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Comment by mjd | Hacker News Reader

That's impossible, the mirror wasn't invented until millennia later, so there's no way the sculptor would have known what a human face looked like.

They must think we're stupid.

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I see some people didn't get the obvious joke.. the big joke though is that some people actually think like that. As a little boy I was into Erich von Däniken and his books about how, basically, aliens made a lot of the "impossible to make for humans at the time" artifacts. But then my, at the time, 9-year old found the part where he wrote (paraphrased) "[photo of a sculpture made to look like a skeleton] This sculpture has the correct number of ribs. This proves that they had access to X-ray machines, because without X-ray machines this is impossible."

That's when I realized the guy was a kook and it was all rubbish. He was into it for the money, btw. The "click-bait" of the time. And in my opinion Hancock is Däniken's spiritual descendant.

We’ll, that’s me convinced.

And how!

they have played us for absolute fools

So, they were all blind? They couldn't see each other? (Not to mention reflection in water).

It's sarcasm

But how can mirrors be real if our eyes aren't real?

I don't get your joke

I think he's making fun of historians that have really dumb reasons for declaring human culture is one way or another because of event X but it doesn't pass a sniff test. In this example, mirrors don't need to exist because people can look at other people (or more simply feel their own face). It was a 40% funny joke.

don't forget water and maybe oiled polished obsidian?

Not a bad guess! According to this report on my desk, it is 61%±2% funny.

I reran the numbers and it did come in at 59.5%

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