"I personally can't conceive of how one might built this, and I must be a million times smarter than people 4500 years ago, ergo people didn't build this." is how the Ancient Aliens theory always sounds to me.
There's a ton of people that, for some reason, just can't grok that humans have been largely behaviorally and biologically identical for the past 200k years.
The average ancient roman plebeian's life would not look dramatically different from ours today, minus technology of course. They worked a day job, ate at thermopoliums (basically fast food), lived in crowded apartment complexes with various forms of slum lords, deal with high rent prices, and roman graffiti is littered with complaints about politicians, sports teams, and the rising cost of living.
With the pyramids, we have the Wadi al-Jarf papyri, a detailed logistics logbook documenting the teams moving the stones for the great pyramids, along side payroll records much like any other spreadsheet you'll find on someone's corporate computer today.
We are not so different from our ancient ancestors at all.
It has always been my understanding that if talking about homo sapiens sapiens: then if you could „snatch“ a newborn from 200k years ago and raise it just like any other human baby today, there is nothing in terms of biology etc. that would stop said baby from becoming an engineer, astronaut, formula one race driver, lawyer, programmer, or CEO (or any other modern profession for that matter).
Never read up if that pet theory of mine has any merit, though.
A couple years ago I realized that I had somewhat subconsciously made the same assumption. The thing that snapped me out of it was my awe in watching Clickspring (YT) try to recreate the Antikythera Mechanism. That device's complexity and craftsmanship is proof to me that despite the lack of technology, there were some astonishingly smart and resourceful people living thousands of years ago.
There are ideas that ancient human thinking was very different and primitive compared to modern. For example (and others):
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes (1976)
In the half century that has passed since the publishing of that book, plenty of work has been done to say that ancient human thinking wasn't primitive, especially the ones that made the pyramids 4,600 years ago, such as the Red Sea Scrolls: How Ancient Papyri Reveal the Secrets of the Pyramids by Mark Lehner and Pierre Tallet (2022) which alludes to the minds of competent and intelligent humans
Romans, huh? Many of them were slaves, they believed they could learn the future by looking at the patterns of birds in flight, a Roman's bloodline was very important to the Roman's importance. You can take "behaviorally identical" too far, ideas got better over time, people in the past had bad ideas.
If genuine, I'm puzzled. In the current world we have a tremendous amount of people who hold various superstitious beliefs as well as spend tremendous amount of time on their genealogy. And nepotism never went away. I agree those are "bad ideas", but don't see how they differentiate us from people 5k years ago?
Still sounds a lot like humans today. Many are still slaves, many believe they can learn the future by reading cards with funny pictures on them, for some bloodline is very important, as is race.
I don't think we are meaningfully different at all. The same types and groups of people and social structures all still exist today. I suppose the big difference is those of us who are well adjusted know that racism is not good, and tarot cards are meaningless woo woo. But there were also such skeptics back then too.
I don't understand the downvote, it's like "nooo, their ideas were exactly as good as the ones we have today, humans don't learn over time, how dare you imply we used to be stupider, it's sacrilege".
So I object to this weird article of faith every time it comes up, we can't have been exactly as sensible and exactly as clever in the past as we are today, it doesn't make any sense to say that. But it's somehow become right-on to say that it's so, as if denying it is a prejudice like timeism or something. It obviously matters to some world view, equality maybe?
We have access to different data points today. But the way I read the original post is that human mind as such did not meaningful change. If you took a Roman or Egyptian embryo from 5k years ago and incubated it today, you'd have a modern human. The fact that many people back then had crazy ideas, is orthogonal to the biological argument at hand - and that's before we look at amount of people with crazy ideas today, many of which are largely the same.
Basically I think we have to pick a lane on whether we are talking biology, vs culture, vs knowledge and accumulated data.
But, I'm not saying that humans haven't learned anything, but that cognitively we haven't changed. A roman citizen has the exact same brain capacity to reason and adapt as we do today. There is zero separation from ancient human vs. modern human in that aspect.
You are conflating collective knowledge with individual human intelligence. That roman looking at bird entrails to predict the future was using the exact same pattern-recognition ability we use today to look at data visualizations, or trend graphs.
You could go back in time, steal an ancient roman baby, and raise them in today's year and they would be no different from you or I.
I agree with the "steal an ancient roman baby" premise. The "roman citizen" example is not as strong. Cognitive ability is not just genetics. The grown-up roman would be missing a lot of advantages during their upbringing that weren't available back then. Also, limiting it to just "citizens" means limiting it to their upper class.
Compared to Roman times, we've had pretty big advances in nutrition, healthcare, education, and widespread middle class wealth. It's not unreasonable to infer that these would have an impact on cognitive ability similar to the effect they've had on life expectancy.
That being said, there's definitely a present-ist bias, as the McSweeney's article does a good job mocking. I do believe their best thinkers were as good as our best thinkers.
Life expectancy didn't change that much, what changed is infant mortality.
And for cognitive ability: plenty of firsthand accounts from Enlightenment thinkers about thesuperior reasoning abilities of average members of hunter-gatherer/American Indian tribes compared to the typical European at the time, and they arguably already had better access to nutrition/education/healthcare.
Cognitive ability is for sure related to some extent to these factors, but actual practice of reasoning (through public debates, leisure time, storytelling) seems to have been much more influential on the actual realisation of cognitive potential, and I'm not sure there'd be a stark difference between a typical human today, or even a typical Westerner, vs a typical Roman citizen.
Plato begs to differ re: philosophy. Ancient people could memorize staggeringly more than folks today. They probably also paid (far) more attention to their surroundings. Like Rangers in D&D, they could read blades of grass and state what/when walked by...
Same religions. Same political structures. Same engineering - we've only recently duplicated their concrete, and man, could they build roads and aqueducts. Yeah, they had a dodgy number system, but they had military and political organizations that lasted 1000+ years. They had worldwide trade, and unified far more territory than anybody today.
Well no, not even as good. For instance, your comment invokes the idea of prejudice, and the value of being unprejudiced. Did Romans know about that, and consider it important? Maybe, I couldn't say offhand, but my point is that they might not have had some valuable idea like that. I think we can say with certainty that they must have lacked some idea of great value to thinking. That makes the ancients all worse at thinking, all of them. This doesn't of course mean that their best ideas were bad though!
Yes, of course that's right. But I thought you were the one conflating collective knowledge with individual human intelligence, when you said "behaviorally". Behaviors being due to ideas, not nature (I don't much rate nature's effect on smarts anyway).
Maybe I need to spell this distinction out next time it comes up, which will be the next ancient history thread, probably. I guess the endless repetition of "they were just as smart as we were you know!" is in order to counteract an unstated idea that the ancients were some other species, like orangutans in bronze armor, I don't know. Maybe it's common to vaguely think that about them? But this gratuitous counter-point should be on a strictly genetic basis, or else you'd be accidentally denying that ideas improve.
Ancient Aliens conflates two very different ideas.
The show’s core argument is that ancient civilizations were more advanced than we give them credit for. That may be true, but “more advanced” does not mean they had superior technology or help from aliens. It can simply mean they had technical knowledge, methods, or craftsmanship that we have since lost or forgotten.
Elon Musk has made a similar point about the US space program. We landed on the moon more than 50 years ago, but in some ways we now have to relearn how to do it (because we forgot how). That does not mean we had better technology in the 1960s, and it certainly does not mean aliens were involved. It means knowledge, systems, expertise, and institutional capability can fade over time. And that doesn't mean aliens were involved (as the tvshow would make you believe).
> It means knowledge, systems, expertise, and institutional capability can fade over time
This has also been happening since ancient times. Famously, how to make roman concrete was lost after the fall of the empire and Europe did not reinvent high quality concrete until much later in the 18th century. They also lost entire industrial-scale manufacturing pipelines for pottery and had a regression back to crude, hand-shaped pottery.
Turns out we humans have been dealing with the same human problems for hundreds of thousands of years.
This reminds me of Gall’s Law. You cannot create a complex system, you must create a simple system and improve it over time.
The issue arises when you get so many iterations in, you’ve forgotten the process. Any catastrophic event can mean you won’t be able to create the silicon chip or airplanes and so much other technology.
Maybe I’m wrong and people and books do exist that can explain the process and human might would succeed.
Have we actually forgotten how to land to the moon? That sounds very fishy, I’m pretty skeptical that’s not the case, that was done at a time where we had good records and still have access to them. And it’s close enough to current time that people who worked on it are still alive (not all of course). Coming from musk makes me believe that’s not true, he’s far from a reliable narrator
There are two parts to manufacturing technology: The written knowledge of what to build, and the process knowledge of all the gotchas and tricks and skill that people experienced in their craft rarely write down. (In many cases the great craftspeople with the knowledge are not great teachers or writers). Manufacturing an object is not like compiling code, where if you pick the right inputs and machines you get the same output. The actual process of building is so full of domain knowledge and variability that ten different people following the same written instructions can get wildly different results.
Derek from SmarterEveryDay ran into this when trying to get a product manufactured in the US and shared his experience: https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?t=1386
Many of the manufacturing processes used to make the Apollo spacecraft were not followed in the production floor - and nobody wrote those changes down. That's one well-known example of Apollo-era knowledge lost, there are a few others if you seriously care to DDG them.
> Landing humans on the Moon by the end of 1969 required the most sudden burst of technological creativity, and the largest commitment of resources ($25 billion; $187 billion in 2024 US dollars)[24] ever made by any nation in peacetime. At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities.[25]
A large chunk of those industries and supporting academia no longer exist in the US outside the defense sector.
It has been a common meme within NASA since before SpaceX was founded.
The hard part of putting humans on the moon and bringing them back safely is not a problem if basic scientific knowlege, it is more an engineering challenge in an incredibly complex and bespoke domain. It is the know how that this component from this manufacturer has this kind of failure rate under these conditions, but when interacting with this other component under these conditions the failure rate is much higher, but that can be mitigated if we apply this kind of technique, but only if the temperature stays within X....
My original comment was more along those lines, but then I did a quick Wiki refresher on Chariots of the Gods (possibly the origin of the popular "Ancient Aliens" push), and noted that the author included Stonehenge among his examples, so I changed course.
This is a strawman argument, their real one is: "These megalithic structures would be tremendously difficult for anyone to build even today with all of our modern technology, and yet they did it hundreds of times before even inventing the wheel, in several places across the world."
> People dramatically underestimate what thousands of organized humans can accomplish when they are adequately fed, aggressively supervised, and denied alternative career paths.
If aliens built the pyramids they did a pretty shit job. You can see the evolution where they started building a pyramid and realized it would be too high so they changed the angle half-way up. If they had computers and geometry they probably would have gotten it right from the start.
I think the more likely explanation is racism. If the pyramids were in Europe, nobody would challenge their human origin but pyramids are in Africa Surely aliens are involved.
This is such a weirdly misanthropic view of humanity. Why are people so desperate to find evil in this world when ignorance is not only nicer to believe, it’s insanely more accurate?
Like I get it, you’re depressed, but this doesn’t automatically make everyone everywhere that doesn’t believe some random facts “racist”.
If we interpret the grandparent charitably, they're saying the centuries-long history of people suggesting Africans couldn't have built the pyramids to justify their own racial bias [0] also applies to modern people. It doesn't seem like an outrageous position, nor does it preclude ignorance being involved.
the article has a huge 'flash sale' and is selling shit. Not the best evidence to declare huge swathes of people racist.
c
If you search "extraterrestrial origins of Stonehenge" you'l find the same shit. 'Muh aliens' crowd are happy to attribute anything to aliens. The pyramids of bosnia? Nazca lines? Moai?
And why is it bad that people feel wonder at places literally called "wonders" and build stories around them? That's universal, not sinister. Egypt is steeped in religion, myth, and all kinds of craziness; most Egyptians don't hold a strictly secular, "logical" view of the world either, and no one calls them "racist" for it. From my time living in Cairo, people attributed most things to Israel and god, lol.
I also don't get tying a whole continent (an arbitrary construct) to a single race. There's no such thing as "the African race."
> the text describes how Solomon was enabled to build his temple by commanding demons by means of a magical ring that was entrusted to him by the archangel Michael.
> The Testament of Solomon is a pseudepigraphical composite text ascribed to King Solomon but not regarded as canonical scripture by Jews or Christian groups. It was written in the Greek language, based on precedents dating back to the early 1st millennium AD, but was likely not completed in any meaningful textual sense until sometime in the Middle Ages.
I think people fall into two distinct camps here: the wildly exploratory, who chase everything from lost civilizations to aliens, and the hyper-rationalists, who refuse to budge from safe, conventional explanations. When it comes to Giza, It may be disingenuous to write all the banter off as either conspiracy or bona fide science. While we understand the general progression of pyramid-building in Egypt, the sheer scale and precision of Giza creates blind spots.
There are major gaps in all explanations provided and there are a huge array of interesting but unprovable theories. People fill those gaps with whatever is compelling, but really, none are good enough to prove anything definitively and that includes the academic explanations.
It's entirely possible that we may never have the definitive answer for how they were built or even exactly why, and will have to live with the mystery. But humans rarely will accept that conclusion and we would rather invent certainty than put up with open questions.
It would be interesting to know who by Country or Language who believes ETs built the pyramids.
Personally I expect US would be the leader. The reason is because over the last 50 years there have been lots of shows describing how and why Space Aliens built the pyramids. Some of these shows were well produced.
In the US, it seems we are at the point if a show is based on fantasy, it is believed as fact.
one piece of "evidence" some conspiracy believers cite to prove aliens is, roughly: a bunch of places around the world independently all built similar pyramid-like structures (egypt, machu picchu, etc.). so it must be aliens.
the fact that the easiest way to pile up a bunch of big rocks without it crumbling down is to have a wide base and a narrow top is seemingly forgotten.
Which is an underappreciated part. They didn't only build pyramids, it's just pyramids had a much higher chance of actually surviving the millennia so it looks like early human civilizations were weirdly obsessed with pyramids. You never hear any theories about how aliens built the Colossus of Rhodes, but the pyramids get it because they're still around.
If there was ever a candidate for alien intervention its the roman aqueducts, and like you said, I never see any conspiracies for that either. The romans figured out water filtration, built a massive underground network, figured out hydraulic pressure, and created concrete that can set underwater and resisted cracking.
Egyptians were clever. They had rivers, water and advanced water-management technology.
The shaduf, which is a hand-operated lever with a bucket, to lift water from rivers and canals for irrigation.
The Nile River annually flooded which was monitored because it determined agricultural success.
As well, the Nile served as a transportation route. Huge stone blocks transported through and evidence suggests that canals and harbours were built near some pyramid complexes to help move materials closer to construction sites.
Given that Giza pyramid took about 30 years, the internet and AI together took the same amount of time. So then AI is definitely a work of aliens from the far away galaxy.
“People dramatically underestimate what thousands of organized humans can accomplish when they are adequately fed, aggressively supervised, and denied alternative career paths.“
> This feels deeply insulting considering humans also created taxation, organized warfare, and raisins.
Offtopic, but why do people hate raisins so much? No other dried fruit gets so much hate.
I would imagine it's something genetic like the reason why some people dislike coriander (which has been shown to be related to genetic sensitivity to aldehydes).
The only other dried fruit I see people eat regularly is cranberries, and those really can’t be eaten fresh. I think it’s just that most people don’t like dried fruit and this is their only exposure. It’s definitely one of the most sickeningly sweet natural things you can eat that isn’t a sweetener in and of itself.
I think a lack of curiosity and capacity also play a role in some believing the conspiracies. The information is there. More accessible than ever, yet most out of reach for our brains addicted to instant gratification of doom scrolls and outrageous headlines that we’re blasted with by multibillion dollar attention optimization machines.
Well. Not really? Of course a lot of information is available but still there is a lot of open questions.
Just considering the Great Pyramid of Giza: was it built with an external or an internal ramp? What was the purpose of the so called “well shaft”? What was the purpose of the “grand gallery”? What about the “air shafts”? Is the restoration of the so called “great step” in the “grand gallery” historically accurate? What is going on with the “big void” and the “small void” seemingly indicated by the ScanPyramid data? How did those who dug the “robbers tunnel” know how deep the granite plugs are?
My point is that there are enough interesting questions even after one learns “all there is to know”. They are just not in the realm of “aliens?” but much more like “what order were the ramps removed?”
Information is there to help steer people away from crazy conspiracy theories. The kind of information that help people even arrive at the questions you mentioned. That’s the whole point of my argument.
the wild thing about this is that _we have contemporaneous records of how they were built_. They know the names of architects and managers. There's no mystery to it at all.
Humans. The “aliens” do not like to leave overt signs of meddling.
The glyphs of Peru had more to do with the off worlders. Such are how tribesmen “represented” their local identities to the sky peoples.
In ancient times, the Greys did in fact visit primitive tribes peoples. They introduced themselves, chatted for a bit.
The Hopi and other end of the world myths were instigated by these conversations. Without their intervention the world was to be consumed by nuclear fires before 2012.
We are literally about to build the next civilization and some still wonder if we can build the Pyramids while it's actually basic for today's technology, people are not on phase, it's scary to see that gap.
I can sympathise and understand why people don't believe this is within human capabilities.
Look at how fractured the government and political systems of the west have become. Humans forget. We've forgotten how to build pyramids, we've forgotten the second world war and the lessons learned.
"The government sucks therefore aliens built the pyramids" has to be the line of thinking I sympathize the least with in the entire span of human opinions.
Sure, but no-one on Earth today is willing to pay for a pyramid - or anything like it - even with the convenience of modern construction.
I have a similar feeling looking at the great cathedrals.
These structures took up a huge proportion of the community's money, labour and talent, for decades on end.
They're orders of magnitude bigger than any 'normal' building of the time or for centuries later.
All with no prospect of any tangible return.
If we set out now to build the largest structure that the limits of our technology allow, designed almost purely as a work of art with little regard to any function, what would that look like? I don't know, no-one's done it for centuries.
The closest thing is the Eiffel Tower.
It's a national icon, the wrought-iron equivalent of a pyramid - but it took two years to build, not twenty. What would an Eiffel Tower with 10x the resources look like? And that's more than a century ago.
It's not hard to believe that humans could build these things, but it's occasionally hard to believe that they chose to.
I found out that classical building with ornaments aren't that more expensive than modern glass boxes. The Berlin Baroque palace costed 680 Million euros which isn't atypical for buildings that size, and it includes carved stone ornamentation [1]. Modern CNC robots have made stone carving much more efficient.
So only around 500 times as much moving material around, feasible I guess. You might need a dedicated rail line built direct to the quarry.
Funny to mention cathedrals considering that they finished one in Spain just recently. There's also Guédelon Castle in France, still being slowly built.
For anyone interested in modern humans' ability to move material around when it is economically advantageous to do so, try a web image search for "largest open pit mines".
I suppose the Burj Khalifa, the Sky Tree, the Sphere, and the Luxor don't count? Mount Rushmore? The only thing that's changed is that we've gotten more efficient at megaprojects and, I suppose, they've become so common you don't register them as interesting anymore.
The classic Mcsweeney's for the HN crowd is "E-mail Addresses That Would Be Really Annoying to Give Out Over the Phone"
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/e-mail-addresses-that-wo...
My father in law has email address that is about his small dog. He's Scottish and his dog growls a lot. So his address is weegrrrr.
Oh let me tell you the fun of spelling that one over the phone. He's also not the most patient man in the world either :-)
Tell him to be careful. The chinese government might try to re-educate his email address.
lol, that's what I'd call a dense piece of text:
(header)
(end article)"The WiFi password is fourwordsalluppercase. One word, all lowercase."
I love that gmail was only 4 months old when this came out.
"I personally can't conceive of how one might built this, and I must be a million times smarter than people 4500 years ago, ergo people didn't build this." is how the Ancient Aliens theory always sounds to me.
There's a ton of people that, for some reason, just can't grok that humans have been largely behaviorally and biologically identical for the past 200k years.
The average ancient roman plebeian's life would not look dramatically different from ours today, minus technology of course. They worked a day job, ate at thermopoliums (basically fast food), lived in crowded apartment complexes with various forms of slum lords, deal with high rent prices, and roman graffiti is littered with complaints about politicians, sports teams, and the rising cost of living.
With the pyramids, we have the Wadi al-Jarf papyri, a detailed logistics logbook documenting the teams moving the stones for the great pyramids, along side payroll records much like any other spreadsheet you'll find on someone's corporate computer today.
We are not so different from our ancient ancestors at all.
It has always been my understanding that if talking about homo sapiens sapiens: then if you could „snatch“ a newborn from 200k years ago and raise it just like any other human baby today, there is nothing in terms of biology etc. that would stop said baby from becoming an engineer, astronaut, formula one race driver, lawyer, programmer, or CEO (or any other modern profession for that matter).
Never read up if that pet theory of mine has any merit, though.
A couple years ago I realized that I had somewhat subconsciously made the same assumption. The thing that snapped me out of it was my awe in watching Clickspring (YT) try to recreate the Antikythera Mechanism. That device's complexity and craftsmanship is proof to me that despite the lack of technology, there were some astonishingly smart and resourceful people living thousands of years ago.
Maybe they learned from the aliens?
There are ideas that ancient human thinking was very different and primitive compared to modern. For example (and others): The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes (1976)
In the half century that has passed since the publishing of that book, plenty of work has been done to say that ancient human thinking wasn't primitive, especially the ones that made the pyramids 4,600 years ago, such as the Red Sea Scrolls: How Ancient Papyri Reveal the Secrets of the Pyramids by Mark Lehner and Pierre Tallet (2022) which alludes to the minds of competent and intelligent humans
Comparing Plato to various current-day companies and governments, this is true. Assuming "primitive" means "clear or unobscured".
That one is an interesting scifi premise, but deeply unpersuasive when it comes to actual humans.
It was one of the main influences for the cyberpunk Snow Crash novel.
In much the same way there are 'ideas' that aliens built pyramids.
Romans, huh? Many of them were slaves, they believed they could learn the future by looking at the patterns of birds in flight, a Roman's bloodline was very important to the Roman's importance. You can take "behaviorally identical" too far, ideas got better over time, people in the past had bad ideas.
If that's sarcastic, good one :)
If genuine, I'm puzzled. In the current world we have a tremendous amount of people who hold various superstitious beliefs as well as spend tremendous amount of time on their genealogy. And nepotism never went away. I agree those are "bad ideas", but don't see how they differentiate us from people 5k years ago?
Still sounds a lot like humans today. Many are still slaves, many believe they can learn the future by reading cards with funny pictures on them, for some bloodline is very important, as is race.
I don't think we are meaningfully different at all. The same types and groups of people and social structures all still exist today. I suppose the big difference is those of us who are well adjusted know that racism is not good, and tarot cards are meaningless woo woo. But there were also such skeptics back then too.
I don't understand the downvote, it's like "nooo, their ideas were exactly as good as the ones we have today, humans don't learn over time, how dare you imply we used to be stupider, it's sacrilege".
So I object to this weird article of faith every time it comes up, we can't have been exactly as sensible and exactly as clever in the past as we are today, it doesn't make any sense to say that. But it's somehow become right-on to say that it's so, as if denying it is a prejudice like timeism or something. It obviously matters to some world view, equality maybe?
We have access to different data points today. But the way I read the original post is that human mind as such did not meaningful change. If you took a Roman or Egyptian embryo from 5k years ago and incubated it today, you'd have a modern human. The fact that many people back then had crazy ideas, is orthogonal to the biological argument at hand - and that's before we look at amount of people with crazy ideas today, many of which are largely the same.
Basically I think we have to pick a lane on whether we are talking biology, vs culture, vs knowledge and accumulated data.
I didn't downvote you.
But, I'm not saying that humans haven't learned anything, but that cognitively we haven't changed. A roman citizen has the exact same brain capacity to reason and adapt as we do today. There is zero separation from ancient human vs. modern human in that aspect.
You are conflating collective knowledge with individual human intelligence. That roman looking at bird entrails to predict the future was using the exact same pattern-recognition ability we use today to look at data visualizations, or trend graphs.
You could go back in time, steal an ancient roman baby, and raise them in today's year and they would be no different from you or I.
I agree with the "steal an ancient roman baby" premise. The "roman citizen" example is not as strong. Cognitive ability is not just genetics. The grown-up roman would be missing a lot of advantages during their upbringing that weren't available back then. Also, limiting it to just "citizens" means limiting it to their upper class.
Compared to Roman times, we've had pretty big advances in nutrition, healthcare, education, and widespread middle class wealth. It's not unreasonable to infer that these would have an impact on cognitive ability similar to the effect they've had on life expectancy.
That being said, there's definitely a present-ist bias, as the McSweeney's article does a good job mocking. I do believe their best thinkers were as good as our best thinkers.
Life expectancy didn't change that much, what changed is infant mortality.
And for cognitive ability: plenty of firsthand accounts from Enlightenment thinkers about thesuperior reasoning abilities of average members of hunter-gatherer/American Indian tribes compared to the typical European at the time, and they arguably already had better access to nutrition/education/healthcare.
Cognitive ability is for sure related to some extent to these factors, but actual practice of reasoning (through public debates, leisure time, storytelling) seems to have been much more influential on the actual realisation of cognitive potential, and I'm not sure there'd be a stark difference between a typical human today, or even a typical Westerner, vs a typical Roman citizen.
Plato begs to differ re: philosophy. Ancient people could memorize staggeringly more than folks today. They probably also paid (far) more attention to their surroundings. Like Rangers in D&D, they could read blades of grass and state what/when walked by...
> Life expectancy didn't change that much, what changed is infant mortality.
Life expectancy means at birth commonly. Life expectancy changed because infant and child mortality changed.
Same religions. Same political structures. Same engineering - we've only recently duplicated their concrete, and man, could they build roads and aqueducts. Yeah, they had a dodgy number system, but they had military and political organizations that lasted 1000+ years. They had worldwide trade, and unified far more territory than anybody today.
Well no, not even as good. For instance, your comment invokes the idea of prejudice, and the value of being unprejudiced. Did Romans know about that, and consider it important? Maybe, I couldn't say offhand, but my point is that they might not have had some valuable idea like that. I think we can say with certainty that they must have lacked some idea of great value to thinking. That makes the ancients all worse at thinking, all of them. This doesn't of course mean that their best ideas were bad though!
Yes, of course that's right. But I thought you were the one conflating collective knowledge with individual human intelligence, when you said "behaviorally". Behaviors being due to ideas, not nature (I don't much rate nature's effect on smarts anyway).
Maybe I need to spell this distinction out next time it comes up, which will be the next ancient history thread, probably. I guess the endless repetition of "they were just as smart as we were you know!" is in order to counteract an unstated idea that the ancients were some other species, like orangutans in bronze armor, I don't know. Maybe it's common to vaguely think that about them? But this gratuitous counter-point should be on a strictly genetic basis, or else you'd be accidentally denying that ideas improve.
Ancient Aliens conflates two very different ideas.
The show’s core argument is that ancient civilizations were more advanced than we give them credit for. That may be true, but “more advanced” does not mean they had superior technology or help from aliens. It can simply mean they had technical knowledge, methods, or craftsmanship that we have since lost or forgotten.
Elon Musk has made a similar point about the US space program. We landed on the moon more than 50 years ago, but in some ways we now have to relearn how to do it (because we forgot how). That does not mean we had better technology in the 1960s, and it certainly does not mean aliens were involved. It means knowledge, systems, expertise, and institutional capability can fade over time. And that doesn't mean aliens were involved (as the tvshow would make you believe).
> It means knowledge, systems, expertise, and institutional capability can fade over time
This has also been happening since ancient times. Famously, how to make roman concrete was lost after the fall of the empire and Europe did not reinvent high quality concrete until much later in the 18th century. They also lost entire industrial-scale manufacturing pipelines for pottery and had a regression back to crude, hand-shaped pottery.
Turns out we humans have been dealing with the same human problems for hundreds of thousands of years.
This reminds me of Gall’s Law. You cannot create a complex system, you must create a simple system and improve it over time.
The issue arises when you get so many iterations in, you’ve forgotten the process. Any catastrophic event can mean you won’t be able to create the silicon chip or airplanes and so much other technology.
Maybe I’m wrong and people and books do exist that can explain the process and human might would succeed.
Have we actually forgotten how to land to the moon? That sounds very fishy, I’m pretty skeptical that’s not the case, that was done at a time where we had good records and still have access to them. And it’s close enough to current time that people who worked on it are still alive (not all of course). Coming from musk makes me believe that’s not true, he’s far from a reliable narrator
There are two parts to manufacturing technology: The written knowledge of what to build, and the process knowledge of all the gotchas and tricks and skill that people experienced in their craft rarely write down. (In many cases the great craftspeople with the knowledge are not great teachers or writers). Manufacturing an object is not like compiling code, where if you pick the right inputs and machines you get the same output. The actual process of building is so full of domain knowledge and variability that ten different people following the same written instructions can get wildly different results.
Derek from SmarterEveryDay ran into this when trying to get a product manufactured in the US and shared his experience: https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?t=1386
Many of the manufacturing processes used to make the Apollo spacecraft were not followed in the production floor - and nobody wrote those changes down. That's one well-known example of Apollo-era knowledge lost, there are a few others if you seriously care to DDG them.
Can you see how far
"some Apollo program last-minute production-floor manufacturing changes were not written down"
is from
"humans lost fundamental technology needed to land on the moon"?
In aerospace, those are the same statements. Those production floor changes are often the difference between a payload working or failing.
How many years did these production floor changes take to engineer?
Over a period from 1960 to 1969:
> Landing humans on the Moon by the end of 1969 required the most sudden burst of technological creativity, and the largest commitment of resources ($25 billion; $187 billion in 2024 US dollars)[24] ever made by any nation in peacetime. At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities.[25]
A large chunk of those industries and supporting academia no longer exist in the US outside the defense sector.
It has been a common meme within NASA since before SpaceX was founded.
The hard part of putting humans on the moon and bringing them back safely is not a problem if basic scientific knowlege, it is more an engineering challenge in an incredibly complex and bespoke domain. It is the know how that this component from this manufacturer has this kind of failure rate under these conditions, but when interacting with this other component under these conditions the failure rate is much higher, but that can be mitigated if we apply this kind of technique, but only if the temperature stays within X....
It's more specifically "I personally can't conceive of how one might built this, so non-white people definitely didn't build this"
My original comment was more along those lines, but then I did a quick Wiki refresher on Chariots of the Gods (possibly the origin of the popular "Ancient Aliens" push), and noted that the author included Stonehenge among his examples, so I changed course.
This is a strawman argument, their real one is: "These megalithic structures would be tremendously difficult for anyone to build even today with all of our modern technology, and yet they did it hundreds of times before even inventing the wheel, in several places across the world."
> People dramatically underestimate what thousands of organized humans can accomplish when they are adequately fed, aggressively supervised, and denied alternative career paths.
Somehow I feel personally attacked.
The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them..."
Reminds me of my career explaining how to build simple webpages without using large abstraction libraries/frameworks for JavaScript.
If aliens built the pyramids they did a pretty shit job. You can see the evolution where they started building a pyramid and realized it would be too high so they changed the angle half-way up. If they had computers and geometry they probably would have gotten it right from the start.
I think the more likely explanation is racism. If the pyramids were in Europe, nobody would challenge their human origin but pyramids are in Africa Surely aliens are involved.
This is such a weirdly misanthropic view of humanity. Why are people so desperate to find evil in this world when ignorance is not only nicer to believe, it’s insanely more accurate?
Like I get it, you’re depressed, but this doesn’t automatically make everyone everywhere that doesn’t believe some random facts “racist”.
If we interpret the grandparent charitably, they're saying the centuries-long history of people suggesting Africans couldn't have built the pyramids to justify their own racial bias [0] also applies to modern people. It doesn't seem like an outrageous position, nor does it preclude ignorance being involved.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-white-southerners...
the article has a huge 'flash sale' and is selling shit. Not the best evidence to declare huge swathes of people racist. c If you search "extraterrestrial origins of Stonehenge" you'l find the same shit. 'Muh aliens' crowd are happy to attribute anything to aliens. The pyramids of bosnia? Nazca lines? Moai?
And why is it bad that people feel wonder at places literally called "wonders" and build stories around them? That's universal, not sinister. Egypt is steeped in religion, myth, and all kinds of craziness; most Egyptians don't hold a strictly secular, "logical" view of the world either, and no one calls them "racist" for it. From my time living in Cairo, people attributed most things to Israel and god, lol.
I also don't get tying a whole continent (an arbitrary construct) to a single race. There's no such thing as "the African race."
Weird comment. Hammers and nails, imo.
This is provably incorrect. Stonehenge is the target of alien conspiracies as well.
Related: Masonry Techniques of the Inca’s Master Builders
https://www.earthasweknowit.com/pages/inca_construction
This article was a fantastic read, and thoroughly debunks a lot of ancient alien style stuff.
Saying that aliens built them is as likely as claiming magic built them.
Magic is explicitly something outside the realm of possibility, but I get what you’re saying.
The Testament of Solomon indulges this craziness.
> the text describes how Solomon was enabled to build his temple by commanding demons by means of a magical ring that was entrusted to him by the archangel Michael.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testament_of_Solomon
> The Testament of Solomon is a pseudepigraphical composite text ascribed to King Solomon but not regarded as canonical scripture by Jews or Christian groups. It was written in the Greek language, based on precedents dating back to the early 1st millennium AD, but was likely not completed in any meaningful textual sense until sometime in the Middle Ages.
Yeah that’s super reliable…
Moreover cannonical and historical truth are orthogonal axes.
For real
I think people fall into two distinct camps here: the wildly exploratory, who chase everything from lost civilizations to aliens, and the hyper-rationalists, who refuse to budge from safe, conventional explanations. When it comes to Giza, It may be disingenuous to write all the banter off as either conspiracy or bona fide science. While we understand the general progression of pyramid-building in Egypt, the sheer scale and precision of Giza creates blind spots.
There are major gaps in all explanations provided and there are a huge array of interesting but unprovable theories. People fill those gaps with whatever is compelling, but really, none are good enough to prove anything definitively and that includes the academic explanations.
It's entirely possible that we may never have the definitive answer for how they were built or even exactly why, and will have to live with the mystery. But humans rarely will accept that conclusion and we would rather invent certainty than put up with open questions.
It would be interesting to know who by Country or Language who believes ETs built the pyramids.
Personally I expect US would be the leader. The reason is because over the last 50 years there have been lots of shows describing how and why Space Aliens built the pyramids. Some of these shows were well produced.
In the US, it seems we are at the point if a show is based on fantasy, it is believed as fact.
one piece of "evidence" some conspiracy believers cite to prove aliens is, roughly: a bunch of places around the world independently all built similar pyramid-like structures (egypt, machu picchu, etc.). so it must be aliens.
the fact that the easiest way to pile up a bunch of big rocks without it crumbling down is to have a wide base and a narrow top is seemingly forgotten.
>without it crumbling down
Which is an underappreciated part. They didn't only build pyramids, it's just pyramids had a much higher chance of actually surviving the millennia so it looks like early human civilizations were weirdly obsessed with pyramids. You never hear any theories about how aliens built the Colossus of Rhodes, but the pyramids get it because they're still around.
If there was ever a candidate for alien intervention its the roman aqueducts, and like you said, I never see any conspiracies for that either. The romans figured out water filtration, built a massive underground network, figured out hydraulic pressure, and created concrete that can set underwater and resisted cracking.
Far more impressive than a pyramid IMO.
It strikes me that it also might be the best way to build a tall structure, for the ancients. It takes modern materials to build skinny and tall.
Egyptians were clever. They had rivers, water and advanced water-management technology.
The shaduf, which is a hand-operated lever with a bucket, to lift water from rivers and canals for irrigation.
The Nile River annually flooded which was monitored because it determined agricultural success.
As well, the Nile served as a transportation route. Huge stone blocks transported through and evidence suggests that canals and harbours were built near some pyramid complexes to help move materials closer to construction sites.
https://aeraweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/aeragram15_1-...
Clever people. Not as advanced as the Romans but they had technology and prospered for a long while.
They used kite-sails with rollers, according to Caltech
Given that Giza pyramid took about 30 years, the internet and AI together took the same amount of time. So then AI is definitely a work of aliens from the far away galaxy.
“People dramatically underestimate what thousands of organized humans can accomplish when they are adequately fed, aggressively supervised, and denied alternative career paths.“
> This feels deeply insulting considering humans also created taxation, organized warfare, and raisins.
Offtopic, but why do people hate raisins so much? No other dried fruit gets so much hate.
I would imagine it's something genetic like the reason why some people dislike coriander (which has been shown to be related to genetic sensitivity to aldehydes).
I don’t understand why you wouldn’t like raisins? They’re pretty much just sugar.
The only other dried fruit I see people eat regularly is cranberries, and those really can’t be eaten fresh. I think it’s just that most people don’t like dried fruit and this is their only exposure. It’s definitely one of the most sickeningly sweet natural things you can eat that isn’t a sweetener in and of itself.
I feel like people believe whatever they want and the narrative changes to “can you 105% guarantee aliens didn’t build them?”
I mean even if you could people would still believe whatever they want… must be tiring for sure.
I think a lack of curiosity and capacity also play a role in some believing the conspiracies. The information is there. More accessible than ever, yet most out of reach for our brains addicted to instant gratification of doom scrolls and outrageous headlines that we’re blasted with by multibillion dollar attention optimization machines.
> The information is there.
Well. Not really? Of course a lot of information is available but still there is a lot of open questions.
Just considering the Great Pyramid of Giza: was it built with an external or an internal ramp? What was the purpose of the so called “well shaft”? What was the purpose of the “grand gallery”? What about the “air shafts”? Is the restoration of the so called “great step” in the “grand gallery” historically accurate? What is going on with the “big void” and the “small void” seemingly indicated by the ScanPyramid data? How did those who dug the “robbers tunnel” know how deep the granite plugs are?
My point is that there are enough interesting questions even after one learns “all there is to know”. They are just not in the realm of “aliens?” but much more like “what order were the ramps removed?”
Information is there to help steer people away from crazy conspiracy theories. The kind of information that help people even arrive at the questions you mentioned. That’s the whole point of my argument.
Hopefully he gets replaced by AI and is relieved of his torment.
the wild thing about this is that _we have contemporaneous records of how they were built_. They know the names of architects and managers. There's no mystery to it at all.
the aliens could have planted those records tho
Extraterrestrial parallel construction.
There are no photos of Merer, they were actually extraterrestrial /s
links?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_Merer among many others.
I thought these were just about limestone blocks being transported from quarries in Tura to Giza.
Not saying it was Aline’s but it was aliens
Humans. The “aliens” do not like to leave overt signs of meddling.
The glyphs of Peru had more to do with the off worlders. Such are how tribesmen “represented” their local identities to the sky peoples.
In ancient times, the Greys did in fact visit primitive tribes peoples. They introduced themselves, chatted for a bit.
The Hopi and other end of the world myths were instigated by these conversations. Without their intervention the world was to be consumed by nuclear fires before 2012.
https://pastebin.com/42dTemNe
So it's a sci-fi short story? what reason would anyone have to believe this stuff?
What reason do people have to believe the Moses story?
We are literally about to build the next civilization and some still wonder if we can build the Pyramids while it's actually basic for today's technology, people are not on phase, it's scary to see that gap.
> aggressively supervised
Is that what we're calling it now?
that's the joke
I can sympathise and understand why people don't believe this is within human capabilities.
Look at how fractured the government and political systems of the west have become. Humans forget. We've forgotten how to build pyramids, we've forgotten the second world war and the lessons learned.
"The government sucks therefore aliens built the pyramids" has to be the line of thinking I sympathize the least with in the entire span of human opinions.
> We've forgotten how to build pyramids
What exactly has led you to believe this...?
Modern construction firms would have no problem^ planning and building you a pyramid if you were willing to pay for it.
^ well, maybe some problems like any project, but they would overcome them.
Sure, but no-one on Earth today is willing to pay for a pyramid - or anything like it - even with the convenience of modern construction.
I have a similar feeling looking at the great cathedrals.
These structures took up a huge proportion of the community's money, labour and talent, for decades on end. They're orders of magnitude bigger than any 'normal' building of the time or for centuries later. All with no prospect of any tangible return.
If we set out now to build the largest structure that the limits of our technology allow, designed almost purely as a work of art with little regard to any function, what would that look like? I don't know, no-one's done it for centuries.
The closest thing is the Eiffel Tower. It's a national icon, the wrought-iron equivalent of a pyramid - but it took two years to build, not twenty. What would an Eiffel Tower with 10x the resources look like? And that's more than a century ago.
It's not hard to believe that humans could build these things, but it's occasionally hard to believe that they chose to.
I found out that classical building with ornaments aren't that more expensive than modern glass boxes. The Berlin Baroque palace costed 680 Million euros which isn't atypical for buildings that size, and it includes carved stone ornamentation [1]. Modern CNC robots have made stone carving much more efficient.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HC1lLC7zY4&t=537s
> Sure, but no-one on Earth today is willing to pay for a pyramid - or anything like it - even with the convenience of modern construction.
- Luxor in Las Vegas: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Las_Vegas_Luxor_04.j...
- Bass Pro Shop Memphis Pyramid: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Memphis_Pyramid.JPG
- Sunway Pyramid Mall, Malaysia : https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sunway_Pyramid_front...
- Walter Pyramid, Cal State Long Beach: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Csulb-pyr1.jpg
- Muttart Conservatory, Edmonton: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Muttart_Conservatori...
- Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, Kazakhstan: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%9C._%D0%90%D1%81...
> What would an Eiffel Tower with 10x the resources look like?
The Burj Khalifa.
Eiffel tower: 10,000 tons
Great pyramid: 5 or 6 million tons
So only around 500 times as much moving material around, feasible I guess. You might need a dedicated rail line built direct to the quarry.
Funny to mention cathedrals considering that they finished one in Spain just recently. There's also Guédelon Castle in France, still being slowly built.
To be fair you got to also move a lot of ore to refine that metal. But there was also a lot of mechanically generated power used to get it.
For anyone interested in modern humans' ability to move material around when it is economically advantageous to do so, try a web image search for "largest open pit mines".
The Burj Khalifa is exactly the kind of vanity megaproject you're talking about.
> I don't know, no-one's done it for centuries.
I suppose the Burj Khalifa, the Sky Tree, the Sphere, and the Luxor don't count? Mount Rushmore? The only thing that's changed is that we've gotten more efficient at megaprojects and, I suppose, they've become so common you don't register them as interesting anymore.
Many medieval Britons believed that Roman ruins were built by giants.
The Luxor Las Vegas was built in 1993. It even had a replica tomb for a while.
> We've forgotten how to build pyramids.
Luxor in Vegas is way more complicated than the egyptian pyramids were.
The bass pro pyramid store was built by aliens.
Are you for real?
These are common false narratives pushed by "documentaries" on Netflix and cable television in the US.