AI Uncovers a Forgotten 1812 Meteorite Hidden in 400 Years of Archives
I Pointed AI at 400 Years of Archives. It Found a Forgotten Meteorites and More
Software engineer Jesse Waites built an AI pipeline to search 4.35 million pages of Dutch East India Company records and other digitized archives. After validating the system against known events, it surfaced a forgotten 1812 meteorite fall in India, three Javan rhinoceroses that died en route to the King of Kandy, and unrecorded volcanic eruptions. The project shows how AI can scale historical discovery while keeping humans in the loop.
Once confirmed, this meteorite fall I uncovered will represent the earliest recorded meteorite fall in Maharashtra, predating the current earliest record by 26 years.
- sorokod
If I sat down to read just the Dutch East India Company pages myself, at two minutes a page, eight hours a day, five days a week, it would take me about 70 years. And that’s before the newspapers. My homebrew AI lab got through the entire archive in a single twelve-hour overnight run.
Makes me wonder how much the author himself learned about the Dutch East India Company. I suspect very little, if anything. Something about these exercises reminds me of junk food: empty calories and all that...
- whythismatters
>To make this kind of research accessible, I’m open-sourcing the workflow I created for this investigation as a small toolkit, Antiquity, enabling anyone with a question and a coding agent to conduct similar historical archival investigations.
- jvanderbot
IMHO: The rotating rhino, meteor impact, and animated flowchart is totally unnecessary cruft that makes it look almost satirical. If this keeps up, in time, this "AAA effects" stuff is going to look like the 90s "under construction" banner gifs.
- jttnr
That was a fascinating read, I really enjoyed it. Literally like exploring lost knowledge. Great work and a great write-up.
I also liked the aesthetics of it and the little effects (meteorite and volcano, but please fix the rhino and the text flowing around it while it rotates).
I wonder what else could be found in such archives. Some ideas:
- Locations or routes of sunken ships and their missing cargo?
- Some pirate stories, maybe about a now-forgotten but once-legendary pirate captain?
- Unusual weather events, like snow in the summer?
(edit: formatting)
- dang
Recent and related (by HN's own https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=benbreen!)
Using Opus 5.5 to discover a new eyewitness record of the dodo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49926917 - Oct 2026 (79 comments)