Archaeologists using AI-powered technology have managed to uncover a 5,000-year-old lost civilization hidden and buried underneath the world's largest desert, complete with trade routes and ancient cities.
There is so much of ancient history that we've still yet to find due to the obscuring of time, but recent innovations in technology have allowed scientists and archaeologists to uncover what was previously inaccessible.
While sometimes natural occurrences like global warming can reveal things like forests hiding in plain sight, and some lucky individuals can stumble upon relics of ancient Mayan cities by accident, and even 'lost cities' at the bottom of the ocean that would remind anyone of Atlantis.
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Technology has also played a key part in revealing lost and hidden mega cities across the world, and joining these is a new revelation thanks to the combination between artificial intelligence and what's called Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), as it's allowed researchers to uncover a staggering lost civilization that stretches back over 5,000 years, as reported by IDR.
Led by Maria Gonzalez, this project studied the Dubai desert, finding traces of human activity in remnants of settlements and lengthy trade routes.
The SAR technology is able to 'scan' thousands of square kilometers in a matter of hours, analyzing the data in relation to existing archaeological sites in order to spot subtle differences in the land.
What this saves is not only time but also money, as sending specialists into the field is incredibly costly, whereas these new innovations can predict previously hidden locations that would be near impossible to spot by humans alone.
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On top of this, the AI and SAR combination is not only capable of uncovering where ancient civilizations and human movements might have existed, but it's also able to conjure what settlements and multiple-millennia-old living might have looked like.
The sourcing of this information also challenges previous assumptions that indicated little movement and connection between the surrounding regions, which represents a major breakthrough in associated research.
Archaeologists have been able to use the information to link caravan routes between Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the Levant, which were likely used to trade valuable goods like incense, textiles, and metals.
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Trade routes like this were likely in use for thousands of years before disappearing from sight, and it's only now through the utiliszation of machine learning artificial intelligence that archaeologists were able to spot it - especially at the rate at which it has been uncovered.