The Radioactive Sands of Fayum
Researchers from Egypt’s Nuclear Materials Authority described unusually radioactive Quaternary sediments around Qusor El Arab, with some samples reportedly reaching around 2,600 parts per million uranium.
Ancient Egypt religion described a remote primordial era called Zep Tepi, the First Time, when gods were said to have established order in the world. Kingship, sacred architecture, astronomy and ritual were repeatedly presented as continuations of patterns established in that distant beginning.
That does not mean the Egyptians were remembering a technological civilization from 100,000 years ago.
But myths are not technical archives either. If human societies had existed across vastly deeper periods of prehistory, later cultures might have misunderstood whatever fragments survived. A ruined structure could become the house of a god. An ancient catastrophe could become a cosmic battle.
After 100,000 years, almost nothing recognizable might remain. Metals would corrode. Buildings would collapse and deserts would erase the surfaces.
Nuclear chemistry is harder to erase. A reactor can leave long-lived uranium-236, iodine-129, and neutron-capture signatures in samarium and gadolinium, precisely the kinds of traces that have yet to be searched for in Fayum.
Perhaps the story is exactly what geology says it is.
But if an unknown civilization had existed in the deep human past, almost everything we now call myth would be a distorted memory, and almost everything physical would have become indistinguishable from the landscape itself.
Only a few unusual fingerprints might remain.
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