Egypt's pyramids may have been built on a long-lost branch of the Nile
nature.com
nature.com
The water came most of the way up to the now seasonal lake near the pyramids there.
But also the river used to flood so there were some seasons when the water was high enough to easily transport the stone directly from Tora I assume.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ancient-egypt-shippin...
The Great Pyramid Grand Gallery locks have spots for things that roll or that rope rigging may have pulled around.
Hydrological engineering pyramid construction methods: Herodotus, Strabo, Edward J. Kunkel "The Pharaohs Pump", Steven Meyers, Chris Massey
Herodotus > Life > Early Travels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus#Early_travels
https://www.secretofthepyramids.com/herodotus :
> For this, they said, the ten years were spent, and for the underground chambers on the hill upon which the pyramids stand, which he caused to be made as sepulchral chambers for himself in an island, having conducted thither a channel from the Nile.
Sounds like the same story for the Osireion, according to Strabo.
There's a speculative map in "Water Transportation During Khufu Time" https://www.secretofthepyramids.com/projects/project-three-w... :
"Probable look at waterways of Giza during Khufu time" https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/600615bf2f57da...
https://www.secretofthepyramids.com/latestnews references:
"Nile waterscapes Facilitated the Construction of Giza Pyramids During the 3rd Millennium BCE." (2022) https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2202530119
Timeline of Glaciation; the last ice age ended around 11,700 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_glaciation
"Rock art indicates cows once grazed a lush, green Sahara" (2024) https://newatlas.com/science/cattle-rock-art-sahara-desert/
Ancient megalithic Geopolymer masonry made with electrodes and [Lingam,] electricity is apparently lost to modern day as well.
FWIU, in the Great Pyramid, there were/are copper rods in the shafts out from the King's Chamber, and the conductive gold at the top of the pyramid was added after construction over top of a perhaps more ancient well shaft (that is not as geomagnetically-aligned) that may have been a hydraulic/hydrologic water tunnel given the water erosion in the subterranean chamber.
Fairly, Demonstrate moving and then placing an 80 ton granite stone with ancient materials and tools: copper, gold, limestone, granite, probably fulgurite (sand glass due to lightning) and/or volcanic glass, obsidian, grain dust, papyrus rope, papyrus boats, barges, [variable buoyancy] crane machines, masonry forms and jigs, chemistry in jars, large sceptre tuning forks, sand, porous cliffs by the sea
What are the dates on the outer structure, and on the oldest largest object within the structure?
Well: Cyprus (8400 BC),
Wheel: Pillars, Potter's wheel (4500–3300 BCE), chariot (2200–1550 BCE), stone saw
Gears: Antikythera (200 BC), Watchmaking c. 1300 AD
But the boat, and things that float due to ballast or no; how old is that?
Aliens of similar height, from the tunnel and stair heights and sarcophagi.
Such as the [presumed] Sarcophagus of Senusret II - which has a pyramid built around it with perhaps newer and less precise masonry methods - which one might've hoped had contained instructions on how to produce spec granite at those tolerances back then; [1]
[1] "The MOST precisely made granite object of Ancient Egypt - and why it's NOT Geopolymer" https://youtu.be/d8Ejf5etV5U?si=4GfDTL-QSGE5mO05?t=11m30s
There is little evidence of advanced mechanical masonry tools at the time, except for the remaining megalithic stonework that later cultures built upon.
FWIU there are only a few examples of circular polishing, and the core drilling method leaves different signatures than known methods in modern day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_Merer
In fact it describes artificial basins, found in previous core samples.
Nice article about that, lots of pictures:
https://the-past.com/feature/records-of-the-pyramid-builders...
> The biggest unknown with my model is whether there was a major western Nile channel at the time, as modern authorities are split on this question.
Seems like what we have now is the discovery of a natural branch, which doesn't mean they didn't dig out useful extensions too.
The Nature article calls this branch a "tributary of the nile", which is the opposite thing to a branch. The paper says distributary (a branch). The tributaries are way to the south in Sudan and Ethiopia and Kenya.
Here's the paper:
>They said also that the first man who became king of Egypt was Min; and that in his time all Egypt except the district of Thebes was a swamp, and none of the regions were then above water which now lie below the lake of Moiris, to which lake it is a voyage of seven days up the river from the sea: and I thought that they said well about the land;
Later on
>Such is this labyrinth: but a cause for marvel even greater than this is afforded by the lake, which is called the lake of Moiris, along the side of which this labyrinth is built. The measure of its circuit is three thousand six hundred furlongs (being sixty schoines), and this is the same number of furlongs as the extent of Egypt itself along the sea. The lake lies extended lengthwise from North to South, and in depth where it is deepest it is fifty fathoms. That this lake is artificial and formed by digging is self-evident, for about in the middle of the lake stand two pyramids, each rising above the water to a height of fifty fathoms, the part which is built below the water being of just the same height; and upon each is placed a colossal statue of stone sitting upon a chair. Thus the pyramids are a hundred fathoms high; and these hundred fathoms are equal to a furlong of six hundred feet, the fathom being measured as six feet or four cubits, the feet being four palms each, and the cubits six. The water in the lake does not come from the place where it is, for the country there is very deficient in water, but it has been brought thither from the Nile by a canal; and for six months the water flows into the lake, and for six months out into the Nile again; and whenever it flows out, then for the six months it brings into the royal treasury a talent of silver a day from the fish which are caught, and twenty pounds when the water comes in. The natives of the place moreover said that this lake had an outlet under ground to the Syrtis which is in Libya, turning towards the interior of the continent upon the Western side and running along by the mountain which is above Memphis.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestals_of_Biahmu
But Herodotus just reported what he was told, like with the gold-digging ants:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold-digging_ant
Which seem to have been real (marmots). So who knows.
This account lends some credence to theories of the pyramids functioning as some sort of ram pump in my opinion. (Check out John Cadman’s work if you’re interested).
0: https://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/ancient-mysteries/a...
Humans think of rivers as static things and like to use rivers as natural "borders" and forget that these are actually organic and evolving systems.
You don't say...
How do you know that it didn’t work? What if it wasn’t a waste?
To that, so what if the "god" part was a lie?
A stable society built on an unfalsifiable lie is still a stable society.
I'm a through-and-through atheist, but I recognize the civilizing effect of order.
'Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (but epistemologically pure!) isn't a great sort of life.
Fall of Civilizations Episode 18. Egypt - Fall of the Pharaohs
Imagine back when Europe was under the thumb of the Roman Catholic church, but then it went on pretty much the same for 3,000 years. There would be some hiccups along the way, but for the normal peasant, it would pretty much be the same old same old from millennium to millennium.
If we all have the delision that you can fly with the power of your mind that is still a delusion. Because one can perform an experiment and see that you in fact can’t fly with the power of your mind.
But if we all believe that you are the eastern bunny, or the coolest dude on the planet, or the twice crowned poet laurate, those are social constructs. We believe you are the eastern bunny and that makes you the eastern bunny, and that’s no longer a delusion.
I think your hang up is that you have a set of expectations you think a “god” should fulfill, and clearly the pharao did not fulfill them. And that is an objective fact. But there is no reason to expect that the ancient Egyptians shared your expectations about what a god is.
> ensuring the Pharoah's resurrection and immortality after death
That does not sound correct. I don’t think they believed that the Pharao will walk again after he died. That is what the world “resurection” would imply. Their belief was that there is some form of afterlife where you need to perform certain rituals. The pyramids and the treasures were there to aid the pharao in peforming those rituals so he can obtain a better position in the afterlife.
Don't count on it. At times, they believed everybody would.
It's complicated because concepts varied over time, and people had maybe five or eight souls (alright, soul-aspects) and there were two or three thousand years over which this changed (sometimes for ideological reasons).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_conception_of...
> one form of the ba that comes into existence after death is corporeal—eating, drinking and copulating.
> The idea of a purely immaterial existence was so foreign to Egyptian thought ...
> the ba of the deceased is depicted in the Book of the Dead returning to the mummy and participating in life outside the tomb in non-corporeal form ...
That there similar social mechanics might be more appropriate.
And why are you hypothesizing a completely distinct experience when we're the same biological organism?
So, understanding this meaning, I hope it's quite obvious that lived experience is much different for people today than ancient people. Our technology is far more advanced, more information is available to us. And it is all influenced by the vast amount of information that is external to us which puts our first hand experience in different contexts.
re: changes. Yes things have changed. The point of the discussion is some people have asserted without argument that those differences lead to a fundamentally different concept of gods. There is no real reason to believe that that I've seen, and yet people keep pointing out that things are different as if differences in the world necessarily implies different experiences.
> The results of the DNA analyses show that Tutankhamun was, beyond doubt, the child born from a first-degree brother-sister relationship between Akhenaten and Akhenaten’s sister (see Fig. 3). ... Pharaoh Tutankhamun suffered from congenital equinovarus deformity (also called ‘clubfoot’). The tomography scans of Tutankhamun’s mummy also revealed that the Pharaoh had a bone necrosis for quite a long time, which might have caused a walking disability. This was supported by the objects found next to his mummy. Did you know that 130 sticks and staves were found in its tomb?
https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/researchers-in-museums/2018/08/16/co...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/egypt-pyr...
[0] History Channel
I also wonder how much the river moves within that flood plain. I lived in a flood plain at one point and the river even season to season seemed to "move" a noticeable amount.
Of course there were no doubt a large number of boats and only a small number of temple docks.
The type of wood used maters, some wood rots much faster than others. Boats would have been made from rot resistant wood since they are in the water. I wouldn't be surprised if they used any old wood for the piers since the water course and floods mean the piers need to be rebuilt every year anyway - but this is pure speculation.
Many Egyptian watercraft were made not of wood but of papyrus. Where wood was utilised, it was imported from elsewhere (Lebanon, famous for its cedars, and acacia, possibly domestic in origin).
Amongst Egyptian relics, wood stands out as a high-value material reflecting its scarcity and imported status.
Other possible shipbuilding materials, not likely to have been available or widely used, would include animal skins (as with Inuit kyaks), water-proofed cloth (unlikely, though cotton was abundant), metals (unlikely), and concrete (again, highly unlikely).
Papyrus has even poorer survival characteristics as a shipbuilding material than wood, though some relics are extant.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_capture>
We know that rivers change courses, and there are both known and unknown instances of this.
Edit: "capture" above originally read "crapture".
Get your mind out of the sewer, dred...
https://theconversation.com/we-mapped-a-lost-branch-of-the-n...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx_water_erosion_hypothesi...
I think this is a common misunderstanding.
Yes, there are some who think aliens built the pyramids.
But there is an equally large group of people who think that humans pre-ice age were advanced like we are today. And when the ice age happened 12,000 years ago - that knowledge was lost.
When you then look at build sites around the world from this perceptive, structures like the Sphinx and others (like Göbekli Tepe), begin to appear much older than convention teachings might imply.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe
EDIT: for those interested more in this topic, there is a Netflix series on it (called "Ancient Apocalypse"). I can't attest to the validity of the statements made in the series, but the arguments are compelling (and not alien related).
“Current archeological evidence in the form of seals, reliefs, steles, lead strips, and wood panels, across almost one-hundred Anatolian sites, including some within 30 km of Göbekli Tepe, dates the emergence of the hieroglyphic script used to write in Luwian to the late 15th century B.C.E.,”
Göbekli Tepe was inhabited ~9500-8000 BCE, so ~6500 years before the writing examples given.
As another poster has pointed out, there may in fact be a writing system that we are just beginning to understand. So I'll have to see if there is anything I can try and learn there.
Used to be people dynamited sites to get at stuff faster (also dynamite colleague's sites to undermine them). We stopped doing that, because it was stupid and wasteful.
Furthermore protecting and stabilising the site been a major focus of recent site coordinators, especially as the site has been opened up more for public visits.
If you want faster digs, fund archeological grants so there's more money to hire more people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe#:~:text=Radiocarb....
Also note that Gobekli Tepe is neither the oldest site we know of nor unique in having monumental architecture. Even within the Tepler culture, Karahan Tepe dates earlier and I'm sure you heard of the older site of Jericho.
So yea not quite 12,000 years ago.
Advanced as in late neolithic or even early bronze? Sure, I could find that tenuously plausible. Advanced as in space age, heavily dependent on petroleum products, etc... not even slightly plausible.
Primitive people were not stupid, they just needed a lot of time to figure out things that we now think are obvious.
> Terra preta soils are found mainly in the Brazilian Amazon, where Sombroek et al. estimate that they cover at least 0.1–0.3%, or 6,300 to 18,900 square kilometres (2,400 to 7,300 sq mi) of low forested Amazonia; but others estimate this surface at 10.0% or more (twice the area of Great Britain).
I can imagine a world where electricity and batteries were developed before the mass exploitation of fossil fuels as, afaik, there's no specific technological requirement on one for the other to exist.
Well of course the start of it predated the mass adoption of steam engines, but as I understand it the start is generally considered to be when steam engines were first put to use pumping water out of coal mines, that water then being used to flood canals to transport the coal. That synergy was incredibly powerful, making cheap coal available in cities which allowed urban populations to rapidly grow, providing a workforce for the factories which would eventually (not initially) also be coal powered. That's the industrial revolution as I learned it.
I think we forget how many more people there are now compared to just 100 years ago. At -5000, there is an estimated 5M people. There's more than 1000x more people now. Per capita carbon footprint would be quite wild to leave any kind of mark on the planet with a total human population that is smaller than a single modern day mid sized city.
(Data is from worldometers.info/world-population)
Another is the plants and animals they used for food. Why are some plants and animals still indigenous to certain areas, assuming there was a small globe spanning civilization at some point in the last million or so years? Shouldn't this civilization have at least brought the crops and livestock to other areas of the globe they visited?
In this view, archaeologists "know" that he's really on to something, but refuse to look closer. He's claimed to have been "banned" from Egypt (which might even be true, I don't know). The whole vibe is this is the truth that THEY don't want you to know.
Im not convinced he's correct, but that doesn't make his stuff invalid. He's basically just presenting an alternative interpretation of the data and academic archeology is vilifying him for it, which they've done to several people before who ended up being right.
Of course in his shows he presents everything as fact, just like every other science does.
That is problematic though, because genuine science is never/should never be presented as fact unless it's irrefutable. I'm fairly sure that's one big reason why he comes in for so much criticism, aside from any questions about the veracity of his ideas.
I've only seen one of his shows, but he didn't present anything in it as facts except actual facts.
tl;dr: The evidence is simply not there, and real archeology is much, much more interesting.
When the subject is brought up anywhere with experts it is usually dismissed with a bunch of ad-hominem attacks which is just not helpful for anyone trying to learn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DL1_EMIw6w&t=33m20s
Not that those who challenge the status quo can also turn into bullies later in life, once their paradigm is established.
This is well exposed in the first part of America Before (one of Hancock's book)
>At the outset of the twentieth century many scholars took the view that the Americas had been devoid of any human presence until less than 4,000 years ago.
>[...]
>the most influential figure in disseminating and enforcing the view that the New World had only recently been populated by humans was a frowning and fearsome anthropologist named Aleš Hrdlička
>[...]
>throughout the 1920s and 1930s compelling evidence began to emerge that people had reached the Americas thousands of years earlier than Hrdlička supposed. Of particular importance in this gradual undermining of the great man’s authority was a site called Blackwater Draw near the town of Clovis
>[...]
>The Smithsonian sent a representative, Charles Gilmore, to take a look at the site but—perhaps unsurprisingly under Hrdlička’s malign shadow—he concluded that no further investigation was justified.
>[...]
>Anthropologist Edgar B. Howard of the University of Pennsylvania disagreed.He began excavations at Blackwater Draw in 1933, quickly finding quantities of beautifully crafted stone projectiles with distinctive “fluted” points
>[...]
>Before and after 1943, the year in which both Howard and Hrdlička died, further discoveries of fluted points of the Blackwater Draw type—increasingly referred to as “Clovis points” after the nearby town of that name—continued to be made. This ever-accumulating mass of new evidence left no room for doubt and even the most stubborn conservatives (Hrdlička excepted) were eventually forced to agree that the Clovis culture had hunted animals that became extinct at the end of the last Ice Age and that humans must therefore have been in the Americas for at least 12,000 years.
>[...]
>a consensus soon began to emerge that no older cultures would ever be found—and what is now known as the “Clovis First” paradigm was conceived. We might say, however, that it was not officially “born” until September 1964. That was when archaeologist C. Vance Haynes, today Regents Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Arizona and a senior member of the National Academy of Sciences, published a landmark paper
>[...]
>because of lowered sea level during the Ice Age, much of the area occupied today by the Bering Sea was above water, and where the Bering Strait now is, a tundra-covered landscape connected eastern Siberia and western Alaska. Once over the land bridge, however, it was Haynes’s case that the migrant hunters could not have ventured very far before confronting the daunting barrier of the Cordilleran and Laurentide Ice Sheets
>[...]
>Tom Dillehay, professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, began excavations at Monte Verde in southern Chile in 1977 and found evidence that humans had been present there as far back as 18,500 years ago.
>[...]
>Tom Dillehay’s most dogged and determined critic, perhaps predictably, has been C. Vance Haynes, whose 1964 paper launched the Clovis First theory and who by 1988 had used his influence, and his outreach in the scientific journals, to dismiss every case thus far made for supposedly pre-Clovis sites in the Americas.
>[...]
>Indeed by 2012 the bullying behavior of the Clovis First lobby had grown so unpleasant that it attracted the attention of the editor of Nature, who opined: “The debate over the first Americans has been one of the most acrimonious—and unfruitful—in all of science. … One researcher, new to the field after years of working on other contentious topics, told Nature that he had never before witnessed the level of aggression that swirled around the issue of who reached America first.
Graham and a real historian recently did a debate on Joe Rogan where Graham did not come off well.
Because you're trying to 'learn' from an unreliable source spouting fiction. It's like someone learning homeopathy being frustrated that doctors dismiss it with passion.
It’s hard to take this debunking serious when the very 1st point he makes about Graham is incorrect.
He states that Graham claims to be a researcher.
https://youtu.be/-iCIZQX9i1A?t=139
In the Netflix series, Graham doesn’t not. He makes it clear he’s not a researcher nor archeologist. He clearly states he’s an investigative journalist.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=19&v=DgvaXros3MY&feature=youtu...
—-
And then the YouTube host roots his show on the scientific method with the question “How do you prove there was an ancient civilians”.
This is the wrong root question.
The root question should be “How did ancient civilians create these structures using the technology we believe they had at the time”. Or said differently, “how did civilians not use more advance technology than we believe they had”
(Which is only bronze tools and no existence of the wheel)
No, he doesn't state that at all. This is what Milo says, verbatim: "He is a person that some may call a researcher. I am one of those people. More predominantly than that, Graham Hancock is a writer."
> The root question should be “How did ancient civilians create these structures using the technology we believe they had at the time”.
That's an interesting question, but it's essentially an endless one: we will never, ever know how ancient civilizations created everything they created, because their secrets have been lost to time. Human history is so deep and the evidence so porous that we simply will never run out of questions to ask about how they did what they did. Furthermore, even when we come up with ways they might have created things, we may never, ever know whether that's really what they did, because the evidence is not there anymore. There are medieval and later items which we don't really know how were created, but we do know, for sure, that they didn't have power tools.
For instance, what was Greek fire, exactly? There are lots of good ideas, Wikipedia suggests "it may have been made by combining pine resin, naphtha, quicklime, calcium phosphide, sulfur, or niter." Will we ever know which? Maybe, but probably not.
Yet no one disputes that archeologist have found remains of people from 200,000 years ago.
That right there debunks his “debunk” show.
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/13/1072867405/scientists-determi....
Graham Hancock asserts that there was a globe-spanning single culture with advanced technology ~12,000 years ago. That's a big, specific claim! Of course there were people around during the Younger Dryas, Hancock is making a bunch of claims about what people were doing at that time.
Milo is saying there wasn't a globe-spanning civilization with a shared culture and advanced technology existing during that period, not that there weren't people (are you perhaps confusing the words "civilian" and "civilization"?)
Seriously, keep watching for more than a couple minutes: does he at any point say "of course Ancient Apocalypse isn't real, humans didn't exist back then"? That would be a very short video.
I found this channel and couldn't get more than 30 minutes. He starts off well saying that he didn't want to dismiss it all as nonsense but that doesn't last long. So yeah, If you want to watch someone ridicule an alternative theory that has been presented, or present commonly accepted theories as matter of fact, then sure, great channel.
https://www.space.com/ice-ages-on-earth-could-humans-survive
Ice ages are comprised of glacial and interglacial periods. The Last Glacial Period is... a glacial period. We're currently in an interglacial. But still an ice age, since there's ice at the poles (for now anyway).
The thing that sells me, besides the erosion, is the absolutely astonishing artifacts that were left behind. There is no way I could be convinced that hand-driven bronze tooling was cutting diorite to a precision we would struggle to meet today, carving schists so thin you can see light pass through, absolutely perfect symmetry, and creation of granite stoneware with multivariate surface geometry that we'd be unable to do without a precision-destroying tool change.
I find the tool marks on the partially excavated obelisk in Aswan particularly compelling. It's like they had technology that could scoop granite like warm ice cream.
One person doing somewhat interesting research here and other ancient sites is Ben from Uncharted-X. He brings a lot of first-hand content and analysis of areas many can not access, though it is pretty light on conclusions (probably for the best).
As an example, this geometric analysis of a pre-dynastic vase carved from granite belies the capabilities of a forgotten generation of this planet's inhabitants: https://unsigned.io/log/2023_02_24_Initial_Geometric_Analysi...
The explanation is pretty simple: with sufficient effort and skill, it's possible to produce extraordinary works of precision. You cannot underestimate what people can do with sufficient patience and expertise.
However, each artifact is going to be different, because they're hand-made. If you found half a dozen objects that matched each other to extreme precision, you'd have a more serious case- that's the sort of thing you expect to need machine tools for.
One very good way to debunk this stuff is to look at the best stuff that came out of the Renaissance: we know, for certain, that they weren't carving that stuff with power tools.
There were thousands of vases like this found beneath the bent pyramid.
Archeology and Paleontology have evidence for things millions of years ago, yet do not have evidence for Ancient advanced civilizations.
Many astronomers and physicists have engaged in speculations about extraterrestrial life. They also use some radio telescope time for SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) projects.
Here's some still photos and captions: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lostempires/obelisk/cutting.ht...
The thing that made Ancient Egypt so special and so historically significant isn't that they had amazing technology. It's that they built a coherent culture, religion, language and government. The vast construction projects they undertook were achievable because they could field massive armies of laborers and keep them provisioned for years. They built these massive structures by dint of having lots of food and secure borders.
He cuts it pretty sharp here. And then shows a technique for smoothing imperfections. Also a lot of the stones weren't actually cut perfectly. Only the ones that were on visible surfaces. The technique was probably slow and laborious, but the Egyptians had huge numbers of workers and they spent years or decades on projects.
I'm not sure what the counterargument even is. If the Sphinx was built using super ancient metal tools, where are they? And how did Egyptians make granite carvings all over their empire over the span of millenia? They obviously knew how. We know it's possible. We just don't know for sure how they specifically did it and maybe never will.
It was only a few years ago that we solved the mystery of Roman concrete.
The pyramids are almost entirely made of limestone. Limestone is around a 3.5 on the mohs hardness scale.
The scale goes up to 10 (diamond).
Granite (king's chamber, sarcophaguses, plugs) is around 6, 6.5.
Guess what's above that? Quartz. AKA your common desert sand.
World of Antiquity has debunked several unchartedx videos, including the supposed spiral striations. https://youtu.be/n_NguZUDku4 https://youtu.be/Wcl82hQr8xc
"Advanced" can mean a couple of different things. I think your comment and Graham Hancock's stuff is using it in the sense of "technologically advanced", i.e., access to earth-moving equipment or something.
But there's also "advanced" in the sense of "ability to reason", and that's much more interesting to think about!
I think there's a tendency in the modern perspective to equate technological advancement with intelligence, and so we (laypeople and dilletantes especially) tend to think of these long-ago cultures as being sort of comprised of primitive people because they built primitive things, by modern standards. Writing systems, technology, politics & governance, math, chemistry, mechanical systems, metallurgy and materials science, medicine -- minor periodic and localized variations aside, all of these were pretty darn primitive, near as we can tell, and so the people must have been, too.
But maybe advanced people do primitive things because the process of developing technology takes a long time. Think about everything that's required to reliably produce steel; maybe a prerequisite for steel is 10,000 years of agriculture.
The "Primitive Technology" channel on YouTube is a great case study. We have an individual who has access to modern knowledge and technology, but re-producing it is extraordinarily laborious and he's still in the mud hut phase of development -- and he can escape that time period at any time to get access to modern medicine and a rich, nutrient-dense diet.
I think this might be a strong argument against ancient technologically advanced civilizations (and alien claptrap). It's unlikely that things really developed that much out-of-order because it just takes too dang long to develop all the steps between basic agriculture and powered machinery. It's kind of like that counter-argument against the "moon landing was a hoax" nutters: in 1969, we didn't yet have the film technology required to fake a moon landing. It was easier to get on a rocket to the dang thing! We knew it could be possible to fake it, but we didn't have the tools to do it, yet.
So, it's fun to think of past cultures and neolithic humans as being basically us, in terms of intelligence and reasoning and capability, but without any of the modern affordances we have now.
All that said, I do tend to be sort of a Graham Hancock apologist. My take is that most people go too extreme with him. They either think he's a crackpot loony who must be taken at face value and debunked as a purveyor of pseudoscience OR they think he's a rebel truthteller: the only one who will look at the real facts, bravely pushing through the corrupt academic swamp.
It seems obvious to me that he's neither. He's just an author who stumbled on a compelling, mind-expanding idea. Roughly stated: what if we know less about the past than we think, and thus underestimate our ancestors? I think the interesting thing about Graham Hancock's spiel has nothing to do with any of his specific pieces of archaeological evidence that he digs up, which are very clearly marshaled to make a point he has already decided on making. (This is bad science, 100%.) Rather, the thing he brings to the table is more like a philosophical approach that is genuinely fresh and interesting. And I do think he will one day be vindicated in some way, because we act like we have way more precise knowledge about the past than we actually do. This is sort of an epistemology thing, so appealing directly to the evidence and the current anthropological understanding isn't really engaging with him in good faith. He's pointing out that the Troys of history prove that we consistently overestimate how completely we've understood history and what is and is not reasonable. Over time we tend to acclimate to that picture, and then the problem multiplies, because we tend to only accept things that seem to fit with the now-banal-seeming history we already know, leading to even more banal hypotheses gaining traction. Some of his best writings relate to the systematic bias against catastrophism that existed, and showing how these types of errors in epistemology lead to actual errors of science down the line.
Hancock isn't just wrong, he's a fraud. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/z8p83b/is_th...
Evolution has been ongoing on humans the whole time we've been a species. Drinking milk in adults has only been a capability we've had for ~6000 years. I'd be hard pressed to claim that there haven't been other capabilities that have evolved over that time that led to our ability to have more social organization.
The adaptations for social organization seemingly have been with us for a long time. AFAIK humans have been in large groups for a very long time, as long as they have been homo sapiens (Large being over 50 members, and take that with a grain of salt, that is only my possibly incorrect understanding).
I do find it very plausible that people 1k, 10k, 50k and maybe even 200k years ago were all smart (Plato probably is far smarter than most alive today). Though, smart and education are different, while smart- the body of knowledge was limited.
Also relevant: lactose tolerance is something we start out with, babies need it. So lactose tolerance, or more properly lactase persistence, was not the development of a brand new trait out of nowhere, it was maintaining a capability past the age where it would previously degrade out of functionality.
-----------------------
Long answer:
## Natural Selection / Lactose Tolerance (as an example of a very recent adaptation) / Why the discussion is so far incorrect
In my first reply, I notice now a big flaw. Having an adaptation be present in a population for 6000 years does not mean it took that time to evolve it. (According to [3], the adaptation has become prevalent in 20k years rather 6k)
To frame what we are discussing, I hope we can all agree: mutations are happening all the time and in aggregate we each individually carry a vast quantity of genetic differences/mutations apart from every other individual.
For lactose tolerance, really what we are talking about is more natural selection. At least I think we are. As an example, a population can change very quickly via natural selection if an event kills off everyone that is missing a mutation. That perhaps 1% mutation suddenly becomes the surviving population. (For completeness, I'll mention that this process can happen more slowly as well over time, but it can depend on single mutations, aggregates of mutations, and environment and random luck [eg: asteriod] are all factors). This is to say, there could have been plenty of lactose tolerant people well before. This NPR piece on the history of lactose tolerance states it well [3] "But now that doesn't happen for most people of Northern and Central European descent and in certain African and Middle Eastern populations. This development of lactose tolerance took only about 20,000 years — the evolutionary equivalent of a hot minute — but it would have required extremely strong selective pressure."
What's more though too, nothing is to say that natural selection always works to favorably select genes. EG: The village idiot might be the only one immune to the plague. It's way complex of course since there's so much variation between every individual, but I just wanted to underscore that natural selection is a function of individual, time & place. Sometimes some mutations are useful, other times they are not and are dumb luck of what is left over from some time before.
--------------------
## Brain Size & Human Cognition
With the issue of natural selection out of the way, what I do wonder is how long it took for the brain to get the way it is today. According to this resource, The Smithsonian [1], the answer is approx 7M years, with most of that happening in the last 2M years until 200k years ago. That is in terms of 'size' (does not account for wrinkles).
According to 'newscientist' [2], the shape (now talking wrinkles here) of the human brain today is very similar to what it was 160k years ago, and has not really changed since. The resource mentions that the biggest changes since then have been in how our faces look rather than how our brains are shaped. Those changes are specifically smaller jaws: "Faces in modern humans are far smaller, with subtler indentation, than those of their ancestors. Studies show that this change accelerated when hunter-gatherers became agriculturalists around 12,000 years ago and ate softer foods, probably due to less loading on the skull from chewing."
Summing up, given that brain shape has been about the same for the last 160k years; it's plausible that is how far it goes back for people that felt & thought about exactly the same way we do today. If anyone knows about more research around the rise of human cognition on this topic, I'd certainly like to learn more.
[1] https://humanorigins.si.edu/human-characteristics/brains
[2] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2331652-shape-of-human-...
[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/12/27/168144785/an...
Not GP, but to me, these two theories are both wildly implausible, so "think it was built by aliens" is a handy shorthand for "believes an implausible theory about the origins of the pyramids." There's zero reason not to believe the "orthodox" theory about the pyramids. There is even an actual contemporaneous written papyrus record referring to the Giza construction project [0].
> In his book Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, Hancock (2006) explored the cultural importance of shamanism and psychedelics and the idea that nonhuman entities from other realms kickstarted human culture. Hancock draws parallels between shamanic spirit journeys, narratives of fairies, and modern alien abduction accounts. Shamanism is "nonsensical to 'rational' Western minds" as it is based on "the notion that the human condition requires interaction with powerful nonphysical beings" (Hancock 2019:220). He has also discussed this idea in public presentations. In America Before, Hancock (2019) again emphasizes access to the Otherworld of souls and nonhuman entities through psychedelic "plant allies."
- http://onlinedigeditions.com/publication/?i=634462&article_i...
He was able to do a Netflix series because his son is the "Director of Nonfiction" there (https://thetvcollective.org/breakthroughleaders/industry-exp...).
So, how does saying so in a book about ancient shamans equate to an endorsement that aliens built the pyramids?
People love attacking this guy but the attacks always seem to be remarkably poor strawmen. What's so hard about believing we were smarter than acknowledged 10,000 years ago?
I'm not attacking him I'm just posting some quotes. In addition to his ideas about lost prehistoric societies influencing ancient Egyptians, he in turn believes that those prehistoric societies were influenced by aliens. I don't think this is an attack and I don't think he would disagree with this summary of his beliefs.
> I am quite clear, however, having spent more than quarter of a century walking the walk across many of the most intriguing ancient archaeological sites on earth, and digging into ancient texts and traditions from all around the world, that NO ancient archaeological site and NO ancient text or tradition that I have yet come across provides persuasive evidence for the “ancient astronaut hypothesis”.
> ... My own view is that all of the anomalies of history and prehistory pointed to by advocates of the ancient astronaut hypothesis are far better and more elegantly explained as emanating from a lost, advanced HUMAN civilization of prehistoric antiquity than from high-tech alien visitors from another planet.
So, you just made that up, even though he expressly says the opposite on his own website. Why would you do that?
0 -https://grahamhancock.com/ancient-aliens-or-a-lost-civilizat...
> Shamanism is not confined to specific socio-economic settings or stages of development. It is fundamentally the ability that all of us share, some with and some without the help of hallucinogens, to enter altered states of consciousness and to travel out of body in non-physical realms - there to encounter supernatural entities and gain useful knowledge and healing powers from them.
- Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind
Here's a whole book about these supernatural beings who assisted primitive humanity: https://grahamhancock.com/visionary/.
I do think it's different than the "ancient astronauts" theory, but anything living that isn't from Earth is an alien, so entities from other realms clearly qualify.
Edit: Sorry, rereading the thread I see the misunderstanding, you are right that he doesn't think aliens were involved in building the pyramids specifically and I didn't mean to imply that. I'm just saying that he thinks aliens were involved in the general development of the human species.
That's still a gross mischaracterization of his stance, I think.
It sounds like you've never had a psychedelic experience yourself? If you had, I think you'd find it much easier to believe there's something to the 'stoned ape' theory. Especially when you realize that basically every culture ever - I know of no exceptions - has developed some way of leaving their normal state of reality.
And that's not untrue, so why do you think you've proved Hancock a liar?
We owe these traditions an astonishing unacknowledged debt, and the people telling us so are ferociously attacked.
It's a shame. And it will change.
I can confidently say after more than 16 years of listening to his talks, reading and re-reading his books and listening to the shifts of his emphasis, that he is full of shit in regard to his many hypothesis regarding some ancient culture pre-ice age that was the Ur-culture and is responsible for building lots of things in lots of places that we now falsely attribute to other civilisations.
When you get really into to him, the problem is he isn’t even internally consistent. In fingerprints of the gods he’s all into these things, then in heaven’s mirror he’s all going Gaga first on Ur-maps and then on fixed ratios/SI units and in the sign and the seal he’s pandering ultimately to the Masonic Lodge.
It is so convenient that these civilisations would have had, in his estimation, to have the sophistication and technology level of the 20th century, but left behind only artifacts that in many instances ended up getting ‘claimed’ by other civilisations. Give me a break.
The archaeological establishment: "Lynch this fucker!"
But this might be fun... You do know the difference between evidence and proof though, right?
I'll go look at the most recent article on his website [0], and we'll see if there's evidence presented, or if he "provides no evidence at all"...
To avoid bias - and save time, because I'm doing your research for free - I asked ChatGPT to examine whether he provided evidence or not:
...
Evidence Provided by Graham Hancock
Cultural and Archaeological Evidence:
Hancock frequently references archaeological findings and scientific studies to support his theories. For example, he discusses the discovery of ancient human remains in California dating back 130,000 years, which challenges the conventional timeline of human migration into the Americas.
Comparative Analysis:
He often draws parallels between distant cultures to suggest the existence of a lost ancient civilization. For instance, he points out similarities between the spiritual beliefs of ancient Egyptians and Native American mound builders, arguing that these cannot be mere coincidences and suggesting a shared heritage from a forgotten civilization.
Scientific Studies:
Hancock cites recent studies and technologies, such as LIDAR, which have uncovered large, ancient geoglyphs and cities in the Amazon, suggesting advanced pre-Columbian civilizations that were previously unknown.
Historical Documentation:He references historical texts and accounts from early archaeologists and explorers, such as the work of Flinders Petrie and Margaret Murray in Egypt, to support his claims about the existence of older and technologically advanced civilizations.
Analysis of the Evidence
Pros:
Innovative Perspective:
Hancock provides a fresh look at ancient history by challenging established narratives, which encourages further investigation and discussion.
Detailed References: His works are often well-documented with footnotes and references to scientific studies, which lend a certain level of credibility to his arguments.
Cons:
Interpretation of Evidence: Critics argue that Hancock often selectively interprets evidence to fit his theories, sometimes ignoring data that contradicts his views .
Speculative Nature: Some of his conclusions are speculative and not universally accepted by the academic community, relying heavily on what some consider circumstantial evidence.
Conclusion
While Graham Hancock does provide evidence to support his claims, the validity and interpretation of this evidence are often contested. His approach is not always balanced, as he openly admits to focusing on evidence that supports his alternative historical narratives. Readers must critically evaluate his claims and consider the broader academic consensus when interpreting his work.
...
Summarizing: At least 4 different types of evidence are regularly laid out. Benefits to his approach include encouraging fresh investigation and discussion, and the cons are acknowledged by Hancock himself.
I'm no Hancock fanboy - I've seen one show of his. But I've seen the way he gets attacked and it's so often so dumb. It reminds me of how people attack Assange and Snowden, or RMS, or Jared Diamond: surprisingly emotional, personal, venomous, and more often than not completely made up (as in this case).
Will you concede that he has no proof, only conjectures and that big archelogy are not out to get him? I'll leave this for your viewing pleasure, let me know what you think. https://youtu.be/IeIj_rNYhCU
I don't need to, because I never claimed he had proof, and neither did he. He is always very upfront about that fact.
> and that big archelogy are not out to get him
But they are. Look at all the comments in this thread accusing him of things he isn't doing; putting words in his mouth; completely inventing beliefs that he doesn't actually hold - where did all that come from?
> I'll leave this for your viewing pleasure
... A 2 hour video nitpicking a Joe Rogan interview? I'll pass, sorry bud. Maybe if I get really bored later, but I hope to have better things to do.
I'll leave you with this: We have bone flutes that are 50,000 years old that use a pentatonic scale. Reconstructions of the Divje Baba flute can be seen played on YouTube (2 mins long, not 2 hours).
You can claim those perfectly circular, perfectly placed holes are animal bites, but there's other examples confirmed to be >30k years old, also using a perfect pentatonic scale. If you understand how music works, you know that's insane.
You could play modern pop songs on these flutes. Saying that there isn't any chance of an advanced civilization older than 10k years just doesn't seem credible to me, and the insistence from 'big archaeology' that it's impossible is not to their credit.
I guess I am big archaeology then, somehow.
Having a very hard time understanding how a bone flute equates humans having forgotten advanced technology in the past. I don't think anyone here disagree that modern humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years and have made artifacts like this in their spare time and created bespoke tools to create them that have been lost.
Conjecture, yes. Conjectures drive inquiry and investigation, especially when linked with evidence. They serve as starting points for scientific research and exploration.
Ignoring interesting conjectures despite the evidence is a foolish, and a mainstream historical pastime. If we let that be an end of it, we wouldn't understand evolution, germ theory, plate tectonics, or heliocentrism.
Someone always puts the idea out first, lays out their evidence, gets roundly mocked by people who feel threatened... And years later, building on their work, someone finds proof of the idea (or, tbf, sometimes disproves it in an interesting way).
> I guess I am big archaeology then, somehow
I really have no idea why you would say this. Are you feeling personally attacked here or something? Have you forgotten that you are the one that first brought up this term?
> Having a very hard time understanding how a bone flute equates humans having forgotten advanced technology in the past.
Then you don't understand music, technology, humans, or Hancock's argument. Creating such an instrument requires a massive degree of understanding. It suggests symbolic thought, cultural sophistication, planning, and multi-generational knowledge sharing. And it demonstrates that 'modern humans' were not the only game in town, because the Divje Babe flute likely wasn't made by homo sapiens, but by neanderthals.
> I don't think anyone here disagree that modern humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years
Lol... Now most people would agree, but not long ago you'd have been treated just as Hancock is for suggesting so.
And again, the flute was probably made by Neanderthals.
For centuries, the archaeological establishment, influenced by outdated notions such as phrenology, underestimated Neanderthal cognitive abilities and cultural sophistication. Suggesting they were smart enough to make a flute would get you ridiculed by 'big anthropology'.
... I read 20 minutes of the transcript of that YouTube transcript you suggested, and it's really bad. Woeful stuff.
It's an obvious smear job: Someone could make a 1 hour video detailing the rhetorical bs Professor Miano uses in that 20 minutes. It's all there - hypocrisy, projection, ad hominems, insinuations, gish galloping, straw-man arguments, appeals to authority. Honestly how do people fall for this stuff?
He spends the first 3 minutes attacking Hancock's character, then says "I'm sure he's a nice guy, I'm only attacking his rhetoric". He then says a bunch of stuff that Hancock supposedly does, without any reference to evidence whatsoever. He does everything that he accuses Hancock of doing, without a hint of self awareness.
It feels like an elaborate prank on his audience, and I'd believe it was; if only for the fact that I know people do this all the time when they feel their worldview/career is threatened.
For a final time, I hope - Hancock is clear and upfront that he is making conjecture (with evidence). He doesn't claim to have proof. He delineates between evidence and conjecture, and no one in this thread has provided a counter example - only put words in his mouth. Watch for that in your video: look at the first 20 minutes and make a note every time Miano tells us what Hancock thinks or does without any reference to actual fact. You might be surprised.
> Flat earth theories also have evidence
So you're not just confused about the difference between evidence and proof, but also the difference between evidence and disproved claims. How fun! Everything that doesn't have direct proof and mainstream consensus is now on the same level as the flat earth theory, amazing!
> psuedoarcheology grifters
Hancock disagrees with the archaeologocial community on like, one point. Maybe two.
His 'grift' is to write interesting books about a very intriguing idea - wow, what a huckster piece of shit.
Your criticism says more about you than about Hancock, Hikikomori. It's very uncool to attack people like this without bringing any actual evidence for your claims, English as a second language or no.
Neither has any proof. Both have flimsy evidence and only conjectures (Opinion or judgment based on inconclusive or incomplete evidence; guesswork). Both are anti science and anti establishment and believe them to be hiding or stopping the truth from coming out to protect their sweet academic/science jobs. And both are pushed by people that make money from it, ie grifters.
See for instance the argument put forth by Hancock about network of ancient "highways" connecting cities in the amazon. Nonsense until lidar expose them:
https://thedebrief.org/2500-year-old-network-of-elusive-anci...
The problem is when things are ignored because they are inconvenient and you settle on attacking the individuals to the point where if you do not 100% believe in what the Egyptologist say then you must be an ancient aliens believer.
I'm sure some people are motivated by such a belief but ancient aliens is the same as giving up and saying that god did it, it does nothing to get you closer to understanding anything, if anything it gets you infinitely farther since in your eyes there is nothing to figure out.
what is with the obsession that ancient egyptians were incapable of building these monuments?
Atlantis and 11.5ky is crazy talk though.
I guess with enough mind altering (diminishing) drugs anything is possible.
Idk why it’s always these wacko types who are into this kind of ancient history. It’s annoying.
don't even know why they need to get that far. we already know the younger dryas was a time period of extreme climate swings and natural disasters with purely natural causes. a civilization existing before that time could have been advanced without needing to have achieved nuclear. plus its pretty trivial to prove that no prexisting civilization made it to the fossil fuel era. never-mind NUCLEAR age.
So yeah - if this civilization falls - the next one won't be able to have their own industrial revolution.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis>
(Largely debunked.)
It's part of the broader new age movement. It coincided with the rise of commodification of the identity, individualism of the 80s and 90s, and the self-care movement. People express beliefs in a higher power as a way of dealing with many things, and many new age people look either to the stars or into "other dimensions" (whatever that means) for these higher powers.
I'd also like to point out that although you could view this as being cynical about the capacity of humanity, you could also view this as hope that someone will save us from ourselves. You can also see this in political belief with eg posadism (where dolphins/aliens elevate us after we destroy ourselves with nuclear warfare and recuperate by turning to communism, which to be fair is also basically the plot of star trek) or the belief that a free market expresses superhuman collective rationalism that will save us from individual failings.
EDIT: to be clear, I think the idea of alien involvement in pyramids is ridiculous. I'm just answering the question.
It's part of a broader new new age movement. The race to the bottom in the quality of online comments made any informative content immediately suspect of being produced by LLMs which got trained on the few trillion high quality tokens that are encoding all human knowledge.
Where are these high quality tokens you speak of? In the dark net?
Maybe my input filters are set incorrectly but I don't see too many myself. And I'm fairly sure most of the tokens I write are not up to training qwuality.
When people don't understand something they attribute it to a higher power.[0]
Many construction theories otherwise paint a picture of a labor environment that's almost impossible to imagine.
Not if you want to be accurate: https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/were-the-egyptian-pyram..., https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/who-built-the-..., https://www.worldatlas.com/ancient-world/were-slaves-used-to...
Could it simply be a question of society’s priorities and resourcing? Nah. After all the Americans were a fairly primitive culture primarily known for hamburgers and baseball. Most likely Grand Central was built by aliens or an older Native American culture.
I guess demolishing an iconic building could itself be evidence for cultural decline, but stuff like TWA flight center was being built at the same time. the dollars followed the passengers.
The Egyptian pyramids easily make one wonder “How did people move such large stones?” I could never move those with strength alone. Some form of technology / leverage / something was needed for the Egyptian pyramids which wasn’t needed for the American ones.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Comparis...
it has some implications on when exactly these things were really built if it would be true. the height of the water which did that would be quite preposterous, too.
In Napoli, there's a set of pretty old (>300 years, I'd guess?) apartment buildings in the historic center, where if you view the buildings and curvature of the street from the sky or google maps, make a clear C shape.
The foundation of the buildings is a repurposing of a roman amphitheater. By the time that they began to convert the bottom 10 ft of the amphitheater into the basement of the homes, the amphitheater had been unused for centuries and the remaining high-quality building material had already been scavenged and repurposed for construction elsewhere in the city.
Naples, and many other "ancient" european cities that are still places inhabited majority by working people, are full of examples like this. It's kind of cool to see people living in a place where history is so overwhelming that it becomes banal.
Might have read it at the Colosseum, but part of it were used by one of the noble houses to construct their Palazzo in Rome. Barberini if I remember correctly.
One of the most batshit theories I've heard is it was actually a sort of water well on demand, the weight of the pyramid pushing down on an underground aquifer fed by a then-unknown branch of the Nile, forcing water up through a man-made well.
I wonder if they started looking for the missing tributary because of this theory.
Previous tombs were robbed and looted because the king was buried and forgotten and no one cared anymore. Probably helped their followers maintain power after their death too.
(purposefully not using any names, I am skeptical on the official story of who built what for who)
If true now THAT is amazing, personally I think the people in power in ancient Egypt simply rewrote their records.
Virtually no other ancient culture and its world-level marvels can make that claim
Great-Wall-of-China they basically used to throw slaves into the filler after they became too old or injured, people today are basically walking and taking photos on top of a mass-grave of horrors
(In reality the distinction between slave and employee is blurred over thousands of years and it's hard to use our words to talk about their setups. It's likely that both slave and non-slave labor (taking slave to be unpaid coerced labor) was used; just as our society uses both, either openly or discretely.)
The local church down the road from me can bring out a TON of people to work for free for various activities, and they're upset if they miss out.
It doesn't seem unimaginable that non slave locals in Egypt would be similarly motivated and even enthusiastic about working / being a part of it all.
"Prisoners with jobs" are becoming something more people know exist, as opposed to a niche dirty secret, which I think is probably a positive sign of reform rather than an indication of deeper normalization.
I imagine being common citizen back then is terrible, if only relative to my experience, but on the other hand they may have been enthusiastic to contention to an important religious activity. Really hard to know their circumstances / point of view.
They are paid but aren't they technically slaves at that point if they cannot quit?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/25/revealed-qatar...
What if pyramid workers were like that? Came and started to work, realized the insanity of it all and wanted to quit but if they did they would be killed, starved or blacklisted?
I can think of many reasons slaves wouldn’t be used for the pyramids even if they existed. Politics, availability, even worse jobs to be done, etc.
In the modern world, the population is put through 9 or more years of indoctrination during formative years to conform to a different system. Before then it was have as many children as you can, because when they become adults they can have no stronger allies than their brothers.
This book explains it extremely well and backs it up with data in excruciating detail (which you can read or skip if you're convinced early on).
People think that Malthus predicted exponential population growth, but his actual observation was exactly what the above comment described. Growth in productivity would lead to growth in population until wealth per capita reached the same point it was at before. No improvement in productivity would ever actually improve the human condition, just increase its size. Malthus was absolutely right at the time he made this observation of his so called "Malthusian trap".
The observation you make about the modern world and lower birth rates started very abruptly not long after Malthus published his findings. The industrial revolution literally invalidated what had been true for all of human civilization up to that point.
Is it slavery if the pharaoh demands each family provide 1 male for labor each year? Or each person has to spend a month on the pyramid. Or there's a famine and the only way for your family to get grain is to work on the pyramid?
Doesn't really feel like an interesting point to fixate on tbh. There was undoubtedly a huge amount of coercion since Egypt funneled a ton of resources into a useless project, and the pharaoh had to pay for it somehow. Whether it was heavy taxation that forced people into labor or starve, or explicit forced labor, eh.
> Virtually no other ancient culture and its world-level marvels can make that claim
That is a bold claim. My recollection of lots of historical instances of slavery is that slaves tended to be used in jobs that no one wanted to do, such as mining. Monumental buildings tend to involve a lot of skilled artisanal crafts--stonemasons are not something you'd be likely to trust to slave labor. There are also monuments that are constructed by cultures not known to have practiced slavery, such as Stonehenge or Norte Chico.
Slaves were used for all sorts of things in history, with different areas having different uses. However the most common use would have been farming as 95% of the economy was farming.
I do not know if the people who built the pyramids were slaves or not. I can see how different people would define slave differently and as a result get a different answer. However it seems highly likely slaves would be been known and used for many things in that area/time.
That said, I interpret a statement like "the pyramids were built with slaves" to refer to an idea that the vast majority of the workforce were slaves, as for example was the case for agricultural workers in the antebellum US south (although apparently it was roughly 6 free workers : 7 slave workers specifically in agriculture in the region, a somewhat lower ratio than I would have expected--I guess I'm undercounting the existence of non-slave agricultural lands.)
Stone for building is comparatively rare, so buildings that are dilapidated tend to see their stonework reused for new buildings. If we're talking about 4000 year-old architecture that has gone through several eras of state collapse and rebuilding, then you'd expect to see lots of reuse.
Note for example that the pyramids--even the great pyramids at Giza--are pretty thoroughly denuded of their outer casing blocks, and there are a few lesser pyramids whose outer structure have been entirely carted away.
I can't speak to evidence that slaves weren't used but we have records of wages paid to laborers and engineers.
I don't think that's a counter-argument. Depending on context, wages can be paid to slaves, too. "Being forced to work under threat of death" doesn't imply that payment wasn't made.
As a counter-counter argument (yeah, I love arguing with myself), do these records mention any payment for the costs of food and shelter in bulk? Because generally, the food and shelter for slaves is paid for by the slave-drivers, so if slaves were used, I'd expect to see a record of bulk purchases of food and shelter.
But I think others here have pointed out the larger issue at hand, "slavery" isn't a monolith. The spectrum of forced labor is pretty wide and to our modern colloquial use of the word, the builders of the pyramids weren't "slaves" in the same way that those who built the Great Wall or worked in Rome's silver mines were.
[1] https://www.history.com/news/egypts-oldest-papyri-detail-gre...
So with these mega projects, you would think that moving them away would make sense although making it much harder. Easier to think that they made a canal to deliver fresh water for the project from the nearest location of the nile which is a couple of Kilometers aways (~ 8 km).
They were made to be seen; would they not be within sight of the subjects who worshipped the Pharaohs as gods?
Buddhists and Hindus talk about “miracles” often, so why couldn’t the Pyramids be one of those miracles?
It really renders the discussion meaningless when you are trying to justify the impossible with wild theories and whatnot.
No machine today can do what they did all that time ago and yet we still talk about it like there is a practical and logical answer to it.
Just kidding, you and I both know that they are landing pads for Goa'uld starships so they probably used their tech. (Plus slaves).
Except not slaves.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/who-built-the-...
> The best evidence suggests that pyramid workers were locals who were paid for their services and ate extremely well. We know this because archaeologists have found their tombs and other signs of the lives they lived.
Look up "wallywallington" on YouTube and see how trivial moving incredibly heavy things can be with simple leverage.
They definitely can, just no one wants to pay for it. We can build massive buildings, huge bridges, bore through mountains, dam hundreds of millions of liters of water. We can stack some heavy rocks on top of each other.
On top of that, it’s my understanding that Giza pyramids were built with special cosmic alignment also.
Again, I am only throwing “outlandish” ideas in the bucket. It’s a worthwhile discussion to have in my opinion. There are plenty of stories out there about certain places in the world being “consecrated”, so why not the pyramids?
The Giza Pyramids are aligned to the cardinal directions [1] which is something that is done(ish) fairly often nowendays. Muslims often have their houses point towards Mecca [3] which requires you to build a house at a specific cardinal direction after determining it.
You're going to have to provide the special cosmic alignment, Wikipedia mentions Orion [4] as a theory and certainly we can build buildings today 3 in a diagonal line. We can definitely measure the location of the stars in Orion's constellation now better than before. But also keep in mind there are a gazillion stars in the galaxy, any 3 buildings are going to match up with some subset of them.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giza_pyramid_complex#Astronomy
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_pyramids
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_architecture#Qibla_ori...
Pyramids are a pile of big rocks. They're pretty well fitted big rocks, but engineering and construction wise they've got nothing on a Burj Khalifa, or a Millau Viaduct (below which the Great Pyramid would fit handily), or a Three Gorges Dam.
The Palace of the Parliament of Romania has a larger outer volume than the Great Pyramid, and is ~40% lighter, and is an actual building (so large it's mostly unused), and was built in just 13 years, by Romania, in the 80s.
Hell, while the Memphis Pyramid and the Luxor Las Vegas are smaller than the Great Pyramid, they're mostly usable volume, not mostly rock.
It's not that we can't build a pyramid, it's that if you have a few hundred mils lying around there are more useful and / or cooler things to build.
We usually use machines powered by petroleum to do that. I've not seen human labor used for this work in my lifetime.
First, GP claimed it couldn't be done even with machines.
Second... how's that relevant?
> I've not seen human labor used for this work in my lifetime.
First, what work, building pyramids? Because people have definitely built shit by hand in your lifetime, I can assure you.
Second, why would we do things the slower, more expensive, and more dangerous way, if we don't have to? You don't get your nonsense delivered to your readers by runners, riders, or messenger pigeons, that doesn't mean they didn't exist.
But if you want an example of human hard work in the modern era, look no further than Dashrath Manjhi. Dude hammered and chiseled his way through an entire ridge over more than 20 years.