Oldest pyramid

For many years, the Djoser Step Pyramid at Saqqara, Egypt, was considered to be the world's earliest pyramid, constructed by Pharaoh Djoser's royal architect, Imhotep, in approximately c. 2630 BCE. More recently, however, archaeologists have discovered that similar structures were being built at around the same time on the other side of the world. As early as 2700–2600 BCE, an ancient city featuring up to 20 pyramids was constructed at Caral in the Supe Valley on the west coast of Peru. The early settlement is widely believed to be the first city in the Americas, although the difficulties in dating ancient monuments has made it impossible to say for certain whether its pyramids pre-date the one at Saqqara.

Another contender for this title is Gunung Padang in Cianjur, West Java, Indonesia, although the true age of this ancient site is particularly contested. In the 1980s, field research led by B M Kim proposed the terraced structure atop a volcano could date back to between 300 and 2000 BCE. More recently in the 2010s, geologist Danny Hilman Natawidjaja has conducted further studies of the site, using ground-penetrating radar and drill cores among other techniques, and proposed that the entire hill it sits on may, in fact, have been constructed by humans as a stepped pyramid; the earliest layers of this, he posits, may precede the last Ice Age, built 16,000 to 27,000 years ago. This would make this not just the oldest pyramid, but the oldest human-made structure, significantly pre-dating the currently widely accepted oldest stone monuments at the Neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe in Türkiye, dated to between 9600–8000 BCE. However Natawidjaja's theory has attracted a lot of criticism from other archaeologists, so more evidence and consensus is needed before such an early origin can be reasonably ratified.