Expert Archaeologist Shut Down Claims Of New Pyramids Found By Google Earth: VIDEO
By Donovan Jackson | Aug 14, 2012 12:06 PM EDT
Angela Micol, a North Carolina-based woman who blogs at Google Earth Anomalies, says she discovered the two clusters of mysterious, angular mounds in the Egyptian desert while surveying satellite images of the terrain using Google Earth, the virtual map program. In its coverage, Gizmodo asserts that thedesert structures look as if they have been "very deliberately arranged," and that they "bear all the hallmarks of ancient pyramid sites.
Although Micol is a self-described "satellite archaeology researcher" what she claims to have found has gained widespread media attention.
However, experts say that her pyramids simply eroded hills and combined with her complex imagination.
"The images speak for themselves. It's very obvious what the sites may contain but field research is needed to verify they are, in fact, pyramids," Micol wrote on her blog.
"It seems that Angela Micol is one of the so-called 'pyridiots' who see pyramids everywhere," said James Harrell, professor emeritus of archaeological geology at the University of Toledo and a leading expert on the archaeological geology of ancient Egypt. "Her Dimai and Abu Sidhum 'pyramids' are examples of natural rock formations that might be mistaken for archaeological features provided one is unburdened by any knowledge of archaeology or geology. In other words, her pyramids are just wishful thinking by an ignorant observer with an overactive imagination."
What Micol considers to be pyramids are nothing more than three and four sided hill known as buttes, Harrell told Life's Little Mysteries.
Other geologists attribute the features to the forces of nature as well, and do not agree with Micol's claims.
"What it looks like to me is an area where a resistant layer of stone is underlain by soft rock, perhaps shales. If that is so, the triangular one looks very much the sort of feature common in the U.S. southwest, and might be called a butte," said Clair Ossian, a geoarcheologist at Tarrant County College who has studied Egypt's sites.
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