> I would say your guess is as good as mine

Spoiler: I did a few decades of exploration geophysics, some time working on the production circuit of the SuperPit, and part of a team that sold a global minerals intelligence database to Standard & Poor 16 or so years ago.

(No big deal, I'm just old and happen to have literally mapped uranium / copper / gold / et al. resources and reserves about the globe for clients in the past)

> there might just have been untold megatons within reach as low-hanging fruit

And yet the total amount of known gold in all of history is less than a quarter of a single megaton .. you're suggesting mega tonnes of gold from from before the Roman Rio Tinto mining days have lasted more than two thousand years stacked up as nuggets in many many many caves and structures without being found.

That's an interesting hypothesis.

> Of course cave men had no formal education

Interestingly nor did my father (born 1935) and he's still walking about

> recognize the advantage of not telling anybody about "untold" amounts of anything when it's regarded as valuable.

Can you expand upon the value of megatons of gold to cavemen ?

> no telling what they were keeping off the books when there weren't any books yet !

Oh, you know, gravitometers, ground penetrating radar, seismic surveys, etc. are all means of exploring for things not yet on any ledger.

> Edit: Not my downvote!

I don't fuss much about those, not on my comments, and I see no reason to downvote yours - just ride it out, they mostly even out over time.

All of this is in light humour, your comment caught my eye as I wasn't sure if you were serious, jesting, hadn't thought through the physical implications of a perhaps throw away comment, etc.

Thanks even more for coming back and emphasizing your unique experience !

I think cave men are interesting because almost nothing is known about them.

Except that they were just like us.

If you go back far enough they could be in a cave lined with gold and not care about it at all.

Sooner or later though people coveted it so much they would kill for it. Maybe even Neanderthals too ;)

Meanwhile right there in Colorado there were many kilos of gold sitting at the bottom of a lonely river, still just waiting millennia for people to come along and gather it up. By the time settlers got there and were finished sifting out the gold, a whole city had been built on the spot, and Denver has been there ever since.

I would expect there were a lot more places like that which were never recorded, and by the point that biblical times got here had been tapped out and forgotten for millennia.

Sorry about seismics but my only exposure is from petroleum and I was not one of the geologists so not very involved.

But Trinidad is a major example where you didn't need subsurface imaging to find petroleum since there was so much of it floating on top of the water when foreign explorers arrived at the islands. Some people made plenty of money after its value was recognized from just the amount that was coming out of the ground by itself, before any drilling for the mother lode.

First come, first serve though. If an exorbitant amount can be controlled early it can provide an outsize hoard before anyone else has a comparable chance, and the relative advantage in financial strength so there is no threat to the accumulated wealth.

I would think that once gold was deemed desirable in prehistoric times, it didn't take that many more generations for some to appreciate the advantage of keeping the hoard together so they could retain more "critical mass" and power relative to adversaries.

When there is any adversarial situation, lots of times modern man didn't want anybody to really know the depth and type of their assets for strategic reasons. Other times they may have wanted the opposition to think they have way more resources than they actaully do. I guess plenty of people ever since have been no different, so anything is possible.