Gunung Padang

A hill in West Java terraced with columnar basalt blocks, the largest megalithic site in Southeast Asia, and genuinely impressive. It became internationally contentious when a team claimed subsurface layers made it a buried pyramid tens of thousands of years old, which would upend world prehistory. A 2023 paper making that claim was retracted in 2024 after review found the dated material was soil, not worked construction. The surface site is real, protected and worth seeing; the deep-antiquity claim did not survive scrutiny, and saying so is part of telling it straight.