Ancient Egyptian Stone-Drilling (1983)

but when they need precision of 1μm or better (in medieval units, 1/25000th of an "inch"), or when they're cutting materials harder than steel, they resort to grinding with stone, typically emery (sapphire) for most of the grinding, followed by polishing. poor people who don't have steel tools also commonly do this for lower-precision work in soft materials; you can find all kinds of videos on youtube of people using angle grinders for things that a well-equipped machine shop would do with a bandsaw or milling machine

similarly, to get the dimensional references to measure to, common shop work can use cast-iron straight edges. but, for more precise work, they resort to granite surface plates

the egyptians of the old kingdom clearly had granite surface plates (they built significant parts of the pyramids' interiors out of them) and grinding, though they were evidently using the inferior quartz sand as their abrasive

as for symmetry, the most likely explanation is that they used lathes; the oldest indisputable records of lathes are from new kingdom egypt, but rotationally symmetric work that seems to have been made on a lathe appears as far back as the old kingdom

with respect to granite, while i don't doubt that you can find a granite vase here and there, most ancient egyptian fine stone carvings are from much softer rocks such as schist, alabaster (gypsum), and "alabaster" (calcite)

so i would say the investigation has already been done and found convincing answers

The thing that gets me is that all of these questions can seemingly be answered with -- lots of time.

If you work slowly, and have lots and lots of people to throw at problems, nearly anything is possible.

So what?

Everything they did could be explained by mastery of use gravity, ropes, and levers. If the materials used were primarily organic in composition the tooling would be long gone by now.

The widespread use of copper for other purposes than jewelry has begun only after it became possible to produce in a reproducible way various alloys of coppers, now known as bronzes.

The tin bronze, i.e. the alloy of copper with tin, has been discovered relatively late, around 5500 years ago, close to the time when writing has been invented, so we have much more historical information about the civilizations that used tin bronze. (The much cheaper brass has been discovered only long after the method of iron extraction, during the Greco-Roman Antiquity.)

Nevertheless, for several thousands of years before, other copper alloys have been used, e.g. arsenical bronze or antimony bronze, so that is still "bronze age", even if it would be useful to differentiate between the ages of iron, of tin bronze and of other "bronzes". The Egyptian state definitely belongs to the age of the tin bronze.

> Illegitimi non carborundum

In terms of proliferation of “pseudo archeology” - whatever that is - yes, lots of people are realizing they can profit from this, so more content than ever is being created to monetize the attention capture. It’s not unlike flat earth content that people have been able to successfully monetize.

It’s not all bad, Graham is no doubt responsible for getting people interested in history, archeology, and even geology. It’s really not societies fault they are ill equipped to exercise independent and critical thinking, much less the not having the skill sets, tools and resources to evaluate the existing archeological record.

Though for the people that want to make a career out of it, I’d rather see them obtain formal educations and contribute in meaningful ways in lieu of the majority of the grifting type social media content…most people probably have the capability to become educated about the actual science and they’d also learn pretty quickly there is no vast conspiracy to hide history/prehistory as much of the monetized social media promotes.

myth: an unfounded or false notion [0]

Given that definition of "myth" I find the name "scientists against myths" to be rather redundant, wouldn't you? In what version of reality is that not the agenda of every scientist?

0. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/myth

Are there ancient structures where we are unsure what technologies were used to make them? Yes, absolutely.

Does the existence of such artifacts imply the existence of certain precursor technologies and tools used to build them? Yes, but we must proceed cautiously. Without direct evidence of the tools and technologies used we are speculating based on the results we observe, about what the means used to produce them must have been. The same result, though, can be produced in many different ways. Problems we look at today and say ‘surely that would require a machine or a powerful engine to do?’ might be solved instead by just throwing manpower at the problem, or by taking much more time to execute than we might initially assume is reasonable. And the existence of doubt about which of several historically plausible theories as to how something was constructed does not automatically mean that historically implausible theories are equally valid.

And, most importantly, does the fact that we have ‘lost’ the precise techniques used in ancient constructions leave open the possibility that those ancient techniques were actually superior to what we have today? Theoretically, but in general, no, of course not. Be very wary whenever you see someone say something like ‘the precision of these stone blocks exceeds what we can do today’. These are nonsensical claims made from ignorance about what modern engineering is capable of. Take a look just at how modern kitchen counters are cut, let alone how precisely engineered something like a modern tunnel, or the LIGO gravity wave detector was constructed.

Archeology is based on the record, so we only know as much as we have of the record. Like most sciences the archeological record is subject to new discoveries.

The problem is the way “lost civilization” and “ancient high technology” are most often used disingenuously.

For example we don’t have the exact formulas to replicate Greek fire nor Roman concrete as they were valuable secrets of the times. The equivalence of me arguing “Greek fire and Roman concrete is proof of a ‘lost high technology’ and evidence for older ‘lost civilization’ from the before the ice age, lost to a cataclysm, and mainstream archeology rejects my theories because of a vast conspiracy against amateur archeologists” then placing the burden of proof on “academics” to find evidence no such civilization exists.

I sometimes think they might have used some kind of acid (maybe in combination with sunlight) like modern https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photolithography .