The missing digit of Stela C | Hacker News Reader

The missing digit of Stela C

johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com

108 pointschmaynard21 comments

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.

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

Now that piques my interest. Could you be more specific?

Using Stellarium, set the location to Tres Zapotes, but not knowing how far off the calendar's reckoning would be, the closest I have come is a partial solar eclipse, after 9pm on September 1, -23.

Stellarium literally indicates a "Year 0" so BC years could be off-by-one, or off-by-Julian-and-equinox-precession, I just have no idea.

Wikipedia doesn't list any [Lunar/Solar] that are anywhere near 32 BC.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45922610

Sorry that was in French

https://peuplesautochtones.wordpress.com/2022/05/21/sites-ar...

“Il a été proposé qu’elle puisse commémorer une éclipse lunaire qui a précédé une éclipse solaire de deux semaines.” >”It was proposed that it could commemorate a lunar eclipse preceding a solar eclipse by two weeks”

I was very lazy in my search, so I didn’t check anything about this page.

Or they had a detailed record of all eclipses going back several hundred years. I guess it would make sense that this was the record but it's also plausible they had some ritual reason to refer to a date of an eclipse when building this thing.

a continuous chain of memories is enough to consider it the same culture. They did not imply that the date was the carving date, but that the culture extended as far back as that date.

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.

For those confused like me: the line drawing shows both halves of the stela, including the ‘7’ (-..) just above the break. The bottom half was found 30 years before the top.

This seems weirdly...off. Take the reference to Julius Scalier. What in the heck is he doing here? Did somebody do a quick and sloppy search for Julius Caesar? Or mangle Joseph Justus Scaliger and Julius Caesar together and try to take the average? This seems like a very strange thing to do.

> mangle Joseph Justus Scaliger and Julius Caesar together and try to take the average

Such a person actually existed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar_Scaliger

This sheds no light on the mystery of "Julius Scalier", of course, but it amused me.

Right, I know he existed. But what is he doing in this article? I'm loath to cry "LLM!" but this seems like a really weird error for a human to make. Sort of like getting Babe Ruth, Ruth Bader Ginsberg and the Lindbergh Baby confused in your head.

Could just be sloppy writing. The first instance that grabbed me was "The Julian Date simply counts the number of days from an arbitrary remote reference point", it's not arbitrary, it was chosen specifically because three major time cycles, solar, lunar, and the other one, all coincide at that point.

The source seems to be here: https://bsky.app/profile/gro-tsen.bsky.social/post/3meiqswj7...

It is a weird error, true.

That's not only the source of "Scalier" but, from the looks of it, a significant chunk of the embedded e-mail thing. So it was maybe just copied from a bluesky thread?

Im still unclear how they determined the constant to convert from long mesoamerican to GMT. What common reference event could allow syncing these calendars to a +/- 3 day precision? I would guess some solar eclipse pattern visible from both sides of the Atlantic?

They knew about and could identify solstices, which gives you day of the year. So then it’s just a matter of matching years, which can be done on the basis of things like comets.

Supernovae could also play a factor. Or using tree rings to identify years mentioned as having droughts or floods.

Probably a bunch of other things we haven’t thought of.

I guess in modern time we can compute eclipses from the past?

The Wikipedia page linked in the article [0] has a plausible-sounding explanation.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_Long_Count_calend...

The entire quoted section in the middle adds nothing. It just keeps repeating the same things over and over, and it doesn't answer the question of how we know the offset at all. Makes me think his "friend" is an LLM.

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