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.
Is that what we're calling it now?
I was extremely suspicious, and pasted the text into Pangram, said 100% AI generated (and yes, I trust Pangram as they have extremely low rates of false positives).
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.
What exactly has led you to believe this...?
^ well, maybe some problems like any project, but they would overcome them.
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.
Luxor in Vegas is way more complicated than the egyptian pyramids were.
- 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...
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 Burj Khalifa.
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.
Working with blocks of this size is just not a problem for modern equipment.
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/e-mail-addresses-that-wo...
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 :-)
(header)
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
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[email protected]
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.
Never read up if that pet theory of mine has any merit, though.
> Crabtree bases his argument on the fact that, for more than 99 percent of human evolutionary history, we have lived as hunter-gatherer communities, which has led to big-brained humans. Since the development of agriculture and cities, however, natural selection on our intellect has effectively stopped and mutations have accumulated in the critical intelligence genes.
https://wcuquad.com/101393/news/humans-are-no-longer-as-inte...
Yeah but that was planted by the aliens, who got the idea from God when she was planting all the dinosaur fossils in 4,004 BC.
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).
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.
If wanted it in concrete, would be faster. Or could do it in steel or steel/concrete with some interior space (Luxor in Las Vegas is size of smaller pyramid).
Somehow I feel personally attacked.
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.
Of course that doesnt means aliens did it.
https://www.earthasweknowit.com/pages/inca_construction
This article was a fantastic read, and thoroughly debunks a lot of ancient alien style stuff.
You should post it to HN for greater visibility instead of being buried in the comments.
That doesn’t mean “aliens” but lets not pretend its a solved problem.
> 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.
Yeah that’s super reliable…
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.
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.
Far more impressive than a pyramid IMO.
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).
Otherwise I like raisins, just fine on their own or in trail mix :)
but refleting uppon: maybe "aliens" are another name for a kind of ignorance spreading around. basic science and history simply gone. Not so funny to think about.
Ancestors were great. I just want a plan of how to do it.
I mean even if you could people would still believe whatever they want… must be tiring for sure.
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?”
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.
Like I get it, you’re depressed, but this doesn’t automatically make everyone everywhere that doesn’t believe some random facts “racist”.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-white-southerners...
This isn't recent either. When Tolkien put the lines about Orthanc and the Stone of Erech looking unearthly into the Lord of the Rings, he reflected on the early Medieval people and their superstitions regarding Roman ruins. "There once was a race of giants that built X" was a common idea, and fanciful medieval authors would invent all sorts of humanoids that weren't human and were responsible for various wonders or evils.
Burial mounds in Ireland (sídh) are linguistically associated with the "fair folk" (aos sí) until today.
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.
As an example, you could read about the efforts to move a 250 ton obelisk from Egypt to France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxor_Obelisks
It took $16M in 2020 dollars, a special boat built just for this transportation, and five years to complete the whole relocation process.
The mainstream argument is that ancient Egyptians were able to transport this same monument hundreds of miles from the quarry to Luxor with no wheels or cranes, just reed boats, sleds, and ropes. They did this hundreds or thousands of times, sometimes with granite blocks twice the size of this one.
> If wanted it in concrete, would be faster. Or could do it in steel or steel/concrete with some interior space (Luxor in Las Vegas is size of smaller pyramid).
There are a lot of ways the ancient Egyptians could have done this more easily as well. They didn’t have to transport granite from a quarry hundreds of miles away, they could have used softer stones from nearby quarries. They didn’t have to carve things from single-piece blocks, they could have broken it up into many smaller blocks or even bricks. They did everything the harder way, with the oldest constructions being the most difficult and precise, suggesting that there’s a lot we still don’t understand about their motivations, abilities, or the timeline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...
The only thing really amazing about the pyramids is how many couple of ton blocks they carved out and transported. It's around 250 blocks a day for 25 years.
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.
"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"?
2. "Not far" is the difference between "land humans on the surface of the moon and return them safely to Earth" and not doing that. Some of this stuff was unbelievably lucky, go read about the F1 engine baffles - getting that right was pure stupid luck as much as it was engineered.
And there were literally hundreds of these examples - across five different space vehicles and the interfaces between them.
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
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....
We live in a more complex world, this produce someting more complex, culture, ideas, knowledge, tasks, technology, craps.. but basic intelligence i think is the same (if not better in the past, less "pollution")
When I first read it, I remember thinking that this was the most interesting book I've read that is probably wrong.
Probably in the past minds can contemplate things we are not more aware today, who know? is not all about rational and scientific thinking, is not more or less advanced, is simply different, and in the past humans needed a quite different set of ideas and tools than today.
Just travel to Papua-NewGuinea and check with some tribe in a lost valley, straigh from Neolythic, some does not have a concept of "3", but children can learn arithmetic as everyone else, they can contemplate every concept we have, given the right path.
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?
I could point at all the self-help books that promise to improve the way you think, or Wikipedias list of fallacies, but I don't those are great examples either. It's frustrating that I can't make a simple point just because it needs more research. I hoped people would find better examples themselves.
I don't think your word "tremendous" works, I think superstition declined and values improved, but it's hard to nail this down for people who are keen to disagree. Does that include you? Why?
Outside of the "so mainstream and prevalent we don't even consider it" superstitions (which, remember, were all the historical ones we may dismiss now, thousand years later), we have horoscope and astrology, psychics, and people who think wearing same socks will help them on a winning streak, and everybody hesitant to talk about good or bad outcomes less they "jinx it". Maybe you're from Germany or Scandinavia and your daily experience is different?
But again, the thread started about biological differences and I will agree that there are little to none between ancient Egyptians and modern humans.
In terms of cultural values, sanctity of life, freedoms and poverty and lifestyle, I do think some things have improved. We can debate numbers as to how much.
Understand that as a Canadian, and not knowing where you're from, you unfortunately find me at a cynical time as we watch our southern neighbour work so very very hard to dismantle much of the progress we are discussing here very every effectively, so it's just difficult to put one's mind in historically optimistic mindset :-/
Romans had educated intellectuals who had some progressive and scientific ideas, and the less educated masses who had less progressive and educated ideas. This seems to describe today's world well. And we still LOVE to attack the "intellectual elite" for having progressive, scientific ideas.
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.
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?
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 just don't think that comes close to meeting the bar of "lost technology" in the sense that term is used by the extraterrestrial pyramid theorists (i.e., the manipulation of fundamental physical forces allowing the blocks to be levitated into place).
Just because in polls only 4-6% will identity with "atheist" doesn't mean the rest are severely impaired by superstitious beliefs.
I actually think "not impaired by superstitious beliefs" is somewhere between "less than 1%" and "zero", myself sadly included. For "severely" we have to set up some definitions and thresholds.
Again, welcome to reality, meet some racists. They make the majority of population :O
More seriously and in the spirit of HN: Because a lot of people, per the original post, assume ancient people were fundamentally, biologically, less intelligent. Couple of reasons:
1. We teach people about evolution and Neanderthals etc, but it's hard for most of us to grasp the time scales. People conflate "Egyptians 5 thousand years ago" and "australopithecus 5 million years ago".
2. As many many people do today, we also conflate circumstances with inherent - like we've seen several times in this very thread, because people 5k years ago they didn't have technology or knowledge of today, there's subconscious assumption they weren't fundamentally as intelligent as capable.
Original post had a simple and specific claim: Egyptians 5k years ago were biologically equivalent to humans today and their intelligence was just as high. Raise them in modern society and you'd get the same bell curve.
That claim alone is mind blowing to many.
Reading about the design for the F-1B engine gave me some understanding of the issue.
The F-1B was meant as a modernized version of the Apollo Saturn F-1 main engine.
The original design used extensive hand-welding, and the specific details of how to handle tricky situations likely not included in the manufacturing processes details because it was simply expected from an expert welder of the time.
That sort of expertise is far less common now. But rather than try to find those welders, the designers of the new engine used newer methods like additive manufacturing to replace welding entirely.
The old F-1 engine used a lot of complicated mechanical control methods. The F-1B used computer controls.
The new design had fewer components, was lighter, and was designed for a 15% performance boost over the original design.
So, sure, perhaps we can't exactly build a new Saturn V rocket following the 1969 blueprints, due to missing production floor changes. But we would never try because we are not limited to 1960s building methods if we wanted to use the Saturn V design as the basis for going back to the moon.
> 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.
Comparing the cost, the Iran war cost the US between 25 billion and 113 billion, so 187 spending billion over 9 years is not insurmountable. Political will provided. Alas.
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.
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.
Life expectancy means at birth commonly. Life expectancy changed because infant and child mortality changed.
>I think we can say with certainty that they must have lacked some idea of great value to thinking.
I believe there is one idea that they lacked which is that of the Scientific Method, and perhaps some others that helped ignite the Industrial Revolution.
However
>That makes the ancients all worse at thinking, all of them.
No, that does not follow at all. For that to follow you would have to show that those ideas were more valuable to the process of thinking than all the others that they did have.
Furthermore there has been sufficient argument already put forth here in this thread that their abilities at memorization and rhetoric provided a better ground for thinking than a lot of modern people possess, you would have to show that these ideas they did not possess are of so much greater value that they essentially negate the things in which they show superior skills.
You might suppose that to do this all you would need to do is to point around at the highly technological world we live in, but this would be seem to be a categorical error because we are discussing their ability to think not their technological levels. You could make the argument that the superior technology is the output of the process of thought, but I don't think an HN post will be sufficient to make that argument.
Finally assuming the Scientific Method was so superior an idea that it made the Ancients worse at thinking it would actually only make them worse at thinking than people who reasonably understand and apply the Scientific Method in their daily lives, which one look at the news should tell you is not that many people.
You lacked the idea of begging the question seemingly.
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.
When I was in nautical school, I was taught to always be aware of sea state regardless of where I was/what I was doing so I'd get in the habit of always knowing what the sea was doing.
Now I live on a farm. We are always very aware of the weather and instinctively comparing what we see around us to what the forecasts say.
When I lived in a city, I was barely aware of even if it was supposed to rain later or not. Going from your climate-controlled house to your climate-controlled car, to your climate-controlled job, you simply don't notice those things except superficially.
OK, good logic. But that implies could be still very valuable ideas of the ancients which are now lost. I suppose that's what classicism was all about. But we've been through classicism already a couple of times (starting in the renaissance). It seems likely we caught up with most of the powerful ideas of the ancient world.
I'm picking up a "bring back the seven liberal arts!" vibe from your comment, and it has a certain something going for it as an idea, I must admit. Even so ...