AI archive search finds forgotten meteorite and eruptions
Awaiting review
Status
- Claim
Awaiting review
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Verification
- Unverified claim
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 10 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra161 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5100 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 3.8 Flash191 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7130 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 100 days before it.
Key facts
- Corpus: GLOBALISE’s digitised VOC archive (4.35M pages, 1600s–1790s), Delpher Dutch newspapers, two centuries of American newspapers and ship logbooks; 5.7M passages in total
- Tools (author’s account): Claude Code to build the pipeline, Jev as a fast filter, Claude Haiku for detailed reading, a custom GPU semantic search; code at github.com/jessewaites/antiquity. The whole VOC archive was processed in a 12-hour overnight run; filtering 59,000 elephant mentions with Jev cost about $3
- Meteorite candidate: an iron-rich stone that fell near ‘Cokurrgaum’, India on Aug 6, 1812, reported in the Bombay Gazette, which would be ‘the earliest recorded meteorite fall in Maharashtra, predating the current earliest record by 26 years’
- Rhinoceros candidate: three Javan rhinoceroses shipped in 1738–1740 for the King of Kandy, one reaching Colombo before dying, documented in sworn crew statements and official correspondence
- Eruption candidates: Gamkonora (Feb 3, 1722), Ciremai (early 1712) and Slamet (Feb 1780), absent from the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program; 769 eruption reports were found in the corpus overall
- Verification: ‘checked against the original pages and the catalogues I could access, but not yet reviewed by the specialists who maintain those catalogues’; the author had contacted meteorite curators, rhino historian Kees Rookmaaker and volcanologists
What happened
Jesse Waites, a software developer, published a long post on Oct 8, 2026 about “Antiquity”, an open-source toolkit he built with Claude Code to search digitised historical archives. A cheap decision model (Jev) filtered millions of passages for relevant mentions, and Claude Haiku read the survivors in detail. He reports three kinds of finds: a meteorite fall, rhinoceros shipments and volcanic eruptions that are missing from the standard catalogues.
All findings come from the author’s own post. He checked them against the original pages but says specialists have not reviewed them yet.
Why it matters
It shows how cheap models make it practical for one person to read whole archives (one filtering pass cost about $3), and it produces the kind of result catalogue maintainers can check against the cited pages.
What is disputed or not yet verified
| Verification | unverified claim (author-checked against source pages; specialist review pending) |
|---|
Sources
3 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
3 sources: 2 primary, 1 reaction
Primary
- Jesse Waites: I Pointed AI at 400 Years of Historical Archives. It Found a Forgotten Meteorite, Lost Rhinos, and Unrecorded Volcanic Eruptionsjessewaites.com, official
- GitHub: jessewaites/antiquitygithub.com, code
Reactions
- Hacker News discussion (151 points)news.ycombinator.com, discussion
Changes
- Filed