Before walking away, the Ferengi would likely throw up. ---Wait -- can they throw up? Don't know enough about Ferengi anatomy.

They were built not by slaves but by a talented work force. Placing one 5000 lb rock every four minutes for twenty years for the great pyramid.
Certainly not for a burial chamber.

Yes that was the least of their problems finding true north. How about the processional code or the dimension of planet earth among other math baked into the pyramid. Or the stunning fact that they have eight sides not four which was only detected from above high noon on the summer solstice.
They great pyramid and the Sphinx was likely built before the Egyptians. The masterpiece in Giza was the greatest and the future or newer constructs were all inferior.

There is no magic, nickursis, there is no mystery. Time after time we have had 'mystery' products from the past, such as real Damascus swords (not pattern welded!) and inevitably these turn out to have different versions of the same answer: Our ancestors were competent people.

Experimental archeology can and has reproduced these things: Damascus swords (ore has to come from a specific mine in India and be forged in a certain manner), moving huge blocks of stone (many re-enactments), hand spinning and/or weaving finer thread than most modern products.

Repeatedly, we have discovered that our ancestors were more advanced longer ago than we imagined. Occam's Razor says that this is the simplest answer.

Jan

If they could find a way to magneticize it and levitate it like some high speed trains "float".
Those stones certainly look to be shaped , more than cut.

But we're not talking about the 70% of the world at that time that put up these monuments. We're talking about the 30% of the most advanced civilizations. Again, you assume that as you go back in time that 70% number grows and grows, while the 30% number shrinks. But if you measure off what I described, you see things like the Babylonians using a MORE advanced trigonometry than we do. You see Egyptians building pyramids. You see Romans building aqueducts fueling their empire.

You assume that since the Egyptians didn't have caterpillar tractors to move around the blocks that the Egyptians must be stupid, must lack the knowledge of how to cut and create square blocks, and don't have the strength to put them in place.

Simple geometry is easy to suss out. For example, the pyramids are pointing TRUE north. How can a race as primitive as the Egyptians achieve this, you ask? It must be aliens or some unheard of technology! No. If you start with the assumption that the Egyptians are not dumb, it's easy to figure it out. Assuming the earth is round (which shoots the Flat Earth BS in the foot), you can find True North with a string in a single night.

That is the conundrum, why would they do that? Even if they were slaves, it takes a lot of people to keep slaves in line, and then you have to have people engineering and supervising, all of which need some compensation, in food or whatever. That means a huge chunk of society is dedicated to shaping big rocks? No profit in it. A Ferengi would laugh and walk away....

I would tend to disagree on just that idea, it seems you have to have both a physical and a social evolution to get to where you can perform advanced tasks and have the wisdome to implemnt their results, look at where we are today, with a split of 30-70 between "1st world" and "3rd world". 3rd world is not held back by their technology or intelligence but by their society and the "power corrupts" rule. Every poor country has a 1% who rle. We just spread that out a little more, and the Liberal dream is to give it away and level the playing field, with no replacement of greed to energize it, so it will inevitably fail.

Yes, well he mentioned a few times in the books, that his theory was they had some way to soften or melt the rock and shape it, but even if you soften it, you still have to manipulate it, unless you have a way to do it without heat.

Not sure about Sacsayhunan. I know that most of these sites have a legend of the construction.
The Spanish wanted to attribute the work to the Inca's .From the Inca they claimed it was already built.

Hardly. It has to do with available time, and not what the brain is capable of. People can sit around and play with theoretical mathematics because of millenia of building societies. A mathematician can sit around jotting notes on paper because other smart people have figured out how to make food cost very little. Because that guy doesn't have to step outside his door and spend 10+ hours a day tilling a farm or he will die.

You only have to look at what all these great societies accomplish when people don't have to go through subsistence survival.

What you are talking about is not evolution of Man's brain, but evolution of society.

Right.
I cannot imagine such effort and expenditure of wealth and manpower without some compulsion other than "because we want to." What is rarely taken into consideration is the cost of housing and feeding the thousands of men needed to be fed, housed and trained. Moving a hundred thousand ton rock, miles away, and carving it to shape with primitive tools? Gimme a break.

Didin't Graham say maybe it was a technology that softened stone so it flowed?

Stones that fit together like they were playdoh.
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ar...

Jan, issue is, where does the tech come from to work such huge blocks, move and cut so precisely, then fit them together? Either they had magic, or there are some records or remains of equipment, but so far 0 has been found.

Not only that, but why would there be such limited numbers of sites, it supports the idea of a huge sea rise, and most of the ancient world is submerged, like the huge city off Iwo Jima.

Then the record would surely support it. Think about how much information gets expended documenting all of today's current efforts. Where is the ancient equivalent of "Discovery, Science channels, or Encyclopedia Britannica?

yes, they try to stay away from conclusions, but offer "alternatives". The bottom line is scoffing at it is illogical, because somehow, someway, they did something that, as Dobrien points out, would have taken a huge amount of effort and resources, for what reason? To expend that much effort there must be a compelling reason.

Indeed, so the science community, in general, ignores it. When they should be over excited and figuring out how it was made, and how they acquired the science to do it. That was why your book works, it offers one of many possibilities, but it does offer a good support for the idea of either outside intervention or a previous civilization destroyed by some cataclysm.

The world population in 3600BC estimated at between 11 million to 28 million. Man just starting to write. Hardly a time when there was an excess of manpower with little to do. Just think what it took settlers in the 19 th century to survive.
There is a disconnect when granite can be cut with the precision that cannot be replicated today with glass smooth surfaces and inside corners precision cut weighing 160,000 lbs all with crude copper chisels.....hmmmm

A little too complex for simple minds with no grasp of higher mathematics.

I've always been fascinated by the Antikythera device.

" fueled by the belief that we of the modern world are smart, and those of the ancient world are dumb."
Or you could say the mental and physical "Evolution of man." Smart really is irrelevant in this context because they didn't have the foundation to build on yet and, perhaps, not a developed enough brain for the higher concepts.

Hardly. All of this conspiracy theory is fueled by the belief that we of the modern world are smart, and those of the ancient world are dumb.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

If you assume a knowledge of Trigonometry (which the Babylonians [3700 years ago] were just recently proven to have [AND they used a system that was far more powerful and more user friendly than the modern way]), all of these things are easily accomplished if you have both the Manpower, and nothing better to do.

They've probably already seen it - which is why they returned to their own time!