So, I've been really into Buzzfeed's Unsolved series and then the Ghost Files spin-off on Watcher with the same costars (Ryan Bergara and Shane Madej). They look at mysteries of the world, often related to spirits or ghosts, but sometimes aliens. I was watching the episode talking about the ancient Egyptians (Buzzfeed Unsolved: Supernatural S2E3) and Ryan is so certain that aliens had to be involved, or he leans towards alien involvement. One of his main reasons that he believes aliens had to be involved in the building of these great pyramids (specifically the pyramids of Giza) is that he thinks that the math is too advanced for these people to have created them without supernatural help. He thinks knowing pi and being able to make right angles is too much. Shane at one point calls him disrespectful for saying so, and I agree!
It's really easy to look back on ancient cultures and think we know more than them. We have created a bunch of shortcuts to life that make doing things easier. We also tend to stick to things that work and not change our methods over time unless there is a better way to do it. But we should be careful making these assumptions that ancient peoples weren't as capable as we are today. Many ancient artifacts are made of organic materials. These materials can easily break down over time, or be reconstituted into other things and the information of how they were used throughout their lives is often lost or overshadowed for their final use. We only get a snapshot of history. We are constantly piecing things together. There are multiple ways to solve many problems. We may have a tried and true way of doing things today that wasn't even a concept in the past, but that doesn't mean they didn't want or need to accomplish the same tasks. I have been watching the Hulu series', "Technology That Changed the World/America" (there are like 8 different ones dealing with different things) and it has really made me think about how ideas happen. Usually, we have tasks we already have to do and we want them to be faster or smoother or safer or more productive. And over time and trial and tribulation and failure, sparks of ingenuity happen to make those desires more possible. Oftentimes, at the pressure of the powers that be to do more with less. Just because we use pulleys today, doesn't mean that ancient humans just didn't make things that we would use pulleys for until it was invented. The pulley was invented for a reason, it didn't just spring into existence and now suddenly we are making things that require pulleys. We were making things and then someone thought, "Hey, maybe this would be easier if we wrap the rope we are using around a tree first." Then they used that and then maybe someone thought, "Oh if we wrap the rope between two trees, it's even easier and we can use less men to pull more weight." And they did that and then someone realized, "Man, we don't have many trees where we want to build, what if I cut a couple down that can be ported and used away from the trees?" and boom concept of pulleys is coming around and being developed. It continues to get more finely tuned every time it's used. Same with the wheel. We didn't not haul things around until one day someone said, "Hey, lets use wheels," and suddenly people started hauling things. No, it's much more likely that we hauled things in many different ways and then one day someone thought, "Hey, what if we used this in this way." And since we haven't found anything better than the wheel yet, it still remains. Lets not forget about the dirt ramp method for lifting very heavy objects into an upright position. Dirt ramps can be flattened and essentially erased from existence with almost no evidence left behind. Just because we can't conceive of doing things in a simpler way, doesn't mean that they weren't done.
Furthermore, it's really easy to assume that ancient peoples didn't use pi because they don't have math books that discuss all their collected mathematical knowledge. But just because they may not have a definition for what they are using doesn't mean they don't use it on some level. We can balance a rock on another rock without being able to explain the physics behind the act. Math is physical. We have mathematical theory today in classrooms where we make up scenarios to answer questions. But ancient math may have been much more tangible and less theoretical for its users. We used gravity and manipulated things with it long before Newton told us what it was. We just didn't know that was why it worked, but we knew that what we did was working. The same is very likely true for ancient civilizations use of advanced mathematical concepts. We knew that the sun gave life before we knew that plant cells break down photons into chlorophyll. So why do ancient Egyptians have to be able to explain pi in order to use it? Does a mollusk need to understand the Fibonacci sequence to build its shell? We need to stay aware of our futuristic privilege and not doubt our ancestors simply because we 'think' we are smarter than them because we have applied labels to many ideas. Hindsight is always 20/20 and it may seem like we are more advanced, but our advancement was built on the ingenuity of those ancient peoples. These techniques were developed over the years much like everything around us today.
Think about how a child learns. The brain of a child is the same brain as an adult in how it processes stimuli. Where they differ is in perspective and experience. Children don't have the experiences to confirm or deny the events they are experiencing, but over time those events compound and their view of the world sharpens. This is the same for ancient peoples. They do not have our perspective, but they process the world in the same way we do. There isn't really any anthropological evidence to say that their brains were much different than ours. They loved, made babies, had families and extended groups, and needed to be safe, warm and fed. They looked up at the stars, played games, were afraid to die and fought to make things better for themselves and their families. Just like us today. So then why do we like to think that they were dumb or less than us? This is our perspective. We tend to dismiss children as dumb, when really they are inexperienced, and we tend to dismiss ancient cultures as dumb simply because they don't have our modern technology.
It may be needless to say, but I don't believe aliens came down and gave us our technology. I don't think it's unlikely, in the slightest, that ancient peoples could have created these amazing works. They didn't have the same culture that we do so we can't judge it by our modern cultures' standards. It really boils down to perspective. We have it, and we need to make sure we are using it properly. Each day is the height of advancement. The Egyptians were at the top of that chart in their time, but we have become more advanced since. We are at the top today, and one day there will be peoples more advanced than us. Our technology doesn't define how smart our population is, but simply how efficient we are at the time. There will always be ways to advance. That doesn't mean that people who haven't advanced yet are stupid or incapable, just in a different part of the (rat) race of existence.
