(Apologies to Ivan Reitman.)
The folks who say “modern tools” have never used any other tools except what’s in a hardware store. Power tools just save time. It’s the same shit that we could do thousands of years ago by hand and determination (or elbow grease for those who build character). Machu Pichu was made by people and anyone can go visit it - the city is made of stones the size of cars all fitted together in irregular patterns and joined without mortar. If those “modern tools” folks knew masonry they would understand how incredible it is to build without mortar and have it withstand 400 years in a jungle with no maintenance.
With enough time and not enough else to do, a village can carve a mountain using sand and water. Fuck modernity. Embrace persistence.
Are you saying they must have some sort of… chisel technology? Could this be possible?
I was thinking more some kind of rudimentary lathe
(this sound bite lives rent free in my head)
There is always a subtext of racism in these claims, because the ancient people that are referred to are always more brown, and surely brown people couldn’t have accomplished anything of significance on their own.
Stonehenge is surrounded by white people and they have doubts about it too.
Never attribute to malice what can be equally attributed to stupidity.
There’s always one weird exception, which is Stonehenge. But yeah, no one ever says the Parthenon or the Colosseum was built by aliens. It’s virtually always non-white people.
The Parthenon and the Colosseum were built by aliens. Who else could have calculated the proper ratio of pillar to roof area? Not humans, that’s for sure!
Yeah, I just think it’s funny that the Ancient Aliens people are like “no, Aliens never came to Europe… except this one time in the middle of nowhere in Britain.”
Stonehenge isn’t in the middle of nowhere! The aliens built it right beside the gift shop.
I thought it was a universal truth that non-white people aren’t human; thus they are aliens.
Nah. It’s “ancient” vs “modern”. “Modern” is anything well-documented or easily translated into English, “ancient” is anything that lacks documentation or has ambiguous translations. Some things I’ve seen ancient alien people freak out about: Stonehinge, pyramids, roman dodecahedrons, antikythera mechanism, ancient astronauts, UFOs in medieval/Renaissance art (yes, that is supposedly a thing), Nazca lines, and more.
My point is that anything even remotely weird or inexplicable with any historical ambiguity is up for grabs when it comes to ancient alien theories. At least, that’s been my observation.
*shrug*
… anything well-documented …
There would be a lot more well-documented ancient things if racists hadn’t actively destroyed ancient documents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu for example.
Okay, but that’s not on the ancient aliens people. According to your Wikipedia page, it wasn’t ancient alien theorists trying to prove bullshit that destroyed them, that was done by Christian nutjobs hundreds of years before anyone came up with the idea of ancient aliens.
He didn’t say ‘ancient alien theorists’, he said ‘racists’.
I don’t know that a Quipu is a good example because we don’t actually know how they worked or how well they documented things. The burning of Mayan and other Mesoamerican books would be better examples.
Those are also good examples - but Europeans most definitely sought to destroy any quipu they found.
Sure, I’m just saying that we don’t know if they would be something readable or if they were more like a mnemonic device.
There’s been some very minimal translation of the few that remain, having to do with numbers and counting. They most definitely contain information. They mean something.
This is also making me think - these words that I am typing now, are they not also mnemonic devices? The written words are not the spoken words, and neither of those are the concepts that we understand the words and phrases to represent. Words are only models of ideas, and models are by definition not as accurate as what they intend to model. Who are we to say that a series of marks on a clay tablet, or paper, or a computer screen are more accurate models of ideas than intricate series of knots in strings?
Yeah god those humans who learned cultivation from nothing and who made tools without prior knowledge of their existance really were too stupid to, i dunno, cut some fuckin shapes into a rock???
Do you think if humans ever achieve interstellar flight and discover a less technologically advanced species that we’ll just show them how to use big stick to move big rock and then fly away smug af and high fiving?
“Awesome prank, bro… but do you think we could anally probe a few next time?”
“What’s with you and probes, Gary?”“Gary, they don’t have anuses. Seriously man, are you ok?”
Sandstone is relatively soft. They could easily carve it with tools made from harder stones. A hammer and chisel is not necessary.
Grinding is another possibility. Rubbing rocks together isn’t a very complicated technology.
I was making sandstone pyramids as a child. Ground them on the sidewalk.
Are… are you an alien?
They even carved the history channel logo into the center!
Of course they can’t carve “this”.
They can’t carve anything since they’re all long dead.
I mean, of course they didn’t carve “this” - they didn’t speak English, so “this” would have just been a random assortment of squiggles!
Listen to the Fall of Civilizations Podcast to hear about even more impressive megalithic structures. The one on the Khmer empire talked about stones cut so perfectly that the seams are not decipherable. Aliens, I guess. (shut the fuck up, it’s sarcasm)
That’s one of my favorites. I hope another episode comes out soon. It’s been months. I’m sure they take a very long time to do though.
Seems like the host does extreme reading to prepare episodes. I only just found it over the summer, so nothing new since I got onboard. Very much looking forward to future eps.
shut the fuck up, it’s sarcasm
made me giggle
Interested in seeing someone tear apart claims like this? Search Miniminuteman on YouTube. He has short and long form content. I have never cared about archeology in the past, but his snarky wit makes it interesting.
