The torch fragments have been radiocarbon dated, and those dates have helped archaeologists establish both the timing and the duration of the mining period.

The dates cluster between roughly 3000 BCE and 200 BCE — a span of nearly three millennia during which Indigenous miners repeatedly entered the cave, worked the mineral-bearing passages, and returned to the surface.

Three thousand years.

That is roughly the time between the fall of Troy and today.

The ancient miners were not making a single historical trip or a brief experiment.

They were conducting, across many generations of knowledge transmission, a sustained and organized economic or cultural activity that was significant enough to justify the effort and the risk of repeated deep cave travel.