gornaya Shoria \"megaliths\" (Mt Kuylyum)","place":"Russia","lat":52.838,"lon":87.937,"date":"see measurements","mat":"granite (Kulyum-Surak massif)","nfacts":4,"tags":["Asia","Megaliths"],"sum":"On Mount Kuylyum in southern Siberia, whose summit reaches 1,203 m, granite blocks line a ring of ridges roughly 5 km across. After his visit on 23 September 2013, the writer Georgy Sidorov called them ancient buildings, and proponents claim blocks of 3,000 tonnes or more, raised possibly more than 100,000 years ago. A 2016 Russian Geographical Society report captions some blocks at 18 by 8 by 4 m and over 1,300 tonnes.","why":"Straight-edged granite walls on a Siberian peak: lost megaliths, or rock that split along its joints?","src":[419],"nsrc":4,"yt":"Granite cracks along straight joints. What would prove a block was placed by people?","rel":["EUR-002","YON-MON"],"hook":"On a Siberian peak, granite walls look built. Proponents claim blocks of 3,000 tonnes or more."},"S":{"419":["Wikipedia: Gornaya Shoria megaliths","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gornaya_Shoria_megaliths"]},"rec":{"id":"RUS-GSH","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"Mount Kuylyum","a":"elevation","v":"1203","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia","yr":"","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gornaya_Shoriya","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M2902"},{"f":"massif","a":"rock type","v":"granite (Kulyum-Surak massif); orthogonal jointing, corestones/tors","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia (citing 1990s geologic mapping)","yr":"","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia (citing 1990s geologic mapping)","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gornaya_Shoriya","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"natural \"denudated prepared ridges\"","id":"M2903"},{"f":"claimed wall blocks","a":"length (claimed)","v":"up to 20","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Jensen 2014 / Sidorov 2013 (claimants)","yr":"2014","m":"derived","c":"Jensen 2014 / Sidorov 2013 (claimants)","pg":"","url":"https://www.academia.edu/6200990/Super_Megaliths_in_Gornaya_Shoria_Southern_Siberia","b":"S","bb":"claimant figure, not survey","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"page not opened (timeout)","id":"M2904"},{"f":"claimed wall blocks","a":"mass (claimed)","v":">1000 (some 3000)","u":"t","o":"","unc":"","by":"Jensen 2014 / Sidorov 2013 (claimants)","yr":"2014","m":"derived","c":"Jensen 2014 / Sidorov 2013 (claimants)","pg":"","url":"https://www.academia.edu/6200990/Super_Megaliths_in_Gornaya_Shoria_Southern_Siberia","b":"S","bb":"claimant figure","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"no density/dims given","id":"M2905"}],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[{"a":"largest_block","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"slope_face_angle","r":"no published face/slope angle in sources reached (often n/a for non-pyramidal sites)"},{"a":"wall_batter","r":"no published batter survey in free sources"},{"a":"orientation","r":"no published azimuth reached"},{"a":"levelness","r":"no published levelling survey in free sources"},{"a":"geochem_petro","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"quarry_source","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"mortar","r":"dry-stone construction or no binder analysis in free sources"},{"a":"tool_marks","r":"no tool-mark study in free sources reached"},{"a":"volume_labor","r":"no volume/labour estimate in sources opened"},{"a":"construction_phases","r":"no phase sequence in sources opened"},{"a":"lab_date_material","r":"no lab date with dated material in sources opened"},{"a":"hydrology_acoustics","r":"no published hydrology/acoustic measurement in sources opened"},{"a":"magnetic_radiation","r":"no published magnetic/radiation survey found (searched site name + magnetometry/radiation; Wikipedia, Google Scholar snippets)"},{"a":"metals_clamps","r":"no metal/clamp evidence reported in sources opened"},{"a":"excavation_history","r":"no excavation history row yet"},{"a":"artifacts_found","r":"no finds row yet"}],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA030","a":"cyclopean walls 1000-3000 t","who":"John Jensen 2014 (academia); Georgy Sidorov 2013 expedition","main":"natural granite jointing","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gornaya_Shoriya","st":"contradicted","n":"claim figures unsurveyed; geology natural","nl":3}],"ac":[{"v":"cyclopean walls of 1000-3000 t blocks","who":"John Jensen 2014 (academia); Georgy Sidorov 2013 expedition","url":"https://www.academia.edu/6200990 ; https://www.obretenie.info/txt/sidorovg/gornaya_shoriya.htm","b":"I","ce":"granite orthogonal jointing and tor weathering produce block-like walls"}],"me":[{"v":"natural granite outcrops","ev":"1990s geologic mapping (via Wikipedia)","s":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gornaya_Shoriya"}],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"see measurements","dm":"","lab":"NO","weak":"","unesco":"","dens":"STUB"},"co":{"lat":"52.83830","lon":"87.93720","src":"Wikipedia = Wikidata Q16891810 (same lineage)","agree":"single source","b":"S","note":"only one independent coordinate source found","osm":""},"src":[{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gornaya_Shoriya"},{"id":null,"t":"Jensen 2014 / Sidorov 2013 (claimants)","u":"https://www.academia.edu/6200990/Super_Megaliths_in_Gornaya_Shoria_Southern_Siberia"},{"id":null,"t":"https://www.academia.edu/6200990 ; https://www.obretenie.info/txt/sidorovg/gornaya_shoriya.htm","u":"https://www.academia.edu/6200990 ; https://www.obretenie.info/txt/sidorovg/gornaya_shoriya.htm"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Gornaya Shoria megaliths","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gornaya_Shoria_megaliths"},{"id":"VRUS-GSH-5","t":"Экспедиция в Горную Шорию","u":"https://gsidorov.ru/discovery/ekspeditsiya-v-gornuyu-shoriyu"},{"id":"VRUS-GSH-6","t":"Have enormous megaliths been discovered in Southern Siberia, or are they a rare product of nature? | Ancient Origins","u":"https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/have-enormous-megaliths-been-discovered-southern-siberia-099123"},{"id":"VRUS-GSH-7","t":"I megaliti di Gornaya Shoria | Butac - Bufale Un Tanto Al Chilo","u":"https://www.butac.it/megaliti-gornaya-shoria/"},{"id":null,"t":"Novgorodov, “Мегалиты Горной Шории. Рекогносцировка” (Megaliths of Mountain Shoria: a reconnaissance), report of the Tomsk regional branch of the Russian Geographical Society, Tomsk, 2016 (institutional field report by a geologist)","u":"http://7ways.su/horizon/122.htm"},{"id":null,"t":"“Проектирование туристско-экскурсионного маршрута «Шорские квазимегалиты»” (Designing the “Shoria quasi-megaliths” tour route), Yuny Uchyony, issue 55, student article citing local geologists","u":"https://moluch.ru/young/archive/55/2799"},{"id":null,"t":"Kiryushin and Kungurov, “Открытие и исследование палеолитических памятников сотрудниками Алтайского государственного университета”, Izvestiya Altaiskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta, 2008 (peer-reviewed university journal)","u":"https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/otkrytie-i-issledovanie-paleoliticheskih-pamyatnikov-sotrudnikami-altayskogo-gosudarstvennogo-universiteta"},{"id":null,"t":"Markin, “Разновидности палеолитических стоянок северо-западной части Алтае-Саянской горной области”, Vestnik Novosibirskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta, History and Philology series, 2010 (peer-reviewed university journal)","u":"https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/raznovidnosti-paleoliticheskih-stoyanok-severo-zapadnoy-chasti-altae-sayanskoy-gornoy-oblasti"},{"id":null,"t":"US National Park Service, Joshua Tree National Park, “Geologic Formations” (granite jointing and weathering, used as a comparison)","u":"https://www.nps.gov/jotr/learn/nature/geologicformations.htm"},{"id":null,"t":"Ancient World Atlas, “Gornaya Shoria Megaliths” (popular summary of the 2013 proponents’ claims and the sceptics’ reply)","u":"https://ancientworldatlas.com/sites/gornaya-shoria"}],"sum":"On the second night in camp, high on a ridge in southern Siberia, many in the expedition hardly slept. The writer Georgy Sidorov later described nineteen people, sixteen men and three women, lying awake trying to understand what they had seen that day: a wall of granite blocks, some of them, by their estimate, 20 metres long and 6 metres high, stacked along the crest of a mountain. How, they asked one another, had stones heavier than the great blocks of Baalbek in Lebanon ended up at 1,100 metres and more? The one thing they all understood, Sidorov wrote, \"without exception,\" was that the structures had been raised by their distant ancestors.\n\nThe mountain is Kuylyum, the highest summit of the Kulyum-Surak granite massif in Gornaya Shoria, or Mountain Shoria, the southern part of Russia's Kemerovo region, east of the Altai Mountains. Its summit stands at 1,203 metres. The outcrops lie on the border of the Mezhdurechensk and Tashtagol districts, at a little over 53 degrees north, and the mountain's base lies about 8 kilometres from the village of Orton. They crown a ring of ridges roughly 5 kilometres across, rising from a small basin near 500 metres to a rim of about 1,200. The western part of that rim is a rock called skarn; the eastern part, where the \"megaliths\" stand, is granite. From a distance, rows of rectangular blocks run along the skyline like the remains of a fortress wall.\n\nSidorov's group went up from 21 to 25 September 2013. According to his report, local geologists from the former geological settlement of Kamushki asked them to come. A geological party had stumbled on the formations in Soviet times, when the roads into the area were closed by the checkpoints of prison colonies; after those were disbanded, the way was open. The climb, partly at slopes of up to 60 degrees through old cedar forest, took about six hours to the first ledge. On 23 September two local guides, Aleksandr Bespalov and Vyacheslav Pochetkin, led them to the blocks. Sidorov saw megalithic masonry alternating with polygonal masonry, traces of melting on top of the wall, and on a neighbouring summit vertical slabs capped by horizontal blocks, which the group took for an ancient power station. He wrote that the ruins had been destroyed by \"thermonuclear or some other\" explosions. When every compass needle swung away from the stones, he speculated about traces of ancient anti-gravity technology. His site now speaks of single blocks weighing two thousand tonnes.\n\nThe story spread quickly. In March 2014 the website Ancient Origins published photographs released by Valery Uvarov, who was convinced the blocks were man-made, repeating the measurements of 20 metres by 6 and the reports of burn marks and contrary compasses. Popular summaries added estimates of 3,000 tonnes or more for some blocks, and dates of possibly more than 100,000 years. None of those figures comes from a survey; they are the claimants' estimates.\n\nThe geologists' answer was already on file. Mapping of the ridges in the late 1990s had identified them as denudation ridges, carved by the natural, differential erosion of the local bedrock. In late September 2016 the Tomsk branch of the Russian Geographical Society sent a small expedition, with the geologist Nikolai Novgorodov, to settle what the formations really are. Its guide was Bespalov, the same geologist who had led Sidorov's group, and who had first drawn attention to the site believing it artificial.\n\nNovgorodov's team agreed that many places look remarkably like built masonry. Its report captions some brick-shaped blocks at 18 by 8 by 4 metres and more than 1,300 tonnes. But appearance, they argued, is not evidence. Real masonry would often use stone of different makeup, so they took 12 samples, from the \"wall\" and from blocks hundreds of metres away. Every one, examined by eye and hand lens, was the same light grey, faintly pink, coarse-grained biotite granite of feldspar, quartz and about 1% biotite. Novgorodov read that sameness as evidence that wall and massif are one natural body. He also pointed to things masonry does not do: blocks that thin out to nothing, vertical blocks split by curved cracks, horizontal and steeply tilted blocks side by side in one outcrop. There was no money for thin sections or chemical analysis, so only this field description exists.\n\nThe mechanism is ordinary and well understood. Deeply buried granite, squeezed by tectonic forces and then released as erosion uncovers it, cracks along sets of joints that often meet at nearly right angles. Groundwater moving down the joints rots the rock at edges and corners first, and erosion carries the rotten material away, leaving rectangular cores stacked one on another. At Joshua Tree in California, dikes broken this way into uniform blocks are described by the park service as \"suggesting the work of a stonemason.\" Compass deflection, the sceptics add, is common in igneous rock that carries magnetite. The Italian fact-checking site Butac notes that the widely shared photographs give no scale, and that claims of 3,000 or 4,000 tonnes trace back to a site that cites no source.\n\nWhat would settle it is evidence of people. People did live in this part of Siberia in the Ice Age. Survey of the southwestern spurs of Mountain Shoria began in 1976, and work from 1979 found a cluster of Old Stone Age sites along the Ushlep and Antrop rivers, with layers at Ushlep 6 running from Middle into Upper Palaeolithic tool industries. In the central Kuznetsk basin, one site, MK I, is placed in the Lower Palaeolithic. These are camps of hunters who made stone tools; none of the reports describes building in stone.\n\nAnd yet the question has not been closed by measurement. Novgorodov himself called for joint orientations to be measured, the outcrops to be mapped at scales of 1:1,000 to 1:10,000, and the rock to be analysed chemically and sampled for palaeomagnetism. Whether that work has been done is not recorded in the sources. Until it is, the weights remain estimates, and the \"courses\" of the wall remain an appearance that both sides interpret in their own way.\n\nThe most telling witness is Bespalov. He spent years walking these ridges, first convinced they were built, guiding the 2013 expedition that announced a lost civilisation. In all that time he found no petroglyphs, no inscriptions, no quarry, no burials, no hearths. He came to call the blocks \"quasi-megaliths,\" stone that looks like architecture but is not. In the niches between the great granite slabs, where a fire would have left its mark, the rock is clean of soot, and the flat faces that look so cut are covered in lichen.","qs":["Granite cracks along straight joints. What would prove a block was placed by people?","No dig has been published. What should one look for first?","Why do photographs alone convince some people and not others?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/%D0%9C%D0%B5%D0%B3%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%82%D1%8B_%D0%93%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B9_%D0%A8%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B8_05.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%9C%D0%B5%D0%B3%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%82%D1%8B_%D0%93%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B9_%D0%A8%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B8_05.JPG","title":"Мегалиты Горной Шории 05.JPG","lic":"CC BY 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0","by":"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXkknOyCP2ibSrn2mI6KOjg Василий Яр","cap":"Место соединения камней","alt":"Gornaya Shoria \"megaliths\" (Mt Kuylyum)"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/%D0%9C%D0%B5%D0%B3%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%82%D1%8B_%D0%93%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B9_%D0%A8%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B8_03.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%9C%D0%B5%D0%B3%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%82%D1%8B_%D0%93%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B9_%D0%A8%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B8_03.JPG","title":"Мегалиты Горной Шории 03.JPG","lic":"CC BY 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0","by":"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXkknOyCP2ibSrn2mI6KOjg Василий Яр","cap":"В кладке видны массивные камни с ровными краями и прямыми углами","alt":"Gornaya Shoria \"megaliths\" (Mt Kuylyum)"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"Granite","h":"Made of: Granite (Kuylyum-Surak massif)","s":[154]}],"hs":{"154":["Wikipedia: Gornaya Shoria megaliths (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gornaya_Shoria_megaliths"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/RUS-GSH.webp","w":1182,"h":713,"o":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/%D0%9C%D0%B5%D0%B3%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%82%D1%8B_%D0%93%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B9_%D0%A8%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B8_05.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled"}}