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Comment by tarikjn | Hacker News Reader

Not pre-human but challenging the understood modern human timeline of industrialisation — We have not found the tools, but we may have found the products; in the form of stone-based vases that archeologists attribute to the Early Egyptian Period but are believed to be from much earlier, and would have required tools that have not been discovered yet. The channel UnchartedX make a compelling argument about this hypothesis: https://youtu.be/ixTTvRGk0HQ

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What a silly video. The argument he's making is called a unilinear teleology. History is not an arrow-line march from less advanced to more advanced, and it's incredibly common for the apparent workmanship of artifacts to "regress" as styles and intentions change over time. Just look at all the people who complain about modern art because "classical takes more skill".

Also, there's essentially nothing you can't do with stone given primitive tools, sand, and a shitload of talent/time. One thing about ancient people is that they had all of these in abundance. Making arguments from the position of "they couldn't have done this with the tools they had" is almost always wrong because it's coming from a modern perspective of how tedious and uneconomical it'd be to do it today.

As someone who works with manufacturing, I don’t think it’s silly. Precision is not just a function of time available, manpower and talent, but also tooling technology. Manufacturing a single replica with today’s technology is believed to be challenging — and has not been attempted yet — but hopefully someone will take the challenge soon. There are no serious claims that these can be made with known ancient technology and time+manpower. Your response is often the response of people in archeology who do not understand precision manufacturing with hard materials, and shows how underrated these artifacts are.

This is not modern precision manufacturing and metrology, it's abrasively grinding down rock that's been roughly shaped. It's tedious as all hell, but well within the toolbox for ancient Egyptians (not to mention many other societies). There are a lot of options to do the rough shaping. Egyptians are known to have used abrasive drills for some artifacts, but other cultures often used rocks of the same or greater hardness as chisels alongside other mechanical methods for rough shaping.

Again, you can do this to shape virtually any rock. Stonemasons don't do this today because it's excessively annoying and slow. It's not a coincidence that khafre enthroned is a royal piece for a wealthy and powerful pharoah.

Have you ever ground one to prove this?

I've polished things with sand before and used hammerstones, yes. I'm not a stonemason though, just somone who spent a lot of time as a kid playing with rocks.

Most people will have some familiarity with emery cloth/sandpaper, which are basically the same principle. We don't even need to look at fancy egyptian statues. Carnelian beads were a common trade item across the Ancient near east and Egypt made this way. It's not magic.

My issue has always been with the large megaton granite slabs inside the pyramids that you can't even see. They placed these things high up above chambers and rooms like lego pieces.

The stones to which you are referring, and larger that are found in and around other structures, are too large to have been cut with the method that you suggest.

I'm not sure which part you think is impossible, but it's absolutely possible to chisel a stone out of a quarry with stone tools. There were subsequent steps to work that rough shape down into the final product, of which abrasion was one of the last steps. None of them are especially sensitive to the size of the stone. We've found the rocks they used to do it littering known quarries, on obelisks and the like.

The rough shaping is not at issue. The challenge is maintaining tolerances along all axis and constraints on your detail work while using high forces and pressures to work the hard material. Grinding is a good guess for the possible material removal process — and it is up there today for the smallest tolerances using a mechanical process —- watch a video of a jig grinder in action. But what tool is used to hold or insert the sand aggregate at the pressure point? Are you suggesting that the vase is turned? That turning tool would need precise bearings itself to maintain that precision. According to archeologists, Egyptian didn’t even have the invention of the wheel yet at this point. These are all questions that people are looking for answers, and the best way will be to attempt to reproduce an artifact using various methods. I sincerely invite you to contribute by trying to elaborate the entire process that would enable this.

I assume back then they weren't too fussed about having 100 people work on a small rock should they desire.

I think we just don't comprehend, as mentioned above, how much time and effort could be allowed for back then. I'm sure 100 people could create a near perfect vase given 30 years to work on it (random example).

The feasibility is not a function of the time or number of people. When you remove material, the slightest error is irreversible. By combining error rate, design tolerance bounds and work point size in a statistical model, you should be able to prove that even using the entire known population on earth at the time for several centuries, you would not be able to product near anywhere the number of these specific artifacts found under the step pyramid (40,000). It’s sort of like the problem of enough monkey typing randomly to produce the work of Shakespeare.

If you travel to spaces that are "less industrially developed" you will see an incredibly high level of talent.

This idea that its just not feasible because it is hard ignores existing architecture that we can date in places like China and India, but cannot easily replicate in the US or other spaces because the generationally developed skill and method is not available.

This precision occurs in hard materials like stone, in massive scale as well as in soft materials like cottons and silks which weren't replicated in Europe in previous or current times.

Amateur telescope makers can make glass mirrors accurate to 1/10 of the wavelength of light using very simple tools and processes.

https://www.bbastrodesigns.com/JoyOfMirrorMaking/Intro.html

> Also, there's essentially nothing you can't do with stone given primitive tools, sand, and a shitload of talent/time

How absurd! Skill and craftsmanship can get you far, but they will not allow you to craft with such precision that it's imperceivable to the human eye, how could they even verify their efforts? The video, while long, presents dozens of well structured arguments with strong evidence, your dismissal comes off as extremely arrogant and foolish in comparison.

Pre-history is tough. Outside of written accounts and a few major cities cited in particular environments - there isn’t a lot of evidence about what humans were doing for 100k years before the Roman/Chinese empires formed. Even Egyptian history is pretty spotty.

We know there were civilizations in North America such as the Mississippi River valley mound builders - but our knowledge tops out at “they existed”. It would not surprise me if agrarian civilization rose and fell multiple times due to climate change.

Maybe we should look off planet, look to the Lagrange points: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point

We might find some old equipment from an elder spacefaring species. If we don't find anything, maybe we should leave some human monuments out there so the next civilization can know about us.

As the Wikipedia article mentions, we’ve already done just this with the JWST…

Naw the JWST won't stay there after it loses power.

> The points L1, L2, and L3 are positions of unstable equilibrium. Any object orbiting at L1, L2, or L3 will tend to fall out of orbit; it is therefore rare to find natural objects there, and spacecraft inhabiting these areas must employ a small but critical amount of station keeping in order to maintain their position.

Nothing will. The Lagrange points are only quasi stable.

L4 and L5 are "stable" -- but of course on timescales of billions of years even Earth's orbit isn't guaranteed to be stable.

Lagrange Point orbits still require station-keeping. Anything 'parked' there will eventually float away from it, unless the position is actively maintained.

There is tons of archeological evidence dating back to the last ice age, roughly 10,000 years ago. Before that, there is ample evidence dating back to the middle paleolithic identifying cultural traditions including art, music, and ritual.

Ample is debatable. We have biased evidence from specific biomes and regions. We are restricted to artifacts that survived from this period - effectively tusks, rocks, and specific forms of art.

I recall TV shows saying that the Egyptian pyramids could not have been constructed with Egyptian technology, so it must have been space aliens. The same for the closely fitting stones in Inca buildings.

It doesn't take advanced technology to do either of those things.

My favorite one was pi is there in the relationship between the pyramid base length and its height, and the Egyptians had no notion of pi. Again, space aliens! But if the Egyptians used a wheel 1 cubit in diameter to mark out the base, and the height was in cubits, then there's pi.

(What's a cubit?)

Both can be true that it took more advanced tech than they are credited and it wasn't aliens.

The simplest explanation is the most likely.

This reminds me of this video by engineerguy that discusses the use of heuristics in engineering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ivqWN4L3zU

Not sure if irony but cubit means a unit of length from an elbow to the end of the fingers. (BTW maybe that’s why people think giants were 100 cubits tall, when in fact the text said they were a group hundred hands strong)

It's a joke from a famous comedy routine where God tells Noah what the dimensions of the arc should be in cubits. At the end, Noah asks "what's a cubit?"

You were assuming that their industrial civilization would look anything like ours. Why do they need nuts and bolts? Why couldn’t they have use some natural form of biodegradable materials?

Then they made some leaps.

Casting iron(copper) is relativly easy and powerful.

Experiment with hot things in fire and you will discover it after a while.

"Why couldn’t they have use some natural form of biodegradable materials?"

Like bones for bows and spears? Humans did that, but metal is apparently more effective and useful.

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