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Comment by wnevets | Hacker News Reader

> , attributing their creation to Plato's lost civilization of Atlantis over 11,500 years ago

what is with the obsession that ancient egyptians were incapable of building these monuments?

In the specific case of the Great Sphinx, there is evidence that it was an existing structure repurposed by Khafre and may have predated the rest of the Giza complex by thousands of years.

Atlantis and 11.5ky is crazy talk though.

What if they’re even older than 11.5ky? Neanderthals had larger brains and have been around for half a million years

Well that'd be quite unexpected and surprising, I'd say!

Larger brains don't mean a whole lot. Look at crows. If you do question they do have relatively big brains for their size... That's completely fair. Still, current research still hasn't proven if it's indeed causal, and not just correlated.

Someone told me that an ancient civilization got to nuclear power and destroyed the planet resetting civilization.

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.

> got to nuclear power and destroyed the planet resetting civilization

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.

If that was true then we would still be living like in the 18th century. They would have pumped out all the easily accessible oil. It's not possible to access current oil fields with 19th century tech.

So yeah - if this civilization falls - the next one won't be able to have their own industrial revolution.

The Silurian hypothesis:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis>

(Largely debunked.)

They're in Egypt, the builders would have been "Ancient Egyptians" regardless of whether that means dynastic Ancient Egyptians or a pre-dynastic "lost civilization". That being said there are a lot of interesting unanswered questions, e.g. why are pyramids newer than the Giza complex less-sophisticated? The fact that we don't know how they are built tells you all of these are still questions completely unanswered by archeology.

Were there less laborers available after the Giza pyramids? Of course s/laborers/slaves/ would be implied. If the labor force was smaller later, would that contribute to less-sophisticated?

> Of course s/laborers/slaves/ would be implied.

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...

Why is New York Penn Station so ugly and drab compared to Grand Central even though it’s newer? Even the style of decoration is entirely different and much richer on the older and larger building.

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.

The obvious conclusion would be that Penn Station was built during a period of cultural decline, which turns out to be both true and interesting.

Indeed. For some reason this obvious conclusion doesn't satisfy the pyramid theorists, even though ancient Egypt's many periods of cultural decline and later resurgence are well documented.

the economic case is more compelling in this example. grand central is still largely the same structure that was built in 1910 at the peak of rail's dominance. penn station was demolished and rebuilt to sell air rights during a sharp decline of intercity rail ridership.

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 particular reference to Egyptians is a red herring, since nobody else built pyramids of this sort (that survive and are known). I expect that if they were located in China or Europe (and no where else), people would equally wonder how the Chinese or Europeans could have been so unique as to build something of the sort.

There are a number of Pyramids in Mexico. Unless your definition of "this type" is very narrow that disproves your point.

I don’t think it’s very narrow to note that the Pyramid of the Sun was built with stones that a single man can carry on his own. It’s impressive at half the size of the largest Egyptian pyramids, but it doesn’t really raise the question of how. They just got a lot of people to carry a lot of stones, maybe using carts or something.

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...

Some of the Pyramids were the largest structures in human history until the industrial age. They're definitely worthy of being considered their own category.

> what is with the obsession that ancient egyptians were incapable of building these monuments?

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.

Appreciate the comment. Are you a real person?

Yes, of course. What kind of comment is this?

EDIT: to be clear, I think the idea of alien involvement in pyramids is ridiculous. I'm just answering the question.

> what kind of comment is this?

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.

> few trillion high quality tokens

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.

They are hard to find indeed. Finding them is a whole new business

I think about that Westworld line a lot. "If you can't tell, does it matter?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaahx4hMxmw

People have been doing this for millennia. It's called religion.

When people don't understand something they attribute it to a higher power.[0]

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps

Maybe because that's what they themselves believed?

Because all the evidence points to ancient civilizations building these monuments that the ancient egyptians repurposed.

Like?

Can you have links to all of this the evidence that isn't a youtube video or podcast?

The lack of tools and historical documents that explain the feat. It is hard to believe that thousands of people made these monuments simply by using "pounding stones" to extract them from quarries.

Many construction theories otherwise paint a picture of a labor environment that's almost impossible to imagine.

Not really, plenty of tools have been found and techniques have been successfully tried https://youtu.be/L3A_kItgymQ

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