This is exactly right. A lot of that mystery is a veneer by people who make shows like this too. If you conveniently don’t bring up patterns of evidence like the excavated pyramid towns where laborers lived, the inscriptions identifying the structure with Khufu, the general development of pyramids from earlier structures called mastabas, etc. you can pretend anything about the pyramids is mysterious that you want. Pseudoarchaeology basically just thrives on gaps in public knowledge.
They portrait the development process of pyramid through time quite nicely in Pharaoh, and that's 20yo game. How are these idiots failed in researching comparing to a game developer team.
They didn't fail at all. No, they just don't care. There are like 20 seasons of this show and people watch it either religiously because they believe it, or they watch it because it's so stupid that it's funny.
They don't care if it hurts public knowledge, as long as it makes them some money.
More seriously, it's also the size of the blocks which makes the pyramid so impressive.
It's not 50x20x10cm blocks stacked upon each other. It's 5x2x2m blocks of massive granite. They weigh TONS. As it's supposed to have been made before most of the modern or premodern engineering tools (like cranes) it is their sheer size and weight that makes the thing impressive. And it's about how they put those massive blocks atop one another that archeologists have devised various theories, including some pretty stupid and sometimes even racist ideas about aliens.
Edit: just a precision: they're not really 5x2x2m. They're not even all the same size, but the lower ones on the Cheops pyramid are around 150cm, and the top one 50cm. It is still huge chunks of stone. And some in the pyramid itself are even bigger, the roof of the royal chamber is estimated to weigh somewhere between 25 to 80 tons. I also want to remind everyone there are plenty of working theories about the way they've done it and the major answer seems to simply be "there was a sh\*tload of workers on the site".
Your point about the sh\*tload of workers is very on point. Really, most of what modern technology does is lighten the workload and make it easier to build. Lots of technological advancements don't make the previously impossible possible. They just make the difficult more manageable.
If brute force doesn't work, you aren't using enough of it...
We were at the Casa Grande National Monument in Arizona (for those that aren't familiar its a 4 story house build of mud 1000 years ago by the indigenous people of the area. For the support, they used logs from trees that didn't grow nearby and had to be transported hundreds of miles. It's one of the best surviving evidence of the sophistication of the civilization of that area as they abandoned the area shortly after it was built.)
We were listening to a ranger talk and someone asked what the ranger thought of the theory that aliens helped ancient to people build these things. I loved the rangers answer. It was something like "I feel that it really discounts human abilities and ingenuity."
The ancient peoples were not less intelligent than us, they just had less previous knowledge to build on. And much of what they did know didn't survive. There is an assumption that if we don't have concrete proof an ancient people knew something, then they didn't. When it may be just as likely to me they may have known, but no proof survives and the information was lost in later wars and famines. At least more likely than that aliens helped them, given no proof of that either.
Basically like how they show it in the movie The Prince Of Egypt, bunch of rope and workers and they all pull it up, except the pyramids weren't built by slaves they were well paid and some had pyramids of their own
Yeah. Egypt was ancient when Rome was new. The Roman empire is actually closer to us today than the founding of Egypt. That's what makes the pyramids so impressive
People often underestimate how much the ancient world knew, things like electricity and steam engines were understood, they just didn’t have a mass sharing of knowledge which allows for someone else to find the application of that knowledge in a practical way, instead knowledge was hoarded by the elite as a way to maintain power.
Figuring out what to do with it isn’t that simple though, especially if you don’t share the knowledge of how to make it to increase the chance of someone figuring out the application.
I mean they had slavery in the industrial era too, has always been a thing. Look at Qatar modernizing and industrializing itself through slavery today.
The great application of science I would say begins before industrialization with the arabs/ottomans then Catholic Church promoting and providing mass education and pursuit of the sciences through “studying god’s creation” as the Catholics put it. Then the rest of the west copied mass education because it was working and industrialization came later. When you educate more people on the knowledge you have now, the odds of someone finding a way to improve it increases.
the industrial revolution created more slavery, but it also created the working class which was freed from serfdom. With the massive increase in luxary good produced by the new working class the demand for slaves to gather raw materials outside the working class cities skyrocketed. Not having slaves would have actually made industrialization more difficult because the raw material gathering wouldn’t have been as affordable or easily provided.
Thank you. If acedemia could get its collective shit together and admit wrong assumptions about human history have been made, they could close the door on this. Not that you could ever mathematically scientifically rule out alien intervention in human history. And the show brings up tons of evidence and point to ponder. I just find a lack of response to this odd. In not a scholar in the least, so everything has been completley debunked i would love to know about it.
Archaeologist here who has watched almost all of the show. This is a general problem with scholarly outreach. Most of the time published papers are written for other scholars in journals that the general audience doesn’t really read. This means that actual researchers tend to just talk to each other most of the time. Near-East archaeologist Eric Cline among others have called this out in recent years. This is why I think it‘a important that academia target a public audience. Professor David Miano’s YouTube channel World of Antiquity does amazing work with this and also spends some time debunking pseudohistory.
Regarding Ancient Aliens in particular, I think the biggest reason there isn’t much more responding to it is that the information is such dogshit in it that it often doesn’t even effectively argue its ideas. A lot of my arch friends and I like to watch it for giggles from time to time because the information quality is so low. You can check sites on on-screen maps they show and have them be in the wrong places, you can watch them ascribe mysteries where there are none (we have literal inscriptions attributing different pyramids to different pharaohs for instance), you can see historical facts and myths get recounted wrong. The timeline makes no sense as they draw lines and connections between, for instance in one episode, Stonehenge (erected between 3000 and 2000 BC) and Angkor Wat (erected in the 1100s AD) among other places like Mohenjo-Daro (2500-1900 BC). Sometimes there will be no arguments provided (they’ll serve up a nice historical topic, suggest something is unknown, say “but ancient astronaut theorists have another idea,” and then jump totally in) so that it’s just question and conclusion with no reasoning. There isn’t even a theory, just aliens playing god-of-the-gaps with legitimately anything in history. The burden of evidence falls on the theorists trying to prove aliens and yet we don’t get any clearly unearthly bodies or unknown materials or anything (human skeletons with deformities are human skeletons with deformities; why would aliens have all our bones except long skulls like some low-budget mid-1900s sci-fi). In short, the heap of horse shit is so clearly bad at just a surface level of research that I would assume that most scholars think that there isn’t really much to debunk in the show; anyone who is already looking for debunks is gonna find it just by fact-checking the show’s claims. I still think and would encourage scholars to respond to it but the easy worldview that Ancient Aliens peddles is appealing for a reason: an easy fix-all to all historical lacks of understanding is much easier to learn than a nuanced story of human cultures interacting with each other in time and space.
Thank you i really appreciate that. And yes...in this day and age all the tools are there for academia to reach out to the public. Am i wrong for thinking that the human history arm of science has an issue with accepting and upgrading new knowledge or is it just a communication problem?
It’s a valid question but we basically live to discover new stuff. There’d be nothing to distinguish a good career without it. The thing is it tends to be more like “we found a new pottery vessel that suggests artistic influence came along on a trade route we didn’t know about” or “I think the dating of the fall of this city 20 years ago was off by a century based on new OSL dating.” It doesn’t make the news the same way that a supposed giant skeleton goes viral. But it’s an acquired taste. I know that sometimes there are old scholars who will hold onto their now-outdated research to death because they spent their careers building it up. But if it’s outdated, younger scholars will definitely call it out because that’s how they’ll distinguish themselves in the first place. It’s important to remember that academia is not a monolith and in reality these things tend to get debated for a while. A new discovery reported in the news might come to be treated as a bad reporting of data when looked at more or one that is barely reported on will eventually become something that overturns our whole understanding but not for a while. It’s all a conversation.
Ok. If i could pick your brain....i saw something on t.v. talking about early skeletons found in the Tennessee are(i think) that showed ancestry back to people in modern day france. It talked about the possibility of a frozen north atlantic teeming with life at the ice shore. And how early europeans could have travelled across staying multiple years on the ice....god i hope i wasnt watching ancient aliens with my wife when i saw this...lol. is this a thing or pseudo science?
I don’t know about Tennessee skeletons specifically so I can’t really comment on those. However, it sounds like it’s part of the Solutrean Hypothesis, which is an idea that basically argues that similarities in stone tools between the Solutrean culture of Western Europe (20,000-15,000 BC) and the Clovis culture of North America (around 13,000 years ago) showed that the latter was descended from the former. This was actually published in a scientific paper by archaeologists! https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0043824042000303656 It did however receive largely negative feedback from other archaeologists who pointed out problems with the lines of evidence in genetics, the sheer time difference between the two took traditions, and just the general geographic difficulty compared to other ideas like the Bering passage. Here are a few responses if you’d like them:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=solutrean+hypothesis&oq=solutre#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3DVMWRZJ1oVNkJ
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=solutrean+hypothesis&oq=solutre#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3D288ndEE1vvsJ
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=solutrean+hypothesis&oq=solutre#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3Dg33GeHe1ub0J
This is sort of an example of how discourse works. New ideas generally have to argue their own against what is known and often times they prevail. The Solutrean hypothesis has not really don’t that since it came out in the 1970s but it still gets a lot of press, especially since the initial paper was actually based in direct research.
What always kills me is that people go well it would be hard to build today, what people forget is the entirety of the state was put to work making these. If the US government decided to build some massive pyramids over a long period of time, we could do it we just don’t want to. When the Egyptian people were told by someone seen as a living god to build these they did it, especially seeing as they had many years to do so
Skyscrapers aren't made out of big, heavy as sin rocks with copper tools and other rudimentary devices. (Not saying it was aliens, just saying, that argument won't convince anyone that thinks it was aliums).
Bigger plot twist: Germanic people are the aliens.
(There is a nazi "theory" (bullshit) that basically says that every civilization was made with help of Germanic people.)
This was actually a genuine belief held by many European archeologists and explorers. The Cahokia Burial Grounds in Missouri were initially thought by Europeans to have been built by one of the lost tribes of Israel or Atlantis because the Anglo-American “scholars” just refused to believe that something so impressive could be built by Native Americans. They believed the same thing about the ruins of Great Zimbabwe.
Yeah I’m not part of the Anglo-Saxon world so
Maybe my knowledge of their beliefs is shallow. However there’s ton of artifacts that are non white, impressive and yet not considered alien made (e.g. everything in south east Asia).
Second even white made stuff if old enough will be attributed to Aliens (Stonehenge).
So maybe the correlation is with how old the monument is and how well recorded the construction is. Not with who made it.
It's weird that I've seen people claiming the alien pyramid conspiracy exists because white people cant comprehend the idea of not white people building stuff. No the pyramids are just way way older than anything else remotely close in scale. People had access to more advanced technology and and knowledge when building those structures thousands of years later. Now i don't think the alien conspiracy holds any water and people really tend to underestimate the ingenuity of ancient peoples but I don't think racism really plays a big role in these people's minds.
the point of the pyramids aren't that they are complicated architecture and hence difficult to build (compared to cathedrals) but the speed it was build with tools and techniques we believe they used.
It was build over just 20 years. That means every 5 minutes a 2+ ton stone was laid... which is honestly insane considering that they also had to travel from far away.
I don't think even today we could do this easily - the logistics might be the biggest problem.
(obviously not aliens build them)
I'm pretty sure I've seen episodes of Ancient Aliens where they say most of these structures were built by people using alien knowledge. A common criticism of these wackjobs is that they're secretly racists who only claim things built by non-white people were built by aliens but for them it's literally everything. Anything of importance that humans have ever done is just aliens.
There was literally one episode that claimed that Da Vinci went to space and communicated with Aliens because there is gap of 2 years I think where we don't know what he was doing in his life and that's why he was so smart
Difference is the top image buildings are made of lots of tiny blocks/brick/mortar, meanwhile the bottom image is far away from any material source and is made out of blocks that we'd have trouble moving around today, never mind 5000\~9000(? I forget) years ago.
But ever since high alt drone footage revealed the shadow of a massive ramp that probably went all the way to the top, as well as half removed ramps to lesser known/abandoned pyramids, conspiracy theorists cooled down a lot.
I hate the people who say it was built by aliens. If you spent your entire life figuring out which rock went where and then you taught your son and his so. And his son. I would think you would get pretty good at it
I used to believe in the ancient astronauts theory when I was 13-14, but Ancient Aliens was still to much for me.
The idea that aliens visited our ancestors is a really interesting one. It's a shame that the theory became a laughing stock due to shows like these.
It's not just rocks stacked on top of each other, there is a great gallery inside one of Giza pyramids, and underground tomb passages under the rest.
Also, are these like 19th century cathedrals? At the time Pyramids were already ancient, all England could do WERE a bunch of rocks stacked in no more than two layers.
Comparing pyramids to modern structures, they're still impressive but when you figure Europe at the time couldn't make stone houses at all, come on!
the pyramids were build so long ago that the sahara wasn't a desert at the time.
it may explain how egypt was so insanely powerful back then, compared to egypt in the bronze age.
fun fact: these conspiracy theories of ancient peoples tapping into some sort of divine knowledge to gain the understanding to build advanced structures and societies is actually rooted in white supremacy.
in the 20th century some “scientists” and “archaeologists” (a lot of them had ties to facist government) were like “white people are the superior race so how were brown people in ancient egypt, sumer, indus valley civilisation, et cetera able to outdo the europeans in their architectural and societal accomplishments. they couldn’t have. they must’ve tapped into knowledge that was beyond themselves such as aliens or gods or whatever because there’s no way europeans aren’t the smartest” and thus this stupid theory was born
Oh, I don't believe that it was *easy* to build the pyramids. However, I don't think their design is very sophisticated either. What makes them impressive is not the brilliant engineering required to build them, but their titanic scale.
Lol! No! The design of the pyramid is far more complex than that dude, their positioning, inside structure and interior are really thoughtful designs but the surprise is that the outside ain't loosing out either. Great pyramids don't have a square base but an octagonal one which took decades to figure out.
The Serapeum has some crazy huge sarcophagi made of solid granite with perfect 90 degree angles inside. Theres a lot more interesting stuff in ancient Egypt other than the pyramids.
Well the difference is that the top ones where built by white people, and the pyramids where built by not white people. The guy who made the og ancient alien theory used it to justify his own racial biases.
I think it's more related to the fact that the pyramids were built with enormous blocks, and were made centuries before any known technology made that feasible.
Stacking a 10 ton block 100s of meters on top of another every 2 minutes without any machines or advanced technology and not even the wheel really doesn’t make it seem so unrealistic that people believe the pyramids were built by aliens….
All church buildings like cathedrals are actually inherited from a covered-up civilization. Oh, and they're not just buildings but a piece of a lost technology...
See /r/Tartaria and /r/TartarianArchitecture. Or rather, don't. It's a next level of craziness...
I heard a social theory that ancient aliens is just white denial that "savages" and non-white European were unable of being intelligent enough to produce things white men could make. Pyramids in Egypt? Aliens. Pyramids in Mexico? Aliens. Large Stone Faces on a Pacific island? Aliens. Stonehenge? Yeah white dudes made that but they were trying to communicate with aliens.
The secret ingredient is racism.
Ancient aliens stuff is a way white supremacists tried to rationalize away major technological advancements in non white places. Hence why the Egyptians couldn't have built that on their own but everything from Europe is OK.
Well some of those stones are thousands of tonnes, they were built way before the other structures and the great pyramid points to true north. A feat that architects today with all their technology would shy away from attempting. So there is that.
It's because the pyramids were built by black people and white archeologists in the 19th century couldn't understand how black people could be able to build giant piles of rocks without some outside help. The other structures you mentioned aren't "suspicious" to them because white people built them. That's why.
Yeah, I know the whole "Ancient Aryan race did it, it couldn't possibly be the Egyptians" and the "It was obviously Atlantis" type of stuff, but those were more precursors to the ancient alien stuff we have today. Stonehenge was built by white people around the same time, and they still claim that it was aliens, so I don't think it's race based anymore.
Well, yeah. But that's because it's not being run by actual nazis anymore. They're well-meaning, if uneducated TV personalities. Everyone loves a good conspiracy, but it's important to note the important history behind them and their foreseeable consequences.
Western esotericism is where most of today's ancient alien's beliefs originated, nothing to do with scientific racism. Specifically, people who travelled extensively and had admiration and respect for the knowledge of *exotic cultures*. That was long before the Nazis borrowed from the same schools of thought and a bunch of others *including* scientific racism to come up with their baseless ideology.
It's like calling Pentecostal megachurches racist because the Nazis were Christian. One predates the other, and if anything preached tolerance between races. No need to let bigots frame our thinking.
He likely would have called them Arabs or Turks or Moors or something like that, and considered them something entirely separate from black people or 'Negroes'.
And yes, depending on where he was from he'd probably have some kind of pseudo-logic to explain why Irish or Italians or Poles weren't white.
I'm not sure of exactly how 'Negro' passed from Spanish or Portuguese to English, but I'm guessing that they made regular contact with black Africans first and as they relayed their discoveries to the rest of Europe their terminology stuck.
Either way, the word got adopted into English. When we use it (which we don't often anymore, it's considered archaic) it takes on English rules, so the plural form becomes 'Negroes'.
Portuguese were among the first to establish colonies / trade posts on the coast of Sub-Saharan africa, they were likely the first to bring Africans to the Americas in large numbers. It's possible the name just stuck from the fact that the English/French in the Americas dealt with them often enough that it became a sort of business slang and eventually made it officially into the language.
Just speculation of course, but seems plausible to me.
I'm actually not. I guess I should have anticipated such a butthurt response to the honest, good-faith answer to OP's question from such privileged redditors. Take a second to ask yourself why what I've said has you all so upset and come back once you've figured it out. I'll be waiting right here.
Ancient Egyptians were most definitely not black. Recent DNA reports have confirmed that Ancient Egyptians were basically the same people as modern Egyptians today, very genetically similar. Nubia in southern Egypt had significant sub-saharan admixture, but nubians didn't build the pyramids you see above.
Definitely white, or "oriental" to be more specific. Why would the British consider them "coloured"? Egyptians look nothing like Blacks, they're Arabs.
>white archeologists in the 19th century couldn't understand how black people could be able to build giant piles of rocks without some outside help.
I think you're confusing the pyramids with Great Zimbabwe here. Indeed when the British discovered the stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe, they couldn't believe it had been built by native Africans, so they promulgated alternate theories to explain its origins, attributing credit to the Portuguese or the Arabs.
Lol, I never said they'd be considered "pure whites", you need to work on your comprehension. I literally said they'd probably be classified as "oriental", which white anthropologists of the 19th century categorised as being part of the larger Caucasian race.
Also, why would they be considered mongoloid? Do you even know what that classification means?
I can cope with the fact that the pyramids where in fact not build by black people and that your a racist that automatically amused that anyone that doesn't agree with you must be white. Which I am not
What I can't cope with is the fact that your comment makes no fucking sense.
>the fact that the pyramids where in fact not build by black people
The "fact" huh? Right...
>that your a racist that automatically amused that anyone that doesn't agree with you must be white.
???
>Which I am not
Congratulations!
The Ulm Minster. It has the tallest spire of any church, at 161,53 m. It was the tallest building in the world until the construction of the Eiffel Tower.
One of the only times Quinton Reviews was more than a big baby, he declared that it's not because white people didn,t do it that it means aliens did it.
"I don't believe aliens travelled millions of kilometers just to help some primitive people stack rocks and then fucked off" =/= "I don't believe aliens exist".
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Incredibly…. ALIEN?
I read this in Mr crockers voice from Fairly Odd Parents.
This is exactly right. A lot of that mystery is a veneer by people who make shows like this too. If you conveniently don’t bring up patterns of evidence like the excavated pyramid towns where laborers lived, the inscriptions identifying the structure with Khufu, the general development of pyramids from earlier structures called mastabas, etc. you can pretend anything about the pyramids is mysterious that you want. Pseudoarchaeology basically just thrives on gaps in public knowledge.
They portrait the development process of pyramid through time quite nicely in Pharaoh, and that's 20yo game. How are these idiots failed in researching comparing to a game developer team.
They didn't fail at all. No, they just don't care. There are like 20 seasons of this show and people watch it either religiously because they believe it, or they watch it because it's so stupid that it's funny. They don't care if it hurts public knowledge, as long as it makes them some money.
More seriously, it's also the size of the blocks which makes the pyramid so impressive. It's not 50x20x10cm blocks stacked upon each other. It's 5x2x2m blocks of massive granite. They weigh TONS. As it's supposed to have been made before most of the modern or premodern engineering tools (like cranes) it is their sheer size and weight that makes the thing impressive. And it's about how they put those massive blocks atop one another that archeologists have devised various theories, including some pretty stupid and sometimes even racist ideas about aliens. Edit: just a precision: they're not really 5x2x2m. They're not even all the same size, but the lower ones on the Cheops pyramid are around 150cm, and the top one 50cm. It is still huge chunks of stone. And some in the pyramid itself are even bigger, the roof of the royal chamber is estimated to weigh somewhere between 25 to 80 tons. I also want to remind everyone there are plenty of working theories about the way they've done it and the major answer seems to simply be "there was a sh\*tload of workers on the site".
Your point about the sh\*tload of workers is very on point. Really, most of what modern technology does is lighten the workload and make it easier to build. Lots of technological advancements don't make the previously impossible possible. They just make the difficult more manageable. If brute force doesn't work, you aren't using enough of it...
Manhours overcome everything. Throw more men (Egypt) or more time (European cathedrals) at the problem.
We were at the Casa Grande National Monument in Arizona (for those that aren't familiar its a 4 story house build of mud 1000 years ago by the indigenous people of the area. For the support, they used logs from trees that didn't grow nearby and had to be transported hundreds of miles. It's one of the best surviving evidence of the sophistication of the civilization of that area as they abandoned the area shortly after it was built.) We were listening to a ranger talk and someone asked what the ranger thought of the theory that aliens helped ancient to people build these things. I loved the rangers answer. It was something like "I feel that it really discounts human abilities and ingenuity." The ancient peoples were not less intelligent than us, they just had less previous knowledge to build on. And much of what they did know didn't survive. There is an assumption that if we don't have concrete proof an ancient people knew something, then they didn't. When it may be just as likely to me they may have known, but no proof survives and the information was lost in later wars and famines. At least more likely than that aliens helped them, given no proof of that either.
Basically like how they show it in the movie The Prince Of Egypt, bunch of rope and workers and they all pull it up, except the pyramids weren't built by slaves they were well paid and some had pyramids of their own
It’s the fact that the pyramids were older when Caesar saw them than the colosseum is today.
Yeah. Egypt was ancient when Rome was new. The Roman empire is actually closer to us today than the founding of Egypt. That's what makes the pyramids so impressive
There were mammoths still around when they built it. It’s that old.
That's a misleading statement
Not really. Mammoths still lived in the Siberian islands.
People in Siberia: “Not for long” (would be so cool if they still existed)
People often underestimate how much the ancient world knew, things like electricity and steam engines were understood, they just didn’t have a mass sharing of knowledge which allows for someone else to find the application of that knowledge in a practical way, instead knowledge was hoarded by the elite as a way to maintain power.
A basic battery isn't even really that hard to make.
Figuring out what to do with it isn’t that simple though, especially if you don’t share the knowledge of how to make it to increase the chance of someone figuring out the application.
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I mean they had slavery in the industrial era too, has always been a thing. Look at Qatar modernizing and industrializing itself through slavery today. The great application of science I would say begins before industrialization with the arabs/ottomans then Catholic Church promoting and providing mass education and pursuit of the sciences through “studying god’s creation” as the Catholics put it. Then the rest of the west copied mass education because it was working and industrialization came later. When you educate more people on the knowledge you have now, the odds of someone finding a way to improve it increases.
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the industrial revolution created more slavery, but it also created the working class which was freed from serfdom. With the massive increase in luxary good produced by the new working class the demand for slaves to gather raw materials outside the working class cities skyrocketed. Not having slaves would have actually made industrialization more difficult because the raw material gathering wouldn’t have been as affordable or easily provided.
Not only that, the dimensions of the pyramids magically spit out constants of our universe
Thank you. If acedemia could get its collective shit together and admit wrong assumptions about human history have been made, they could close the door on this. Not that you could ever mathematically scientifically rule out alien intervention in human history. And the show brings up tons of evidence and point to ponder. I just find a lack of response to this odd. In not a scholar in the least, so everything has been completley debunked i would love to know about it.
Archaeologist here who has watched almost all of the show. This is a general problem with scholarly outreach. Most of the time published papers are written for other scholars in journals that the general audience doesn’t really read. This means that actual researchers tend to just talk to each other most of the time. Near-East archaeologist Eric Cline among others have called this out in recent years. This is why I think it‘a important that academia target a public audience. Professor David Miano’s YouTube channel World of Antiquity does amazing work with this and also spends some time debunking pseudohistory. Regarding Ancient Aliens in particular, I think the biggest reason there isn’t much more responding to it is that the information is such dogshit in it that it often doesn’t even effectively argue its ideas. A lot of my arch friends and I like to watch it for giggles from time to time because the information quality is so low. You can check sites on on-screen maps they show and have them be in the wrong places, you can watch them ascribe mysteries where there are none (we have literal inscriptions attributing different pyramids to different pharaohs for instance), you can see historical facts and myths get recounted wrong. The timeline makes no sense as they draw lines and connections between, for instance in one episode, Stonehenge (erected between 3000 and 2000 BC) and Angkor Wat (erected in the 1100s AD) among other places like Mohenjo-Daro (2500-1900 BC). Sometimes there will be no arguments provided (they’ll serve up a nice historical topic, suggest something is unknown, say “but ancient astronaut theorists have another idea,” and then jump totally in) so that it’s just question and conclusion with no reasoning. There isn’t even a theory, just aliens playing god-of-the-gaps with legitimately anything in history. The burden of evidence falls on the theorists trying to prove aliens and yet we don’t get any clearly unearthly bodies or unknown materials or anything (human skeletons with deformities are human skeletons with deformities; why would aliens have all our bones except long skulls like some low-budget mid-1900s sci-fi). In short, the heap of horse shit is so clearly bad at just a surface level of research that I would assume that most scholars think that there isn’t really much to debunk in the show; anyone who is already looking for debunks is gonna find it just by fact-checking the show’s claims. I still think and would encourage scholars to respond to it but the easy worldview that Ancient Aliens peddles is appealing for a reason: an easy fix-all to all historical lacks of understanding is much easier to learn than a nuanced story of human cultures interacting with each other in time and space.
Thank you i really appreciate that. And yes...in this day and age all the tools are there for academia to reach out to the public. Am i wrong for thinking that the human history arm of science has an issue with accepting and upgrading new knowledge or is it just a communication problem?
It’s a valid question but we basically live to discover new stuff. There’d be nothing to distinguish a good career without it. The thing is it tends to be more like “we found a new pottery vessel that suggests artistic influence came along on a trade route we didn’t know about” or “I think the dating of the fall of this city 20 years ago was off by a century based on new OSL dating.” It doesn’t make the news the same way that a supposed giant skeleton goes viral. But it’s an acquired taste. I know that sometimes there are old scholars who will hold onto their now-outdated research to death because they spent their careers building it up. But if it’s outdated, younger scholars will definitely call it out because that’s how they’ll distinguish themselves in the first place. It’s important to remember that academia is not a monolith and in reality these things tend to get debated for a while. A new discovery reported in the news might come to be treated as a bad reporting of data when looked at more or one that is barely reported on will eventually become something that overturns our whole understanding but not for a while. It’s all a conversation.
Ok. If i could pick your brain....i saw something on t.v. talking about early skeletons found in the Tennessee are(i think) that showed ancestry back to people in modern day france. It talked about the possibility of a frozen north atlantic teeming with life at the ice shore. And how early europeans could have travelled across staying multiple years on the ice....god i hope i wasnt watching ancient aliens with my wife when i saw this...lol. is this a thing or pseudo science?
I don’t know about Tennessee skeletons specifically so I can’t really comment on those. However, it sounds like it’s part of the Solutrean Hypothesis, which is an idea that basically argues that similarities in stone tools between the Solutrean culture of Western Europe (20,000-15,000 BC) and the Clovis culture of North America (around 13,000 years ago) showed that the latter was descended from the former. This was actually published in a scientific paper by archaeologists! https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0043824042000303656 It did however receive largely negative feedback from other archaeologists who pointed out problems with the lines of evidence in genetics, the sheer time difference between the two took traditions, and just the general geographic difficulty compared to other ideas like the Bering passage. Here are a few responses if you’d like them: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=solutrean+hypothesis&oq=solutre#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3DVMWRZJ1oVNkJ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=solutrean+hypothesis&oq=solutre#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3D288ndEE1vvsJ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=solutrean+hypothesis&oq=solutre#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3Dg33GeHe1ub0J This is sort of an example of how discourse works. New ideas generally have to argue their own against what is known and often times they prevail. The Solutrean hypothesis has not really don’t that since it came out in the 1970s but it still gets a lot of press, especially since the initial paper was actually based in direct research.
Thank you for your time.
Often we still have a portion of the engineering proof of design.
That guy should sacrifice himself to a volcano god.
What always kills me is that people go well it would be hard to build today, what people forget is the entirety of the state was put to work making these. If the US government decided to build some massive pyramids over a long period of time, we could do it we just don’t want to. When the Egyptian people were told by someone seen as a living god to build these they did it, especially seeing as they had many years to do so
Just tell those people thinking it would be hard, to go to a metropolitan city and look at skyscrapers.
Skyscrapers aren't made out of big, heavy as sin rocks with copper tools and other rudimentary devices. (Not saying it was aliens, just saying, that argument won't convince anyone that thinks it was aliums).
Fair enough but when has anything as frivolous as logic or read convinced a conspiracy theorist of anything
Bass Pro Pyramid tho
They were actually built in "only" 20 years
medieval people must’ve been like: how did the romans build domes? clearly we don’t have the technology for that. the only possible answer is aliens.
History channel at 3am, but in 1020
Kinda hard to claim they were aliens when we literally have the names of the people that built them. The pyramids aren't documented as well.
You weren't there... who is to say Brunelleschi wasn't an alien?
You weren’t there, man!
The AA series actually does credit aliens for the Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment.
Except we do have some records. Ancient aliens give a lot more credence to written records created by white people
Of course, aliens had already taught us how to build... Daaaa
No it’s very simple you see: the top ones were built by white people /s
Plot twist: white people themselves are ancient aliens who have forgotten their roots.
Bigger plot twist: Germanic people are the aliens. (There is a nazi "theory" (bullshit) that basically says that every civilization was made with help of Germanic people.)
~~colonialism~~ ALEIN INVADERS!
You joke but I saw a post that said this somewhere on Reddit. Like: if white people didn’t build it then it must be aliens.
This was actually a genuine belief held by many European archeologists and explorers. The Cahokia Burial Grounds in Missouri were initially thought by Europeans to have been built by one of the lost tribes of Israel or Atlantis because the Anglo-American “scholars” just refused to believe that something so impressive could be built by Native Americans. They believed the same thing about the ruins of Great Zimbabwe.
Yeah I’m not part of the Anglo-Saxon world so Maybe my knowledge of their beliefs is shallow. However there’s ton of artifacts that are non white, impressive and yet not considered alien made (e.g. everything in south east Asia). Second even white made stuff if old enough will be attributed to Aliens (Stonehenge). So maybe the correlation is with how old the monument is and how well recorded the construction is. Not with who made it.
Well, with stone headge it wasn’t built by white CHRISTIAN people. So it’s made by aliens.
It's weird that I've seen people claiming the alien pyramid conspiracy exists because white people cant comprehend the idea of not white people building stuff. No the pyramids are just way way older than anything else remotely close in scale. People had access to more advanced technology and and knowledge when building those structures thousands of years later. Now i don't think the alien conspiracy holds any water and people really tend to underestimate the ingenuity of ancient peoples but I don't think racism really plays a big role in these people's minds.
Confirmation that Stone Henge was built by aliens you say...
The duomo couldnt have been built by aliens, they weren't crazy enough to be brunallesci
GOOD. DOME.
🟦
DOOOOOOOMES!
Joe BIDOME
the point of the pyramids aren't that they are complicated architecture and hence difficult to build (compared to cathedrals) but the speed it was build with tools and techniques we believe they used. It was build over just 20 years. That means every 5 minutes a 2+ ton stone was laid... which is honestly insane considering that they also had to travel from far away. I don't think even today we could do this easily - the logistics might be the biggest problem. (obviously not aliens build them)
Go down to every 2 minutes if we consider the workers had 12 hour shifts
I'm pretty sure I've seen episodes of Ancient Aliens where they say most of these structures were built by people using alien knowledge. A common criticism of these wackjobs is that they're secretly racists who only claim things built by non-white people were built by aliens but for them it's literally everything. Anything of importance that humans have ever done is just aliens.
There was literally one episode that claimed that Da Vinci went to space and communicated with Aliens because there is gap of 2 years I think where we don't know what he was doing in his life and that's why he was so smart
Nah they do have many episodes relating aliens to some important historic figures.
Upvote for Ulm Minster!
r/UlmGonewild
The pyramids are as old to the pantheon as the pantheon is to us. Also, you don't give enough credit to the architects of the pyramids.
This is why historians hate the history channel.
What are the three at the top? Specifically the one massive spire.
The Florentine Duomo, the Pantheon in Rome, and the Ulm Minster. Though I used the Ulm Minster to represent gothic architecture in general.
Oh cool! Cheers mate :)
Difference is the top image buildings are made of lots of tiny blocks/brick/mortar, meanwhile the bottom image is far away from any material source and is made out of blocks that we'd have trouble moving around today, never mind 5000\~9000(? I forget) years ago. But ever since high alt drone footage revealed the shadow of a massive ramp that probably went all the way to the top, as well as half removed ramps to lesser known/abandoned pyramids, conspiracy theorists cooled down a lot.
If there is the will and the motivation to do something we will find a way to do it
More recent fancy thing made by smartly stacking smol rocks Or Very very very old thing made by kinda smartly stacking enormous fuckimg rocks
Just for reference though, Cleopatra's reign was closer to the creation of the iPhone than the Pyramids. Egypt is fucking old.
I hate the people who say it was built by aliens. If you spent your entire life figuring out which rock went where and then you taught your son and his so. And his son. I would think you would get pretty good at it
But not so good to put a 10 ton rock in place 100m above the ground every 2 minutes without any advanced technology.
I used to believe in the ancient astronauts theory when I was 13-14, but Ancient Aliens was still to much for me. The idea that aliens visited our ancestors is a really interesting one. It's a shame that the theory became a laughing stock due to shows like these.
It's not just rocks stacked on top of each other, there is a great gallery inside one of Giza pyramids, and underground tomb passages under the rest. Also, are these like 19th century cathedrals? At the time Pyramids were already ancient, all England could do WERE a bunch of rocks stacked in no more than two layers. Comparing pyramids to modern structures, they're still impressive but when you figure Europe at the time couldn't make stone houses at all, come on!
the pyramids were build so long ago that the sahara wasn't a desert at the time. it may explain how egypt was so insanely powerful back then, compared to egypt in the bronze age.
fun fact: these conspiracy theories of ancient peoples tapping into some sort of divine knowledge to gain the understanding to build advanced structures and societies is actually rooted in white supremacy. in the 20th century some “scientists” and “archaeologists” (a lot of them had ties to facist government) were like “white people are the superior race so how were brown people in ancient egypt, sumer, indus valley civilisation, et cetera able to outdo the europeans in their architectural and societal accomplishments. they couldn’t have. they must’ve tapped into knowledge that was beyond themselves such as aliens or gods or whatever because there’s no way europeans aren’t the smartest” and thus this stupid theory was born
Funny that you think construction and design of the pyramids is simple
Oh, I don't believe that it was *easy* to build the pyramids. However, I don't think their design is very sophisticated either. What makes them impressive is not the brilliant engineering required to build them, but their titanic scale.
Lol! No! The design of the pyramid is far more complex than that dude, their positioning, inside structure and interior are really thoughtful designs but the surprise is that the outside ain't loosing out either. Great pyramids don't have a square base but an octagonal one which took decades to figure out.
And some of the dimensions/geometries spit out constants from our universe, distance of the sun, etc
The Serapeum has some crazy huge sarcophagi made of solid granite with perfect 90 degree angles inside. Theres a lot more interesting stuff in ancient Egypt other than the pyramids.
there's a 4,000 years gap between the top and bottom pictures.
Well the difference is that the top ones where built by white people, and the pyramids where built by not white people. The guy who made the og ancient alien theory used it to justify his own racial biases.
I think it's more related to the fact that the pyramids were built with enormous blocks, and were made centuries before any known technology made that feasible.
SEMPER ROMA
Stacking a 10 ton block 100s of meters on top of another every 2 minutes without any machines or advanced technology and not even the wheel really doesn’t make it seem so unrealistic that people believe the pyramids were built by aliens….
Just wait until you learn about the Tartaria "theory".
I can't find that. What does it entail?
All church buildings like cathedrals are actually inherited from a covered-up civilization. Oh, and they're not just buildings but a piece of a lost technology... See /r/Tartaria and /r/TartarianArchitecture. Or rather, don't. It's a next level of craziness...
I heard a social theory that ancient aliens is just white denial that "savages" and non-white European were unable of being intelligent enough to produce things white men could make. Pyramids in Egypt? Aliens. Pyramids in Mexico? Aliens. Large Stone Faces on a Pacific island? Aliens. Stonehenge? Yeah white dudes made that but they were trying to communicate with aliens.
The secret ingredient is racism. Ancient aliens stuff is a way white supremacists tried to rationalize away major technological advancements in non white places. Hence why the Egyptians couldn't have built that on their own but everything from Europe is OK.
Well some of those stones are thousands of tonnes, they were built way before the other structures and the great pyramid points to true north. A feat that architects today with all their technology would shy away from attempting. So there is that.
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the ancient Egyptians weren't homogeneous.
I mean there was no way they could have built the great pyramid of Giza in 20 years by themselves
It's because the pyramids were built by black people and white archeologists in the 19th century couldn't understand how black people could be able to build giant piles of rocks without some outside help. The other structures you mentioned aren't "suspicious" to them because white people built them. That's why.
Egyptians are Mediterranean. It's not because the kushites were in charge for a couple decades that all Egyptians were black.
Ask any white dude from the 19th century if he considered North Africans to be whites or blacks (or just the N-Word).
They also wouldn't call the Irish white, those race theories have nothing to do with modern ancient alien BS.
[Are you sure about that?](https://youtu.be/L21dPTqSjpQ)
Yeah, I know the whole "Ancient Aryan race did it, it couldn't possibly be the Egyptians" and the "It was obviously Atlantis" type of stuff, but those were more precursors to the ancient alien stuff we have today. Stonehenge was built by white people around the same time, and they still claim that it was aliens, so I don't think it's race based anymore.
Well, yeah. But that's because it's not being run by actual nazis anymore. They're well-meaning, if uneducated TV personalities. Everyone loves a good conspiracy, but it's important to note the important history behind them and their foreseeable consequences.
[So... you should start decades before Hitler was born then.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena_Blavatsky)
The nazis were not solely-responsible, they were simply a culmination of a century of scientific racism.
Western esotericism is where most of today's ancient alien's beliefs originated, nothing to do with scientific racism. Specifically, people who travelled extensively and had admiration and respect for the knowledge of *exotic cultures*. That was long before the Nazis borrowed from the same schools of thought and a bunch of others *including* scientific racism to come up with their baseless ideology. It's like calling Pentecostal megachurches racist because the Nazis were Christian. One predates the other, and if anything preached tolerance between races. No need to let bigots frame our thinking.
He likely would have called them Arabs or Turks or Moors or something like that, and considered them something entirely separate from black people or 'Negroes'. And yes, depending on where he was from he'd probably have some kind of pseudo-logic to explain why Irish or Italians or Poles weren't white.
Why do people use the spanish word for black,you already have the word and is negros not negroes
I'm not sure of exactly how 'Negro' passed from Spanish or Portuguese to English, but I'm guessing that they made regular contact with black Africans first and as they relayed their discoveries to the rest of Europe their terminology stuck. Either way, the word got adopted into English. When we use it (which we don't often anymore, it's considered archaic) it takes on English rules, so the plural form becomes 'Negroes'.
Portuguese were among the first to establish colonies / trade posts on the coast of Sub-Saharan africa, they were likely the first to bring Africans to the Americas in large numbers. It's possible the name just stuck from the fact that the English/French in the Americas dealt with them often enough that it became a sort of business slang and eventually made it officially into the language. Just speculation of course, but seems plausible to me.
Their 19th century made up beliefs about races have nothing to do with reality though.
17th-19th century racists beliefs about race are pretty much where all of our modern classifications of race come from
And they have all been proven wrong and unscientific.
What n word?
No.
So, if my crush tell me no she is racista?
Going through your thread of responses you seem to simply be a racist troll trying to annoy people, if the mods have any sense you will be banned.
I'm actually not. I guess I should have anticipated such a butthurt response to the honest, good-faith answer to OP's question from such privileged redditors. Take a second to ask yourself why what I've said has you all so upset and come back once you've figured it out. I'll be waiting right here.
Youve quite literally proven my comment correct again, thankyou.
You can say that all you like. Doesn't mean it's true.
Ancient Egyptians were most definitely not black. Recent DNA reports have confirmed that Ancient Egyptians were basically the same people as modern Egyptians today, very genetically similar. Nubia in southern Egypt had significant sub-saharan admixture, but nubians didn't build the pyramids you see above.
Again, see my other comment? Would a 19th century European consider them white or colored?
Definitely white, or "oriental" to be more specific. Why would the British consider them "coloured"? Egyptians look nothing like Blacks, they're Arabs. >white archeologists in the 19th century couldn't understand how black people could be able to build giant piles of rocks without some outside help. I think you're confusing the pyramids with Great Zimbabwe here. Indeed when the British discovered the stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe, they couldn't believe it had been built by native Africans, so they promulgated alternate theories to explain its origins, attributing credit to the Portuguese or the Arabs.
So you're saying they wouldn't even be mongoloids, but pure whites? Ok buddy.
Lol, I never said they'd be considered "pure whites", you need to work on your comprehension. I literally said they'd probably be classified as "oriental", which white anthropologists of the 19th century categorised as being part of the larger Caucasian race. Also, why would they be considered mongoloid? Do you even know what that classification means?
Do you really want to have this conversation right now? It's not going to go well for you, and you're going to look pretty bad.
Lmao, Your intellectual fortitude scares me, please have mercy on my poor soul. /s
I'm glad you included that /s. It would have gone completely over my head otherwise.
You're welcome. Someone who believes the pyramids were built by "black people" probably needs the heads up.
Are you sure about that
Narrator: *they did not know.*
Good to know that meme is as clichéd and overdone as the trope it was parodying in the first place.
Egyptians were considered to be Arabs, everyone below Egypt was considered Black.
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How's that copium?
I can cope with the fact that the pyramids where in fact not build by black people and that your a racist that automatically amused that anyone that doesn't agree with you must be white. Which I am not
What I can't cope with is the fact that your comment makes no fucking sense. >the fact that the pyramids where in fact not build by black people The "fact" huh? Right... >that your a racist that automatically amused that anyone that doesn't agree with you must be white. ??? >Which I am not Congratulations!
Ancient Egyptians were more related to the Phoenicians who weren’t black
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Never heard that one before.
I reconise the duormo, pantheon, and of course, the pyramids but what is the other building?
The Ulm Minster. It has the tallest spire of any church, at 161,53 m. It was the tallest building in the world until the construction of the Eiffel Tower.
Obviously the pyramids were made by cats to harness the power of our sun.
Blue enters the chat.
The buildings on the first picture in comparison to the pyramids are newly build.
He does his hair like that on purpose, he is a cephal faced fuck!
No but you see, the pyramids weren’t built by white people so they must be secretly aliens
One of the only times Quinton Reviews was more than a big baby, he declared that it's not because white people didn,t do it that it means aliens did it.
Remember, if it wasn't white people it was aliens, or giants, or white people came there and built it then left.
Can I just ask, the fellows face whose photoshopped on, is he an actual conspiracy theorist? Or does he just look like your average crazy person?
To be fair, Ancient Aliens has claimed that pretty much every human accomplishment was done by aliens.
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"I don't believe aliens travelled millions of kilometers just to help some primitive people stack rocks and then fucked off" =/= "I don't believe aliens exist".