When I was a kid we had a pseudoscience documentary about the Sphinx, narrated by Charlton Heston. They took the appealing argument that the surface looks like it's been eroded by water and extended that to conclude that it must have been carved by humans before undergoing water erosion, and that therefore it must be older than mainstream archaeology concludes. This, of course, means that every egyptologist is part of a massive conspiracy to hide the truth, and that therefore wink and nudge something something aliens.
I like this article better. Natural formation, carve a face on an existing head. No prehistoric levitation of massive stones.
> and that therefore wink and nudge something something aliens.
You had me till this.
The conspiracy theorists actually make very good points. They’ve been vindicated by discoveries at Gobekli Tepi and others that basically demolish the strongest argument the Egyptologists had against a significantly older Sphinx - that no other megalithic structure had been found till then.
This is one of those situations where the conspiracy theorists make a far more convincing argument than mainstream, and entertainingly, all the recent discoveries in archeology have only strengthened the positions of the conspiracy theorists.
I would look at them again with fresh eyes. The younger dryas impact hypothesis looks especially convincing.
It's ridiculous that everyone with alternative ideas is labeled a "conspiracy theorist". For example, there's a bunch of people with experience in engineering, material science and so on who've been spending a lot of time doing extensive analysis (high-resolution 3D scans, material analysis with state of the art tools etc.)[0][1][2] of ... granite vases from Egypt.
They're not coming up with theories saying "aliens made these vases!!!" or something, they're saying "we don't know how these were made, but with modern knowledge we believe it would not have been possible to make them by hand, and here's a list of arguments for why".
Yet they're labeled as conspiracy theorists and ridiculed, by people who're convinced that whatever they learned in school 20 years ago is the immutable ground truth, or - worse - by people whose careers are based on this ground truth being correct.
Maybe another factor is that a lot of people involved in these projects are not from academic career backgrounds, so they're excluded on the basis of elitism.
We do know how the vast majority of these artifacts were made, though. Most of the people "just asking questions" are ignorant of craftsmanship and historical achievements, whereas the 'academics' are not.
Quartz and diorite are harder than granite. Quartz sand abrasion, hand drills utilizing quartz, diorite smoothing tools and melting with hot coals are all techniques recorded by the Egyptians, and have been reperformed by scientists and engineers with similar results.
UnchartedX is run by absolute whackjobs who believe an ancient super civilization, despite no iron, no lithium, no artifacts indicating use of electricity, milled these hand crafts with computer guided drills. It's even dumber than ancient aliens, because at least aliens could take the evidence of their existence with them.
There's various theories about how specific aspects could have been made, for example, there are several ideas about how to hand-polish granite surfaces to the required degree.
I haven't seen one that explains all aspects of this at once and it's intellectually lazy to say "(most of) these questions are solved in isolation, so it's not a valid question anymore", with things like the consistent wall thickness being especially difficult (and for which it would be very interesting, for example, to measure whether the miniscule imperfections mirror each other on the inside/outside, to make some deductions about the manufacturing process).
UnchartedX, as far as I know, is one guy who happens to be enthusiastic about a bunch of these things. Regardless of how crazy some of his theories might be, he's sure as heck doing a lot more objectively useful work to find out things about them than insulting people on an online forum.
We have iron artifacts which are thousands of years old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Age says "The earliest-known meteoric iron artifacts are nine small beads dated to 3200 BC, which were found in burials at Gerzeh, Lower Egypt, having been shaped by careful hammering." That's 5,000 years old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaca_H%C3%B6y%C3%BCk shows "Dagger with iron blade and golden hilt from Alaca Höyük. Early evidence for the use of iron in Anatolia. 2500-2400 BC." You can see the iron is heavily rusted, but clearly present over 4,000 years later."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10814-019-09129-6 says "Larger numbers of iron artifacts, too many to list individually, appeared in the second millennium BC. Waldbaum (1978, 1980, 1999) produced several early syntheses of available references to iron in the Bronze Age Mediterranean and parts of the Near East, totaling about 150 artifacts. The majority of these come from the Late Bronze Age (c. 1600–1200 BC)." These are over 3,000 year old.
Even if iron could not be found, where are the furnaces, tuyeres, and slag which are part of iron production?
Ancient iron production leaves behind bloomeries. And in places like Egypt that are so dry, ancient iron (including meteoric iron predating smelting) does survive pretty well.
> with modern knowledge we believe it would not have been possible to make them by hand
This presumes that knowledge can't be lost but we have plenty of evidence that it can be lost and that historical inventions (such as the potters wheel, one of the oldest practical machines) have been made in more than one place.
I don't think elitism is as much a factor as the lack of rigor underlying the analysis, not the fact finding itself. It's perfectly possible to do a whole bunch of materials science and yield some new facts but putting those facts into perspective and getting to the right conclusions is another matter entirely. Most of that 'conspiracy theorist' stuff tends to be 'this was my preferred conclusion and here is the data that supports that conclusion' whilst leaving out everything that contradicts that conclusions (and this is unscientific and may well be why mainstream science doesn't pick up on the ideas, they don't satisfy some of the already known constraints).
That thread is all over the place, the only two vase-related things I found were:
a) A woman in Russia hand-made a vase that looks similar to the Egyptian ones.
b) Some guy said the vases are forged, and made in modern times, because their provenance is not proven.
Neither of these strike me as particular interesting statements, and the rest of that thread is about completely unrelated topics. I closed it at the "Dudes Think They Can Prove Atlantis by Measuring a Vase" link, because that's exactly the kind of condescending crap I'm talking about.
The childish title of the video makes me not want to engage with it, the guy should write a blog post instead. At least I can consume the information from the vase scan folks without watching hour long videos.
We need summarisation tools for clickbait videos. Maybe they already exist?
The pdf at [0] clearly says that while they believe it could not be made without "high-precision modern machinery", that is only a belief. They are aware of that flaw writing:
"To address the question of whether or not such manufacturing accuracy is possible by hand, we will need to expand the analysis to include both modern and ancient objects that are known to have been hand-made."
I read [2]. It comes across as post-hoc numerology - looking for patterns on the assumption they are present. It is also missing a way to perform the same analysis on other objects - are all such vessels using R(n)? Can you find similar patterns in "ancient objects that are known to have been hand-made"?
> The first assemblage to my mind unquestionably connected with [stone-working] is not funerary; Room 12 in House Group 89 in the early Old Kingdom town at Hierakonpolis was a vasegrinder's workshop. Quibell and Green found one quartzite and two sandstone drills, as well as the benches and stands used by the cutters and the remains of their abrasives
> Round the room ran a bench of beaten earth 0.8 m. (2½ feet) above the floor. This bench projects considerably in the W. angle and to a lesser degree in the S. angle. The upper parts of these projections have cup-like hollows in which were vase borers such as are shown on Pl. LXII. That marked .1. was of chert. It stood with working surface upwards in the depression in the bench ; under it was a quantity of sand that had been used as the abrading material. On the top of the borer were two rough pieces of chert. Near to it (marked 2) was an oblong corn grinder. The borer marked 3 on the drawing was of diorite. Both sides had been used as working surfaces. Little or no sand was found in the socket or depression in the bench.
> From the fact of the bench being 0.8 m. above the floor, it seems as if the workmen must have stood to their task ; the squatting position is, however, that represented on the reliefs, when the operation of vase making is represented.
Why can we find a room where stone vase grinders worked, and depictions of them making vases by hand, if at that time they had access to machine-made vases?
Given there were clearly hand-made stone vases, what are the odds that the first vase analyzed happens to be machine made?
How do you distinguish between hand-made and machine-made vases?
The issue isn't the scans but the method used to identify patterns in the scan.
Have they described the method in such a way that others can replicate it?
... that others can apply the method to other objects?
Have multiple independent people used the method to analyze the same objects? Do they get the same answers?
Has the method been tested on hand-made, lathe-made, and CNC-made objects?
What about on naturally made objects?
We know the ancient Egyptians had hand-made stone vases. Does the method resolve which vases were hand-made vs (potentially) machine made?
Where is any sort of archeological evidence? Why no broken machine parts? Why no foundries were the metals were processed? Why no depictions of any of the required processes when other parts of life were depicted, including making stone vases by hand?
All solid questions I'd like answers to as well. I was merely adding that it isn't a one-off, as some people have gotten used to immediately dismissing it with.
> Have multiple independent people used the method to analyze the same objects? Do they get the same answers?
Although this may be difficult. Getting permission to go hands-on with a very expensive ancient artifact isn't easy. So it may be a while before we get lots of third-party reproduction.
Ahh. What I meant was that two different groups, using the same analysis method, analyze the same object (whatever that might be) and compare the result.
That is, how reproducible is the analysis?
Is the method so broad that it finds patterns in things we know are hand-made?
Is the method so vague that different groups come up with wildly different answers?
The [2] paper look very much cherry picking - finding a pattern and saying the odds of finding that pattern are incredibly unlikely, while ignoring the odds of finding any pattern.
As the old Feynman story goes, “You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight... I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!”
The conspiracy theorists look more convincing on an initial read because they cherry pick evidence and often misrepresent it, too.
The one I ran into in college is the TIGHAR group, who have some unique theories about where Amelia Earhart's plane was lost. They sound very convincing... until you realize every piece of evidence is only examined from the perspective of how it proves their theory, and any other views are ignored or dismissed.
The folks who actually care about the truth, on the other hand, tend to qualify their evidence and admit to uncertainties.
There's plenty of room for speculation, and it can be a lot of fun to do so, but it's important to remember that it's speculation. The moment you insist that it absolutely must be true and all evidence to the contrary is proof of a conspiracy to cover it up, is the moment you're abandoning reality.
> The conspiracy theorists actually make very good points.
Like what? Someone else mentioned there's a difference between "conspiracy theory" and "fringe theory". A fringe theory is one that is outside the mainstream (sometimes radically so) but need not involve a conspiracy; a "conspiracy theory" requires the addendum that "they" are suppressing the truth, "they" are out to get you, and this nebulous "they" is often large enough to be all-encompassing ("all scientists", "the world's governments", etc).
Conspiracy theories may still be right ("the US government was hiding the truth about the Vietnam war") but often are simply psychotically wrong. Or maliciously wrong, since there is an industry for conspiracy theories, where it's more important to get your followers than to actually reach any sort of truth. That is, they are often knowingly a scam (like that thing about "alien corpses" that was recently in the news about the Mexican congress).
There's a flaw with their non-scientific, non-methodical approach, too. We can reach the "truth" by randomly asserting things, but generally that's not the best way to go about it.
I don’t think anybody is claiming their questions are wrong. It’s the way they answer them.
And yes, that applies to mainstream fields, too. In the harder sciences such as psychology, sociology and history (physics is easy because all electrons are identical and repeating experiments is possible, if sometimes impractical) it is extremely hard to draw any conclusions, and there’s pressure to publish strong statements (both externally and from people’s egos).
For example, discovering a new dinosaur is better for one’s career than discovering the one thousandth part of a thigh bone of a known one.
To make things worse, the popular press version of such papers tend to remove many of the doubts that the ‘real’ papers mention.
Non-mainstream publications are worse at that, though, by not mentioning doubts at all, and bending facts.
History is definitely not a science and psychology and sociology are “social science” eg not science either. If you can’t make repeatable experiments it isn’t science
The actual point is that both rejecting or accepting anything you're told is unwise, but it's safer to reject what conspiracy theorists say because their assertions are not well-grounded nor do they follow the scientific method.
The procedures they follow (or fail to follow) are more important than their wild assertions. Ground-breaking assertions in science are not unheard of.
But then again, most of them are perfectly adequate minds that could have got a lot more right if they'd ever questioned themselves rather than assuming other people's disagreements merely proved how great they were...
Of course you put in the qualifier "usually" here to be able to reject any arguments against you, but just in case: What's your theory on how the extremely precisely manufactured granite vases found in Egypt were made?
Why do you think it is a problem to make very precise things with effectively basic mechanical tools? Also, keep in mind, the ones that didn't pan out might have been discarded etc., so you are seeing the good ones.
I find it cleans up "conspiracy theory" analysis to clean up the language. "Conspiracy hypotheses" are worthy of consideration, but not belief. Have a stack of evidence? you might have a conspiracy theory, but have you ruled out the other hypotheses?
People are just used to using the term "conspiracy theory" to trash inconvenient ideas that might be true. Wuhan lab funding, leak, and coverup was a conspiracy hypothesis worth consideration.
That's not why that stuff is labelled "conspiracy theory". What's labelled like that are theories about conspiracies, e.g. that all 400000 who worked on the Apollo program was in it together to fake a moon landing, or that all the world's archaeologists are "in it together" to suppress information (one which Mr. Hancock subscribes to).
Theories that are just claimed wacky and requiring no conspiracy "to suppress the truth" are called fringe theories, not conspiracy theories.
So, yes, "Fringe hypotheses" may be worthy of consideration, sometimes.. but conspiracy hypotheses are not worthy of consideration, because for those to turn out true would actually need a real huge conspiracy of people who knows it's true but agree to suppress said truth. If anything you hear needs a conspiracy in order to not be accepted then you can safely dismiss it. If it's just fringe then feel free to pursue it.
Why dismiss conspiracy hypotheses out of hand? Conspiracies happen all the time. As Data becomes a more important resource, asymmetric access to data will become an ever more prominent feature of those in power.
I would say the important thing is to recognize that our pattern recognition overfits for malicious actors with hidden knowledge, probably for evolutionary reasons. The fact we evolved to have more false positives than negatives in this field is emphatically not a reason to dismiss all such hypotheses out of hand.
"Out of hand" is too harsh, but we should lean towards dismissing them unless/until the evidence is compelling.
Why? Well, simply put, because doing otherwise wastes too much time and attention. Conspiracy theories are almost always created by people who are not subject matter experts (at best they are self-taught, but usually this means they watched lots of dodgy YouTube videos), bypassing or ignoring all procedures that exist for a good reason, propelled more by a "I want to believe" rather than a skeptical point of view, and are far easier to create than actual science.
Doing a proper experiment based on clear assumptions is hard. Being skeptical, trying to rule out confounding variables, considering alternative explanations, all of that is hard.
Anyone can create a conspiracy theory, and it requires no skill other than being passionate and having a platform -- like YouTube -- to disseminate your fringe opinion. And because conspiracy theorists seldom follow the scientific method, they can always "ad-hoc patch up" whatever gap you find in their "theory", so it's an uphill battle. It requires no effort to make wild assertions, but it takes a lot of effort to convincingly disprove them.
So it makes sense to dismiss them as default. If one is true, it will gather compelling evidence with time regardless of the crackpot that is currently proposing the theory.
The kind of conspiracies that happen all the time are tiny ones, and typically (and that's how the word is most often defined in text) about a small group planning to do something illegal.
The term "conspiracy theory" is instead used about when a (typically very large) group of people creates a conspiracy to suppress a scientific or factual truth, and that does not happen all the time - it's very hard to find even one case like that. So no, conspiracies, in this kind of context, does not happen all the time.
That wasn't exactly mass deception. It was basically group think inside a certain administration, supported by an at that time must-keep-in-sync-with-them UK prime IIRC. Most of Europe had access to more information and knew it to be incorrect (there were investigative TV programs etc showing why). Most people actually believed that the WMD claim was just a stunt to make an excuse for going in and finally finish the '91 war.
It certainly wasn't a global conspiracy by scientists in any sense.
I thought the Gobekli Tepi age thing was a fringe theory? Not aliens style inanity, but not widely believed in the archaeological mainstream. So maybe a bit early to call it vindicating evidence?
Edit: sorry, I confused it with Gunung Padang, see below.
Göbekli Tepe is not that old. There are plenty of other sites of comparable age in the region, such as Jericho. The exceptional part is that the ancient structures are largely intact, because the site was abandoned rather than repeatedly destroyed and built over.
It's only people like Graham Hancock who thinks that hunter gatherers are primitive and unable to do anything organized. The reality is that they were perfectly capable, and they even have quite a bit more time on their hands than an agricultural society (which until very recently had to work day and night to survive - wait, it's still like that, for modern farmers in my own country. No time for holidays, ever).
The only thing hunter gatherers were lacking compared to agricultural societies was a possible difference in manpower, though for the latter all that manpower was occupied with farming.
I think Graham Hancock & co are confusing hunter-gatherers with nomads always on the move, with nothing more than they could carry. But that's nomads, nobody claimed nomads built Göbekli Tepe.
That was the original claim, these days it's not (from wikipedia: "Current excavators interpret Göbekli Tepe as a settlement, based on recent findings such as domestic structures and features, water supply installations, and Neolithic tools associated with domestic use."
The referenced paper seems to be fully available online: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358411654_There_and...
Hunter gatherers were still humans. Theoretically capable of everything we're capable of. The idea that they would get together to build something big is not impossibly far-fetched, but the fact that it was abandoned shows that their society wasn't able to maintain it in the long term. That requires more complex social structures.
> the fact that it was abandoned shows that their society wasn't able to maintain it in the long term
A flood, drought, climate change, war or better jobs elsewhere were common reasons for abandoning locations. We have many abandoned projects today, that doesn't have to say anything about social structures.
Göbekli Tepe was not abandoned but purposely buried. It is composed of several successive structures, built and then buried over the span more than a thousand years. That's a considerable long term commitment.
So their argument is that since Gobekli Tepi is old (by sediment layer analysis), therefore the pyramids at Giza are older yet again? That's just bluster and whataboutery.
It’s the counter. One of the rebuttals to the conjecture that the sphinx is older use to be that if it was, other older structures would exist (and at the time they did not)
Older man made structures. Plenty of older structures exist and it doesn't prove much of anything, that older man made structures exist is always a possibility and even today there may well be older structures still hidden. But the argument that something hasn't been found yet is a weak one anyway and the local conditions vary enough that that alone might be sufficient explanation. Being buried underground versus sitting exposed in the desert could well explain why most if not all but less than a handful of older structures have disappeared.
No, just the sphinx. Based on erosion analysis of the head vs. the rest of the body, the indications are that the sphinx is much older the latest work which was done on the head.
Throughout history, there's always been wrong-yet-standard "scientific" statements that have been later corrected, from Aristotle's laws of motion, to discussions about the shape of the Earth, going through the so-called impossibility of heavier-than-air flight, the (im)possibility of perpetual machines, etc.
Of course, I'm not suggesting levitation of massive stones either, but I think history encourages prudence.
I would dearly enjoy to read a list of undisputed facts, agreed on by all parties, clearly separated from a list of all interpretations, and an evaluation of their consistency, instead of sensationalized/ridiculed "fringe" theories.
> from Aristotle's laws of motion, to discussions about the shape of the Earth, going through the so-called impossibility of heavier-than-air flight, the (im)possibility of perpetual machines
In the late 1500s, Cornelius Drebbel built and patented a perpetual motion machine that used the daily changes in barometric pressure to power a sort of clock. It was a very impressive achievement. We can be pedantic and say it isn’t actually a perpetual motion machine based on our definitions (which necessitate impossibility) — but for him, he made the impossible possible.
That isn't pedantic. The whole point of a perpetual motion machine is that it has a certain definition which is violated by putting in external energy. For him, had he been aware of all of the facts, he would have reached the conclusion that he didn't make the impossible impossible. There are even more subtly wrong not-quite-PMs that are impressive feats of engineering but nevertheless are not PMs.
Of course, for most intents and purposes, it's "absolutely" true to say that there is no perpetual motion machines. But if we want to be precise, I don't think we can escape the fact that this truth is "merely" relative to a specific conceptual framework.
The now-deprecated conceptual frameworks of the past (religions & cie) weren't so decisive regarding perpetual motion machines for example. In religions/science, people had/have a tendency to think "we've reached the peek", but history relentlessly teaches us to be more careful.
This point of view probably is pedantic, in the context of perpetual motion machines, but that mindset is so prevalent in society today that I can't think of it as a bad habit: it's easy to be blinded by knowledge as much as by ignorance.
No, it's a simple matter of classification. Given a class of hypothetical devices 'X' with a strict and clear definition the question is whether or not device 'Y' is a member of said class.
Yes, but it is quite hard to define it precisely — which is partly why it was so astonishing then and now.
For instance, to say: “a machine that operates indefinitely without the addition of fuel or energy” well, neither fuel nor energy is added to this machine, not in any apparent way. Instead, it absorbs the natural fluctuations of the surrounding environment and translates that to motive power. Now imagine that some huckster claimed to do that with “quantum zero point energy” or something, I think we’d treat the device like a perpetual motion machine — and look under the table for the trick.
You’ll need to translate the page. It’s a fascinating story. Drebbel isn’t well known in the English speaking world — but he also designed the first cybernetic system, a thermostat.
What's interesting is that there is a never ending stream of would-be inventors of PMs that really believe in their devices no matter how easy it is to poke holes in the physics. Most of them don't begin to qualify for a closer examination (assuming they'd agree to that in the first place) and the few that do are often marvels of engineering and the inventors themselves don't actually know or realize how their devices work.
I was part of an online community of renewable energy enthusiasts and we had more than our fair share of cranks there peddling their 'free energy', 'over unity' and 'perpetual motion' devices so I'm probably too bluntly dismissive of anybody that thinks they've finally got it.
Usually they are clever engineers but they miss the physics theory.
And if even the US patent office continues to fall for it who am I to complain...
It's amusing given the context: I think you're using a precise definition of "perpetual (motion) machine", while I'm relying more on the one of an average human.
An average human would not be able to distinguish something that looks like a perpetual motion machine from something that actually is a perpetual motion machine. But it's fine to have different degrees of rigor for lay people than for scientists, the scientists have never been confused on this one, lay people obviously can be simply because the lack the relevant background. Just like 'really long' is not for ever and 'really large' is not infinite.
Saying something "is" or "isn't" something is always within the context and limit of the definition. If you want to throw definition out of the equation just to not be pedantic, anything is anything else.
Those ridiculous fringe theories is how science has marched forward for centuries. Unfortunately, it seems we're losing our capacity for it as a species.
Its almost the exact opposite tbh. We got far more out of Newton doing boring uncontroversial recording and measuring than we ever did from his obsession with heretical interpretations of the Bible. If we're losing our capacity to be gullible enough to take Graham Hancock seriously (and I'm not sure we are) it certainly doesn't seem to have held back scientific progress relative to historic norms.
I guess I wasn't there so we can't settle he debate, but this smacks to me of cherry picking and survivorship bias. For every one of Newton's careful measurements, which I actually imagine he was mocked or dismissed for at the time, I'm sure there are just as many examples of unexpected outcomes, like manned flight, geocentrism, or evolution. Likely many more that seem expected and commonplace today, because they proved true, that we can't even recognize in retrospect.
We don't need to imagine that Newton was marked or dismissed for Principia at the time because we can take note of the actual history where he wound up surrounded by a circle of admirers (some of them famous in their own right) and president of the Royal Society (he had the good sense to keep the unorthodox part of his religious beliefs to himself). Although imagining something that fits a more exciting narrative than the actual historic record is kind of appropriate for a Graham Hancock subthread ;)
The cherry picking actually works the other way - for every great discovery that was universally derided by scientists (which isn't most great discoveries, not even ones that were controversial like natural selection) there are dozens of silly ideas based on complete misunderstandings and mountebanks painting themselves as brave challengers of the orthodoxy to an audience that doesn't really understand the orthodoxy.
The takeaway is that both happen. Sometimes established science is right, and sometimes it's not. I don't mean to dismiss iterative discovery, but paradigm shifts have always required a leap of imagination.
I guess you'll have to imagine (or not, your choice) what it was like to be Newton before the wild success of his works. There was a time where his ideas were not established science, and he didn't know how they would be received.
> Newton said he was reluctant to publish his calculus at the time for fear of being mocked.
You seem to have a pretty established idea of what is right, and I think I've gotten my idea across at this point, so you can take or leave it. Cheers.
There is another claim that the Sphinx was built by earlier people because the water corrosion was caused by rains, not river. That is, it put the date to the end of the last glacier age.
I like this article better. Natural formation, carve a face on an existing head. No prehistoric levitation of massive stones.