There's a piece in the New York Times expressing some skepticism (finally) about that Bosnian pyramid. It's worth reading on its own, but in my semi-caffeinated state, my mind latched onto this sentence:
Now is that an ablative of means or accompaniment? Other than that, though, here's the important bit (for our purposes):
Asim Islamovic, 67, climbs the steep and slippery hill daily to dig with his toothless wife and middle-aged daughter.
Now is that an ablative of means or accompaniment? Other than that, though, here's the important bit (for our purposes):
But not everyone is elated. "This isn't a pyramid, it's a bad circus," said Zilka Kujundzic-Vejzagic, a specialist in prehistoric archaeology at the National Museum in Sarajevo. She is one of 21 experts who published an open letter in Bosnian newspapers in April denouncing Mr. Osmanagic's project as bad science and manipulative sociology.
She scoffs at his suggestion that the pyramid is "probably older than the last ice age," saying no humans were even building simple huts then. There is no evidence, she said, that there was ever a civilization in the region organized enough to build such a massive monument. "If there had been a people who could make something like that, we would have found artifacts around it," she said.
Archaeologists in Bosnia have found little more than flint tools from the end of the last ice age and only simple Neolithic settlements that appeared thousands of years after that. The country's most substantial ancient monument is a modest stone city in southern Bosnia built during the third century B.C. by the Illyrians. The Egyptians are believed to have built their pyramids around 3,000 B.C., but even the biggest of them is dwarfed by Mr. Osmanagic's hill, which is 700 feet high.
Ms. Kujundzic-Vejzagic and her peers say that the symmetrical hill that Mr. Osmanagic has seized on was formed when an ancient lake bed buckled from tectonic movement of the earth's crust millions of years ago. As Africa pushed into Europe, geologists say, the flat lake bed broke into shards that were lifted up like pieces of ice at the colliding edge of an ice floe, creating flat-sided hills.