I am in no way a specialist, but their "dating method" doesn't hold much water. They presuppose that the 3 stones were built in alignment with Orion's belt at a time when it was "flat on the horizon", but there is nothing to indicate this. As it stands, the 3 stones are more or less aligned with Orion's belt today, and have always been.

The underlying problem is that if you throw a stone on the ground, it will necessarily fall in astronomical alignment with some star or another. It would be a miracle if it didn't. What they're doing is look at where the arrow hit, and paint a nice bull's eye around it.

Michael Tellinger is one of those 'aliens did it, buy my book' pseudo-historians.

I have seen similar claims about these 'ancient' stone structures in that region debunked on the basis that the structures were in fact cattle enclosures built by the Mapungubwe society, which would date them to 11th-13th c. AD.

Still archaeologically interesting, but nothing that's going to require a redrafting of anthropology text books.

I can't be 100% certain that this is the same bunk, but it's safe to say that the claims on his site can't possibly be true as carbon dating has a limit of 50,000 YA due to the half life of carbon-14. For any earlier time before that there simply wouldn't be enough of it left to measure accurately.

Since this reddit is for actual history, you might have more luck at

/r/badhistory

I suspect

/r/antropology and /r/Archeology could also help with debunking in more detail as well.

I too, have looked at these structures. They are extremely extensive. I more than a dozen on Google Earth. Do we know anything about these structures at all?

There are numerous problems with this sort of scholarship. The r/Archaeology thread does a good job of going through many of their processual errors. u/EvanRWT explains that most of these assumptions that the stones have to be dated to 260,000 years ago because that's when the stones would have been an accurate representation of a constellation is a huge example of confirmation bias and circular reasoning. I will go into some of their factual errors in methodology.

For one thing, at the first link, they claim that "Adam's Calendar" is:

the oldest man-made site on earth

which dates to 260,000 years ago.

I have no problem with the dating of any rocks to 260,000 years ago, even rocks manipulated by humans, except that they cite no sources for that date. Plenty of human activity has been dated to that time and long before.

However, it is certainly not the oldest human site in the world. Humans were using fire in Wonderwerk Cave, South Africa, around 1 million years ago (four times their date), and here is the article that made that claim. I know these scientists and contributed to the paper which you can read here:

Berna, Francesco, et al. "Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109.20 (2012): E1215-E1220.

It is clear that humans were living in South Africa for a very long time. However, all these "annunaki" or "sumerian" things they are throwing in are complete and utter hogwash. The Sumerian civilization arose out of the Uruk and Ubaid periods in Mesopotamia, with no connection to South Africa.

The Great Zimbabwe culture that they cite? That's from 1100. AD. You heard me, 900 years ago. Not 300,000 years ago. Any attempt to try to push Sumerian civilization (or even pre-Sumerian civilization) that far out of time and place is just incredibly poor scholarship. Having seen some articles and books along these lines, I can also practically guarantee you that nobody cites any sources, and when they do cite sources, it's all either their own work, or the work of equally crackpot people, and nothing published in a respected, peer-reviewed journal. If nobody is willing to put their name down on something, that should tell you everything.

For further reading on the development of actual, historical Sumer, as opposed to made-up imaginary ancient supernatural Sumer, check out these books:

Roux, Georges. Ancient Iraq. London: Penguin Books, 1992.

Van, de M. M. A History of the Ancient Near East: Ca. 3000-323 Bc. Malden, Mass. u.a.: Blackwell, 2007

Crawford, Harriet E. W. Sumer and the Sumerians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991

Next, let's look at that article's assertion that the Epic of Atrahasis (a Mesopotamian creation myth) proves that humans were created by aliens to mine gold. Now, before I tell you why that's stupid, I just have to say that's stupid.

First, the Epic of Atrahasis can only be traced back about as far as 17-1800 BC. Pretty far from this crazy 50,000 to 300,000 year old stuff the alien theorists are spouting. Writing has been around since 3100 BC in this region, and we have the Epic of Gilgamesh fragments from as old as 2100 BC.

Second, as you can read in this paraphrase of the epic, and in this translation of the epic, there is no mention of gold at all. The gods are creating the land, molding it. That's all. They get tired of the work, and decide to create helpers.

Third, this supposed "planet" that the Sumerian gods "the Annunaki" are from, Nibiru? Not mentioned once in the entire poem.

Third, the name of this supposed gold-mining city in South Africa? Abzu? That's not actually a city at all. Not even really a place. It was the term the Sumerians used for the formless waters of the deep, the clay from which is used to create beings (see Jacobsen, Thorkild. The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion. New Haven: Yale university press, 1976, which is an excellent overview of Mesopotamian religion). Not a gold mining city, any city, or even really a place at all.

In short, the buildings they show are completely taken out of context and are dated much later than they say they are, there was no gold mining city run by Mesopotamian aliens in South Africa, no planet of Nibiru, and no city called Abzu. They cherry-pick the things they like from the ancient myth and that fit their notions, and completely ignore anything that might prove them wrong.

EDIT: Formatting