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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>With stonehenge in 5,000 ypb britain, there are thought to be far fewer people.

Well, it's also a much smaller scale project compared to a pyramid.

>So either, (1) "civilised" society was much more common historically and ancient in origin (2) There were "pre-civilised" ways of organising very large numbers of people. Or (3), they had very clever building techniques that did not require many people.

I think (1) is almost a given. Our idea for anything prehistoric is basically based on old prejudices. We find all kinds of things pushing civilization several millenia before where we thought it was.

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Yes, definitely much smaller scale. Still, the unit of work is similar (massive stone cut, moved and placed).

If it takes a lot of people, that implies a lot of people coordinating at that time an place. In a sense, it gives us a minimal level of societal complexity that must have existed. Since britain didn't seem to have towns or cities, the nature of this complexity would be pre-civilised in the literal civil=city sense.

I agree though, civilisation has been getting older as evidence emerges. Or, as I prefer to think of it, the mysterious precursors to civilisation have been getting more impressive.

You don't have to move huge stones. Its possible to cast limestone in place, like concrete. I read/watched some stuff about this guy not too long ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Davidovits

He claims he sent samples of his cast limestone to geologists and they couldnt tell the difference. Overall I think his theory makes much more sense. It just would have been easier to pour each block in place rather than lug huge stones around.

I am surprised there aren’t documenration / art that describes the process contemporaneously.

Supposedly there is, "Irtysen Stele", "Sehel Stele" and "Famine Stele": https://www.geopolymer.org/archaeology/pyramids/pyramids-2-t...

I don't know anything about rocks, but it's very hard for me to take this website seriously when their FAQ repeats several times word for word (https://i.imgur.com/B0VojAZ.png):

>If it is not convincing enough: Recent scientific studies using very powerful and modern equipment found the ultimate evidence that the pyramids stones are synthetic. Believing in the artificial stone theory, or countering it, is simply no longer relevant. It has become a fact, a truth.

https://www.geopolymer.org/faq/faq-for-artificial-stone-supp...

In my experience, people who use repetition like this are not to be taken very seriously. It's a blunt persuasion tactic employed by the likes of used car salesmen and cult leaders.

Yea the site looks a bit disorganized and crackpotty. Perhaps because its translated from french?

You can find videos of them on youtube actually making these stone blocks though. The method works. Based on how long it took a small team to make a couple on their first attempt, it could be a hundred or even thousand times more efficient than carving them out and transporting them.

So if I were going to build a large limestone pyramid that's how I would do it.

It's may be that Stonehenge's labourers concentrated from sparsely populated remote locations in Britain and overseas.

Analysis of pig bones at Durrington Walls - probably a work camp - showed that this animal had been brought in from Scotland.

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