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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: marek_wojna who wrote (85836)	5/26/2002 4:03:31 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116820

There has been an estimated in some circles, 1.8 trillion dollars of gold mined in all history. Don't forget that most gold has been mined privately, was sold to private interests and is not in the hands of bankers. Also, in the past gold was not declared to any kind of world wide statistic, so can only be estimated. In China, Borneo and other places in SE Asia they mined placer gold for 4,000 years in every river and stream they could. Europe and the ME also had a long history of placer mining. All this River Gold cannot be accurately estimated, as people horded it zealously. It is estimated that in France roughly 30% of the citoyens have some gold horded in their garden. Since every culture known has gold in antiquity, from the Inca who mined perhaps 7 million ounce per year in pre-colonial times, to the Ghanians who adorned themselves with jewelry on the gold coast of Africa, the real amount of gold has to be figured in averaged output per mining person per year. Around the world since perhaps 3000 BC there has been perhaps 100,000 persons continuously mining gold on a seasonal, 4 month basis. Output can be figured given the nature of the streams, which are more or less constant, and the methods, which are documented. It is possible to estimate that a person could produce 4 yards of alluvial material averaging 1/20 of an ounce per yard for 120 days per year. Times 100,000 persons, times 5,000 years, that is 3.6 trillion dollars of gold. That may sound high, but the goldfields of Asia are numerous and large and there has been a teeming pile of humanity working in those rivers for some time. We know that the art of gold panning is so deeply rooted in Chinese culture that their traditional wooden hat, is in fact made of wood so that it can triple as a ladle and gold pan! In addition, the accurately known amount of gold the Inca mined, only a fraction of which was found by the Spaniards, is recorded in Quipu rope records as near 1 billion ounces in 150 years! That is a fact. They had near everyone in their 7 million population working the gold placers for 1/4 of the year. We know the Greeks, Romans and Eqyptians mined underground with up to 20,000 slaves as far as 1500 feet underground. The Romans mined numerous underground gold mines from Czechoslovakia to Britain. Their techniques for prospecting blind deposits, surveying tunnels and bulk mining are feats of engineering that would compare well with today. In some cases the Romans used hydraulic pressure to block cave 1000's of tons of rock underground. Tunnels led to deposits deep underground for 1000's of feet. With all this organized and unorganized mining, and the necessity of keeping gold possession a secret from thieves, governments and marauders it is not difficult to see that the amount of gold mined may be much more, not less, than has been guessed at. Our ancestors may not have been so naive or easily fooled to let the governments of the day take gold from them for paper chit like we take candy from a baby. EC<:-}