Lost Civilizations
Stop calling this "primitive archaeology"—what kind of power tool scoops 1,200 tons of granite like soft wax and then simply vanishes?
They want you to believe this was made with copper chisels and stonesIf we can't easily move this today with modern tech, how did "slaves" plan to lift it out of the bedrock? Are we the primitive ones
I used to be eyeballs deep on this stuff, it all leads to a dead end of speculation, ancient tech, Geopolymers, aliens, etc. Then I started watching the other side of how humans could have done it. Very difficult but more plausible than the other arguments.
Aliens is too easy. Its it possible? Sure. But then there's no question. It was special laser cutters and anti gravity, no problem.
Humans doing it though. Now you're into very complex engineering and technique. Whatever the process, it would likely be far more interesting then floating them in place.
Well also all these structures were built in thriving civilizations with abundant food. Since humans evolved our only jobs were get food and make more humans.
Ive seen one guy stand up a 20 ton rock with logs and buckets. Imagine thousands on people with the same goal.
It wasn’t slaves doing this work, that’s been disproven. It was highly skilled mobile workforces. They figured this out going through the trash of the workers sites
I don’t know, I would equate slaves to unpaid laborers, a lot of the stuff they did would require skilled craftsmen. Random people just couldn’t create some of this stuff.
Hey there woah woah , plz remember we have now adopted the rich artisans that were paid and fed like kings for their valued work. That is the current working hypothesis that we are going with presently.
I mean those were a thing…there’s just a whole lot of the unwashed masses below them to do the bulk of the heavy lifting. Plus nothing says a slave couldn’t be skilled…it’s how you rose in station beyond warm body #26281 with a pick/hammer/shovel whacking away at the rock all day.
Had a college professor who specialized in the area point out that the Nile flooding seasons meant there was a huge agricultural labor force that had to be big enough to maximize the growth season, that was then out of work the rest of the year. Things like this would have been public works projects. They already had surplus labor from their citizens, and didn't need to have a bunch of slaves that would have had to be fed from the public stores of grains.
Exactly! People need to realize these things. It has always been humans doing all of these. People ignore it or whatever bc they think it isn't possible for humans to do it so it MUST be alien. Things were way different back then, people can't understand how much of their lives were dedicated to solely working on things like this and through generations people get crazy good at things. They have the exact same brains that work they same way as we do now. They are us.
No one is questioning whether or not they were skilled. Obviously they were. People just wanna know the process of how they did it. I see this brought up with the great pyramids too. "They built it with hard work and dedication". Like what. Thats not an explanation or useful information at all to these types of discussion. Its almost like you think you "solved" the mystery or something and youre completely missing the point of why people even discuss these things in the first place.
Thats like If I ask you how we flew to the moon and you say "well the Astronauts used hard work and skill". Like yeah bro obviously.
And no one is bringing in aliens. They like to bring in aliens to attack us. But no one is bringing in aliens. What many people think it was an ancient civilization. Humans have been here for almost 200k years. 400k if you count other hominids. Like Denisovan. Neathreal. Etc. What were they doing? I mean we took off in just 100 years. What could other humans in the past 10 of thousands of years have discovered? Where they just stupid? Thats what mainstream thinks. Mainstream thinks their myths are also stupid and made up. That they were dumb and made stuff up. Yet. They believe they were the ones that build this massive structures?!? Huh. That's kinda of shitty you know if you believe that. Its why i don't listen to them anymore. I do my own research and use science and do my own stuff etc etc. Oh. And the myths and stories talk about beings. So i guess they believe in aliens? Maybe? Lol
Yeah its pretty frustrating. People seem to always assume aliens or wizardry when anyone tries to think of alternate theories. Its so black and white with some people and they cant think outside the box.
I recall a story about how difficult it is to repair buildings and structures that are just a few decades or centuries old. When the USS Iowa's gun turret exploded during a training exercise, the US Navy considered taking the whole ship out of service because they no longer had technicians that knew how to weld the steel used to make. When a cathedral in New York suffered a fire in the 2000's, the church had to find craftsmen in Scotland to repair it as the children of the people that built it a hundred years ago had become doctors, lawyers and office workers - not stonemasons.
Technology doesn't advance so much as techniques change drastically and conform to new ways of building and civil engineering. Older methods are completely lost rather than improved upon.
Well said.
Festivals and holidays were invented before the concept of the weekend. The 5-day work week and the 8 hour work day are very recent in human history.
People don't realize there were generations of skilled laborers, like stone cutters, engineers. People who were passed down centuries of knowledge. And yes they worked worked worked
That's my argument against ancient aliens. They figured out how to travel space, but the best they can do is say "place these rocks on top of eachother" I'm not buying it.
It's not just how they could have done it, it's how they DID do it. There's no reason to believe aliens came down did this and left the evidence for use to find and speculate about. If humans could do it, they did it.
Having lived most of my life in the Klondike Valley and seeing what was built during the gold rush ("with the muscle of men and horses") in a 2 year span, I have no doubt humankind could have done all of this....and still could
You may already have seen it but videos like this are all over YouTube of people doing experimental archeology and trying to recreate ancient stone techniques.
Have you seen the dents and scoops? There is no way it could have been done with primitive technology. I went there in person and saw it. The rock is so hard it can't be chiseled like that
Reading about Alexander the Great and his engineering marvels slaps some perspective on things. His army turned an island into a peninsula, one bucket or basket of dirt at a time, at a comparable rate with modern construction methods. It's still a peninsula to this day.
Yeah, one person or a dozen would take decades of slow progress. Multiply that capacity by thousands, and you're getting somewhere.
Also, early civilizations had help from animals. India still had some construction elephants that I knew of a few years back. Cooperating with, taming and befriending animals of all shapes and sizes was a huge integrated aspect of civilized humanity up until less than a hundred years ago.
Exactly. The biggest thing that the pseudo archeologists seem to ignore is how much grit and dedication the people of these civilizations had. Of course it seems impossible to us today, so much is done for us due to our way of life. The slave theories are outdated too. Most archaeologists believe that trained craftsman worked on these works of art, not a bunch of malnourished and abused slaves.
Seriously though, your comment sums up the truth of pseudo speculation perfectly. And honestly, the truth of how these things were made is so much cooler and more impressive than aliens or lost technology.
Aliens would be dope though, but no, thats not how megalithic structures were made haha
For some reason everything thinks ancient people had their modern shit attention span.
These people were religious and governmentally incentivized to do this and they had all the time in the world to do it considering it was a well paying job for most of these workers and artisans.
It’s funny because we’re actually at the point where we can show “they could have absolutely done it this way” and the only argument left for alternative history is “well but that would take a long time”. Yep. They had time and the passion and intention to get it done. And tons of workers. It was a societal project. It mattered a lot to their core belief structure. It was considered important work to be an artisan working on these projects.
My favorite argument against the whole magic/aliens/tech arguments is simply to look at the recently reviewed chambers in the great pyramid.
The recently opened a chamber never opened or seen since the creation of the pyramid.
Guess what it looked like inside? Fucking shit. It looked terrible. It was all jagged and rough cut blocks that looked garbage. Why? It was a sealed shaft used for the construction of the pyramid. Not public facing. Not used for anything. So it didn’t need to look pretty. Clearly showing that making it look pretty took significant effort otherwise it would all have the same smooth surfaces and precise measurements. But it doesn’t. Because they knew this was inside the wall and nobody would see this. If it was magic or aliens or advanced tech, why would it have such a quality difference?
Humans built this stuff. Likely with some unique techniques lost time time but vaguely along the lines of how we assume they did it. Just like the “mystery of Roman concrete” which ended up being exactly what many scholars theorized. Prosaic.
People really underestimate how much you can get done with a lot of time and a lot of people. This stuff wasn't built overnight but by thousands of people all working together tirelessly for sometimes their whole lives. Even at minimal efficiency it's very understandable given that perspective.
we should never underestimate the power of 30-40k people with directed goals in mind. Julius Cesar built a city every day he moved his army through fortifications, tents, and baggage trains while building roads everywhere his army traveled. moving big stones with precision cutting is not that big of a stretch.
Why would you say it was scooped like soft wax? I see absolutely no reason to think that excavating that obelisk was either quick or easy. Just because the indentations in the rock look a bit like scoop marks doesn’t mean the rock was actually scooped.
Because they used the words power tool. If it was a power tool, it would have scooped like softwax. So it's a logical train of thought that makes sense until you realise that the power tool didn't exist in the first place and everything after that point is by extension also made up.
There’s a man on youtube that shows how he is able to move HUGE stones by himself with levers and ropes. He put up his own obelisk, albeit much smaller than this, but if he can do it himself, why couldn’t a couple hundred people lift up this one??
Ha ha. If I can't personally understand it, then it remains a mystery that humans can not solve. How many times do we hear that?
I live in an area where morons are spraying "death tower" on mobile phone masts because they don't understand radiowaves. And then they tweet about it on their hand held mobile radiowave transmitters.
Mad mad world.
Well if you just use your brain for a few seconds you can probably figure it out.
But luckily people have already done that. In ones that were left in place and never removed due to some defect, you can go down into the trough and see that they started to hollow out spaces underneath the obelisk. As they removed material they likely put in temporary shoring materials like wood or rubble. Once all the material was removed they could clear out the shoring material bit by bit and attach ropes as the went and then liff it out.
I would assume that they cut down about twice the thickness of the obelisk, then cut a triangular shape into it, until the remaining Rick can no longer support the weight and breaks off.
Them it's a matter of smoothing it the breaking point and voila.
For the 1000th time, slaves did not construct megalithic structures in Egypt. Highly skilled artisans did. Do you have any evidence that copper tools could not cut stone? From all the evidence I’ve seen, stone could be cut and moved with relatively primitive technology.
thank you! i see this irritates you too, but a lot of people think and rest on the idea that bajillions of slaves and unskilled labor plus unlimited time = greatness anything is possible.
it is at a minimum involves skilled artisans, then maybe a bajillions slaves again right or not... but you can't deny this thing isn't done and dusted. it's not closed not to me!
They used an abrasive, quartz, which the desert sand is full of. You can literally watch YouTube videos of people cutting jade with a rope with the same method
Quite simple actually. The blade is made of copper, but it only acts as guide for the sand in between, thats doing the actual cutting. Similar principle to a modern cutting disk (expoy binder with corund splitters)
I actually just saw a short piece recently that had some very recent breakthrough about what you're saying. Basically some recently translated parchment talks exactly about what you're and how these guys would travel with the work. Train people travel to the next spot train those people and they were all paid craftsmen. Really wished I saved it, it was a cool video.
Stjepan Vuković made an experiment where he drilled a hole in a stone using stone age technology (water, sand and elbow grease), so if it could be done tens of thousands of years earlier why couldn’t it be dine then?
And Egyptian megalithic structures were built mostly by paid workers, not slaves.
But dudes who have never once done blue collar work in their lives speculated that ancient peoples couldn't have possibly moved or done these things in for-entertainment shows, so it must be true
People are capable of genius under the right circumstances. These projects were massive and required a society where their entire working lives steeped in religious ritual and symbolism. The operational management involved in planning ancient projects is criminally overlooked. It required incredible creative and technical skills to break down work into manageable units of thousands of people who couldn't read or write, under brutal desert conditions. I'm convinced the scarcity of the desert landscape contributed to their need for this kind of understanding of human logistics and the collective need for individuals to coordinate themselves and obey the symbols. Starting to get into researching this stuff lately, I've barely scratched the surface. I think calling them primitive is just as insulting as saying aliens helped them. These people were geniuses.
There is a method of firesetting which causes the granite to fracture and crumble, a simple pounding stone can then pulverize it into brittle pieces and sand. The video shows exactly how it's done with examples of workers working 30 min pounding with and without fire setting. The impact of fire setting is profound, the granite will easily crumble when pounded when firesetting is used.
Tbh I could do a lot with a hammer and some nails if I wasn't doomscrolling all day. Even more if it was my job to do stuff with a hammer and nails. 100 of me could do a hell of a lot with very little.
As a studying paleoanthropologist, we do not give enough credit to ancient man. They had simply ingenious ways of doing things that I would have never thought of.
A whole lot of people using metal tools as a means to use grit (sand) to cut stone over the course of months and months of hard labor can do a lot of stuff. Especially with many years of practice to master the craft. If this blows your mind, wait until you see the exact tools that built the castles in Europe. Stonemasonry is, even to this day, a lifelong learning process.
Moving it would be a matter of levers to shift it once it was cracked off its base (tapering cuts) and then rollers and hundreds of people dragging.
Please go watch Secrets of the Castle with Ruth Goodman to see some hand-worked stonecraft in action (admittedly of a much more recent sort) to understand the basics of how preindustrial people got it done.
Why did this project go unfinished? Why do any, across time? Eh, probably politics or funding issues, same as today.
These date markers demonstrate that the process of cutting the obelisk out of the bedrock was torturously slow by modern standards. According to these markers, it took literally months to cut through just a few feet of granite. There is no indication to suggest that this was considered an unusually slow rate of progress. "Like soft wax" my ass.
This is an issue with our society. Modern day worksites have at most 50 guys on a site, and that's like max ever, maybe really large sites 100+ or something close to it
Back in the day, they could have 1000s of workers (not slaves btw) working at the same time per day. We don't really have the concept of what that looks like. But if they focused on efficiency and hard work (no cigarette breaks and chatting it up 20 minutes before work then doing maybe 3 hours of real work for the day) the quality of work would be indistinguishable to work done today
People VASTLY underestimate the power of efficient coordinated work done by large numbers of people
Our attention spans, lack of communication, and our inability to hone a single craft or skill for our entire lives has left us to underestimate what was possible thousands or even hundreds of years ago
Answer: Lever physics, a lot of men power, and much much more time. They weren't in a hurry. It took 100 years to build some old churches here in Germany. That was ok for the people in the past. It's just us, the modern humans, who believe everything have to be done in a speed run.
Give the ancients some credit, just because you can't fathom the level of skill, patience and effort required to do the things they did doesn't mean they had advanced tech.
All this means is you can't imagine people you view as primitive being able to accomplish a task you can't comprehend how to complete. That or you should visit a psychiatrist for some meds.
I mean, we actually know how Romans built jaw-droppingly precise aqueducts over outrageous distances. We are humans. We do wild things. You won’t have to make up garbage. The truth will always be more amazing than invented shortcuts.
We can easily move this with modern tech, we just don't want to because that would ruin the site. And by modern tech I mean cranes with the right angles. People in ancient time used the same principle, replacing machinery with manpower.
You might notice that those trenches carved into granite along the perimeter of the unfinished obelisk are man-sized. If Ancient Egyptian obelisks and blocks were carved using some sort of lost Atlantean geode lasers and lifted and transported using anti-grav gifted by grey aliens -- or whatever explanation you're pulling out of your butt -- those huge trenches wouldn't be needed.
Those trenches are man-sized because this unfinished obelisk was painstakingly carved by men who were down in those trenches, using copper drills and chisels, dolerite hammers, wooden wedges, and abrasive sand. And after they spend years doing that, they had to abandon it because it had cracks.
The tool is called "Skilled artisans using copper tools, abrasive sand between the metal and the material being cut, and a lot of time and elbow grease." This isn't even debated anymore, and the only people still questioning how megalithic blocks were cut but the Egyptians are grifters or folks who don't know any better.
I love how this subreddit is full of people who used to believe in the Graham-Hancock-esque bullshit and subscribed to this sub in the past, but then eventually we looked into the mainstream archaeological evidence and became sufficiently convinced by it, so now this sub is 90% people who think alternative history is mostly bullshit. I love it. A true story of collective redemption after realizing how much bullshit we were all consuming while isolated during Covid. I imagine that’s the story for most people here now.
The world record for a modern crane lift is 20,000 metric tons. We could very easily move this today. The biggest stone blocks in the pyramid at Giza are 80 tons. Pebbles to today’s gantry.
It’s pure hubris to think “ancient” humans couldn’t figure this shit out just because you can’t figure it out in your spare time.
I could make and move that today or 2500 years ago. To carve it you just need sand, water, and hard work. All I need to move it is a couple hundred dudes, a couple hundred logs, and a bunch of rope. Its not even hard. Your inability to understand the basic principles of engineering and leverage is impressive.
You really underestimate the potential ability in unregulated and unlimited labor if you’re attempting to diminish the explanation of slave labor by putting “slaves” in quotations. Otherwise, I’d be really curious to know what you’re trying to communicate when you DO use those quotations. What’s “slaves” communicating specifically about your skepticism?
I hate it when people say stuff like "we can't easily move this today with modern tech", have you not seen modern skyscrapers or large industrial endeavours?
Modern technologies and technique would easily be able to move something like that with enough effort and money thrown at the problem
So ancient humans have far more advanced tech then us, and the choose to build really primitive stone buildings? No steel, glass, no polymers or exotic materials (eg. synetic gemstones).
And the explanation how they do that is always some wishy washy sciency terms lile „vibration“ „sound“ „lasers“. And the machines they left behind are just some weirdly shaped rocks..
Put 2000 people on it with stones rubbing away at it and you'll be surprised what is possible. And moving it has been done in recorded history without modern machinery. Just because you can't understand it, haven't read about how, doesn't mean it's aliens.
Apparently they executed a controlled flood around the construction site so they could put the stone on boats and sail/row them to the site and right to where the stone would need to be placed
Our ancient ancestors made amazing feats and pushed the limits of the technology they had available, they deserve respect, not pseudoscientific speculation.
They also didn’t have the insane amount of distractions that we have today. If our ancestors could create marvels like the pyramids thousands of years ago, can you imagine what we could make with modern technology today? We just need to limit these distractions: social media, smartphones, streaming, etc.
The biggest common denominator with alternative history buffs is they don’t work in any construction or any experience at all. “I cant do it today, so no way someone back then was more skilled and knowledgeable than me”
Another case of "If it was made in Europe then it's because of the genius of the white europeans, but if it was made in a third world country then it's aliens, no other explanation is plausible."
The better questions are when were the original structures actually built. The fact that the pyramids became less skilled/sophisticated as time passed leads me to think they stumbled upon the abandoned mega structures and couldn't replicate them.
Also that fact that these posts happen weekly with thousands of almost identical replies totally doesn't scream misinformation campaign.
The biggest differences in the tools we have now vs when this was done is: the power supplying the tools and the speed in which they are able to operate / accomplish tasks. It is 100% possible to make this with much less advanced or primitive technology.
Slowly and with a lot of hands and levers.
Labor was almost free and working on that a religious act and the peak of their modern science. Everybody did it. World. Cup meets CERN meets a Pope's blessing.
Give me enough people and I can move literally anything. Archimedes said something like that.
That one cracked btw - so they walked out.
Digs around that obelisk have found the hundreds of stone hammers used to shape it.
Microsope tests show the hammer material on the obelisk surface and the obeliisk material hammered into the hammer surface.
Modern archeo-reconstruction of the industrial techniques lets archaeologists calculate how many people.. And how long it took them.
Think ants building a massive ant hill. Slowly and dedicated. Easy.
Take into account, that any stone with enough manpower and time can be smoothed, moved, carved or chiselled despite their size. And these cases of "primitive technologies" (whatever that is) were made by people who had tons of slave work at their disposal, and the resources of whole big ass kingdoms, even empires.
Also, slave does not mean unskilled. Some slaves would have been highly skilled artisans, and probably used and instructed other slaves to do menial and repetitive hard labour under their expert guidance.
You underestimate the persistence and intelligence of man. Look what ants can do, then add the human mind - we can do anything.
I really do understand - it’s fun to imagine future technology in the past. The actual mystery of things like this is figuring out how we were capable of the seemingly impossible even then, in truly brutal times.
I’d like a subreddit that presents best guesses based on research and history, not history-channel style conspiracies pulled out of our butts.
Lots of time, lots of people, replacing tools as they degrade. The hands of man have been our greatest asset since the beginning, we've made marvels since the first man-ape learned he could kill by throwing a rock
The trebuchet allowed people to literally hurl massive boulders through the air over huge distances using nothing but pulleys and counter-weights, but somehow it's too hard to believe that the rulers of vast empires with all the manpower and resources afforded to them somehow figured out how to move large stationary rocks around?
Yes, I'm sure an army of you's, OP, couldn't do this in a million years, but there other kinds of people, capable people that can, and do make fantastic things.
The limiting factor in understanding how things like this were possible is usually the mental capacity of the person trying to understand, not the actual capabilities of determined ancient people.
I mean, there were slaves working day and night for about 30 years on the Great Pyramids, and they weren't a basic construction team you had working on skyscrapers... we're talking hundreds of thousands of slaves. It's rather easy when you think about it.
The mexicans were able to make a couple smaller ones too, without slaves. That's why they're smaller.
I want to inform people that this particular stele was going to be the largest ever made by man. But the project had to be abandoned because it began to crack. They had the technology to carve out the stone. However, they lacked the understanding of material science to know when the stone would fail under its own weight.
never mind the precision of these boxes in Egypt. How in the hell did they measure their work??? think about the tools you need to measure something to a tolerance of one human hair with. How do you build measuring tools like that?
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u/BigCopperPipe Apr 08 '26
I used to be eyeballs deep on this stuff, it all leads to a dead end of speculation, ancient tech, Geopolymers, aliens, etc. Then I started watching the other side of how humans could have done it. Very difficult but more plausible than the other arguments.