1. People, in general, are smarter than the ancients and civilization has progressed since then.
2. We don't know how they built the pyramids.
Either aliens built the pyramids, or we're dumber than the ancients.
2. We don't know how they built the pyramids.
Either aliens built the pyramids, or we're dumber than the ancients.
When it comes to engineering, domain knowledge is often far more important than any kind of inherent "smartness," and ancient Egyptians had thousands of years of block-stacking domain knowledge that we don't. While modern society has billions of tricks up our sleeve that would completely befuddle ancient Egyptians, I'm sure they had a handful of tricks that would catch us by surprise. Knowledge isn't strictly ordered.
Also, just because we aren't sure precisely which strategy they used doesn't mean that we didn't think of it, it just means that we can't find evidence to overwhelmingly support a single one of our hypotheses.
I spent a bit of time over the past few years really old text (some 2000 years+). Nothing in those writings suggest we are smarter than those people.
Or even take today's technology. We are in many ways coasting on the accomplishments of prior generations and very likely some of these would be difficult to recreate from scratch. I recall some rhetorical question: say we wanted to do it tomorrow, how much would it cost us in R&D to once again figure out how to get to the moon? Or, since most of us know tech, I can put it this way: how many folks on HN talking about js or ruby know how to write a kernel, or design a CPU, from scratch?
All it really takes is one genius with influence in the right ears to achieve something remarkable.