I can second Jason Colavito’s thoughts on Aaron Adair’s recent post on the very human technology used to move the trilithon stones at Baalbek (and other such stones at other locations). It’s a very good post and, for critical thinkers at least, lays to rest the myths about alien participation at Baalbek.
Those readers who have watched the three-hour documentary debunking the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens series know that part of the documentary is devoted to debunking an extraterrestrial explanation for the statues at Rapa Nui – Easter Island. I came across this short piece on the statues that contributes to dispensing with the nonsense as well.
You just have to check out this fascinating article: “Massive European network of Stone Age tunnels that weaves from Scotland to Turkey.” Really cool.
If you’ve ever visited underground caverns (or ridden a subway), you know that getting from Point A to Point B underground (hence, without the stars, sun, or landmarks for assistance) over any meaningful distance requires planning and intelligence. This is yet another telling find documenting the intelligence and applied aptitude of ancient humans. Sure, prehistoric people weren’t using electricity or computers, but they weren’t sitting on their duffs waiting for star visitors to solve their problems, either.
This link comes by way of its author, Henk J. Koens of the Netherlands. Mr. Koens sent the link a while back to contribute to the conversation about Baalbek. He offers another clever solution. Have a look!
Who will be the first ancient alien drone to claim that this report of a dental filling from 6,500 years ago speaks of alien influence? I wonder. Maybe the History Channel can start a new spin-off series. Giorgio! Giorgio! Wherefore art thou, Giorgio?
More to the point. This is yet another illustration of how we underestimate ancient people.
And for the conspiratorially-minded . . . this tooth is an “out of place artifact” that got attention from the mainstream (it’s hardly alone). Better read about is soon before the goons from the Smithsonian “anomalous artifact retrieval squad” move in to scoop this up so they can store it right next to all those North American giant skeletons they snatched up in the late 19th century.
I just discovered the Archaeological Fantasies blog, a site that warmed my PaleoBabbling heart. The author has a short series entitled, “The 10 Most Not-So-Puzzling Ancient Artifacts” in which many of you will be interested. Two caught my eye right away:
1. The so-called Saqqara plane
I’ve posted about this and other mis-identified objects elsewhere on my homepage, but it’s worth a re-do here, especially since the blog’s author also posted this picture of the Egyptian Opet procession, which features the “plane” (it’s a bird, not a plane) on the masts of sailing ships:
Here’s a close-up of one of the masts:
2. The Baghdad battery
Clever, but not evidence of alien technology.
Thanks go to Charles Jones at Ancient World Online for posting this “pre-print” article, “The Cosmos in the Antikythera Mechanism” (due to the size, it is best to right-click and “Save File As”; you will also have to re-size the file in Adobe Reader, since the images do not scale with the font size). It is far and away the most detailed report on the Antikythera Mechanism I’ve seen. It is basically a full analysis of the mechanism, and ancient celestial calculator, that I’ve seen. It has many X-Ray photos and graphical reconstruction images. If you’re interested in this amazing piece of ancient HUMAN technology, this is a must-read.
Since the link for the article is not permanent, I have converted the page to PDF. But be advised, all the images in it make the file large (30 MB), so give it time to download. The permanent URL for online access to this paper is not active yet, but will be: http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/4
And for those who will insist the mechanism is another example of alien technology, either given to humans or “reverse engineered” by the ancient Greeks, think again. As amazing as the mechanism is, it didn’t work that well. From section 3.10 of the report:
We compare the positions of Mars, as reconstructed by NASA with the Mechanism’s predictions over the middle seven retrogrades of Mars in the 1st Century BC—a period of about 13 years.(86) Serious error spikes can be seen, amounting to nearly 38°—more than a zodiac sign—at the retrogrades. The deferent and epicycle theories, on which the mechanisms depended, might be regarded as an adequate first-order approximation but were completely inadequate for accurate prediction at the retrogrades, particularly for Mars. More accuracy would have to wait for more sophisticated theories such as those employed by Ptolemy in the second century AD. Added to these inherent theoretical errors were significant mechanical inaccuracies because of the way that the rotations were transmitted through the gear trains.(87)
In short, the Antikythera Mechanism was a machine designed to predict celestial phenomena according to the sophisticated astronomical theories current in its day, the the sole witness to a lost history of brilliant engineering, a conception of pure genius, one of the great wonders of the ancient world—but it didn’t really work very well!
So one would expect given this news over on the Talking Pyramids blog. Check it out!
I’m sure you’ll all want to check out the Em Hotep blog. There is a series on how the pyramids were built that is just starting. If you go to the link for the latest entry, “Hemienu to Houdin,” to the right there is an earlier post or two to catch up. Should be interesting, and looks well illustrated.
This is pretty cool. At the risk of repeating myself, my view is that there is no *one* theory that accounts for all the pyramid construction methods. I see no reason why Houdin’s internal ramp theory cannot be working alongside a counterweight method, alongside a concrete method.
Can’t wait until some internet “researcher” finds the recipe for concrete in tablets given to humans by extraterrestrials! Those poor, stupid Egyptians. Can’t do anything without their alien nannies.