Claim: Ancient Cultures inherited Structures and Artefacts from Pre-Historic Lost Civilizations with Advanced Manufacturing Capabilities

[SkepticSteve]

I have been following up on some breadcrumbs laid out by Ross Coulthart in a recent interview with Vinnie Adams from DisclosureTeam. Particularly, he referred to two YouTube channels, being UnchartedX and BrightInsigh, hinting towards an alternative history explanation of many of the megalithic structures and artifacts attributed to the ancient cultures of Egypt, Meso- and South American as well as East-South Asia. The key claim is, that these structures and artifacts were not manufactured by these ancient cultures self, but instead merely inherited from lost pre-historic civilizations with advanced manufacturing capabilities.

An evidence repeatedly brought forward by both channels are precision cuts often in very difficult angles found on megalithic structures made out hard stones such as granite or basalt. The argument is, that these cuts would not have been feasible to achieve with the tools of these ancient known cultures when considering the hardness of the stones and the high precision of the cuts.


Additional arguments often brought forward are the weight of the stones, as well as found drill holes and nubs. And what also appears to be miscuts, thus allowing one to advocate that a machine was involved in manufacturing these stones.

I am curious to see if anyone knows any good counterarguments.

@Mick: How about some backyard megalithic constructions? ;-)

 

[yoshy]

Dr. David Miano has a YouTube channel, World of Antiquity, with a playlist debunking these videos and many others.


Source: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjhctHjnIbUgvin0ZlrsHg87l_k1RrKdf

 

[NorCal Dave]

What machines? Where are they? The general idea has been around for a while, with H.P. Lovecraft using it fictitiously, then books like Midnight of the Magicians and of course Chariots of the Gods down to Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods and shows like Ancient Aliens.

Things like these YouTube videos become a sort of Gish Gallop, with lots of little things to research and maybe debunk. I'll get on it as time allows.

NOVA, on US Public TV had a series called Secrets of Lost Empires, where modern people try to recreate, if not the whole thing, a small version of things like Stonehenge or the Pyramids using only what the original builders had to work with. Here's transcript of the Stonehenge episode:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2403stone.html

 

[gargamel]

Stone is a primitive material. Spending months at a time on making it super smooth doesn't make it any less primitive.

 

[NorCal Dave]

As I alluded to earlier, the first de-bunk here is to have them show the machines, or at least the remains of them. Unless they were all brought by aliens and then taken away, there should be something left somewhere. Actually a lot of somethings left everywhere.

Say COVID where to wiped out our current civilization and later humans come along 2-4k years in the future and found the remains of cars everywhere. They would eventually also find the machines, assembly lines in this case, that made the cars at the ancient sites of Freemont (Tesla) and Dearborn (Ford) or Smyrna (Nissan).

Where are all these machines?

 

[JMartJr]

Stone is a primitive material. Spending months at a time on making it super smooth doesn't make it any less primitive.

The material is primitive, their techniques for working it were not. Unsurprisingly, humans with human brains who spent their life learning and refining a specific skill, then passing on what they had learned to their apprentices, got very good at it!

Where are all these machines?

Good question, but be ready for their counter -- where are all the tools? It is received wisdom among these folks that there are not enough tools found at the ancient sites. The answer to that is that, 1) there are indeed tools found at the sites, though not as many as they imagine would be "enough," but convincing evidence that human tools were used otherwise there would not be ANY, and 2) when my house was built the contractors used a lot of saws and hammers, yet when I moved in there were none on the site -- maybe builders take their tools with them when the job is done, to use on the next job!

 

[Mendel]

Where are all these machines?

A medieval windmill is a machine made almost entirely from wood. Since they've fallen out of use, few remnants remain.

(CC BY-SA, by Arto J)

 

[386]

I wonder if thousands of years in the future, when AI generates most of their software, if people will look back at ancient programming languages and claim there's no way somebody could have manually coded assembly and that we must have had some unexplainable help.

Edit: actually, I doubt it will even take that long, assembly is basically alien witchcraft already, haha.

 

[NorCal Dave]

A medieval windmill is a machine made almost entirely from wood. Since they've fallen out of use, few remnants remain.View attachment 49162
(CC BY-SA, by Arto J)

But they do exist and there are examples of them.

Good question, but be ready for their counter -- where are all the tools? It is received wisdom among these folks that there are not enough tools found at the ancient sites. The answer to that is that, 1) there are indeed tools found at the sites, though not as many as they imagine would be "enough," but convincing evidence that human tools were used otherwise there would not be ANY, and 2) when my house was built the contractors used a lot of saws and hammers, yet when I moved in there were none on the site -- maybe builders take their tools with them when the job is done, to use on the next job!

There are tools that have been found and there are modern experiments showing that they could work, he even shows clips from a series of NOVA productions from the '90s showing that. He just says it's too slow, more on that below.

Yes, as a contractor, I usually pick up my tools and take them with me when I'm done, but you can find them in my shop and in the garages of other contractors. They're around and can be found.

One problem here is we don't know what exactly we're debunking. He says it's not aliens, but then vaguely suggests "lost technology". Such as? Is it giant wooden water wheels that powered the copper saws? We could discuss that. Were they using a pourable concrete type product? That's been proposed and discussed. Or is it crystal lasers brought from Mt. Shasta by the Lumurians and then whisked away to be used at Tiwanaku?

Materials scientist Joseph Davidovits has claimed that the blocks of the pyramid are not carved stone, but mostly a form of limestone concrete and that they were "cast" as with modern concrete

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_construction_techniques

I think there is some modernity going on here. He goes to Egypt and make videos and Instagram stuff and see all these monuments. In his modern mind he has no idea how blocks that big can be moved and carved that well. The way he was taught makes no sense, so it must be machines, like we do today.

An often overlooked item in this kind of argument is the power of man-power. A large and organized work force can accomplish a lot. Our modern thinking is to use machines and automation to get as much done with as few people as possible. But if all you have is slow copper saw, you throw more people at it. Even if the copper saw is slow, if there is a lot of guys using it everyday for weeks on end, stuff gets done.

A construction management study carried out by the firm Daniel, Mann, Johnson, & Mendenhall in association with Mark Lehner, and other Egyptologists, estimates that the total project required an average workforce of 14,567 people and a peak workforce of 40,000. Without the use of pulleys, wheels, or iron tools, they used critical path analysis to suggest the Great Pyramid was completed from start to finish in approximately 10 years.[53] Their study estimates the number of blocks used in construction was between 2 and 2.8 million (an average of 2.4 million), but settles on a reduced finished total of 2 million after subtracting the estimated volume of the hollow spaces of the chambers and galleries.[53] Most sources agree on this number of blocks somewhere above 2.3 million.[54] Their calculations suggest the workforce could have sustained a rate of 180 blocks per hour (3 blocks/minute) with ten-hour workdays for putting each individual block in place. They derived these estimates from modern third-world construction projects that did not use modern machinery, but conclude it is still unknown exactly how the Great Pyramid was built.[53] As Dr. Craig Smith of the team points out:

The logistics of construction at the Giza site are staggering when you think that the ancient Egyptians had no pulleys, no wheels, and no iron tools. Yet, the dimensions of the pyramid are extremely accurate and the site was leveled within a fraction of an inch over the entire 13.1-acre base. This is comparable to the accuracy possible with modern construction methods and laser leveling. That's astounding. With their 'rudimentary tools', the pyramid builders of ancient Egypt were about as accurate as we are today with 20th-century technology.[55]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_construction_techniques

Also, there is the underestimation of what people can do. Particularly skilled craftsmen that do something like this all the time. Below is a transcript for the afore mentioned NOVA series where they try to build a small pyramid using, at least some ancient techniques. Egyptologist Mark Lehner has just questioned the stone mason, Roger Hopkins, about how to keep the 52* slope and how he's not doing it the way it should be done:

ROGER HOPKINS: Well, I'm only using it to keep it square.

MARK LEHNER: You're only using the step pyramid to keep it square.

ROGER HOPKINS: Right.

MARK LEHNER: We're not using the step pyramid to actually control the rise and run of the outer casing slope.

ROGER HOPKINS: No, no, no.

MARK LEHNER: As did the ancient Egyptians, according to some evidence at Meidum, for example, and in the Queens' Pyramids.

ROGER HOPKINS: You can't prove that for a fact for one minute, pal. It's only on record like three pyramids that they used a 51 degree angle, and the rest of them show a 53 degree angle, which shows you a vertical rise that's a 3-4-5 triangle.

After some discussion (bold by me):

NARRATOR: The mathematics used by the ancient masons was probably very simple. Through trial and error, the builders of the Great Pyramid learned that the proportions of eleven and fourteen would give them about a fifty-two degree angle, if these were incorporated into every casing stone before being put in place. By using these proportions, and by periodically sighting at the corners to check if the slope is true, Roger expects to end up with a perfectly-shaped pyramid, despite his disagreement with Mark.

MARK LEHNER: So, you're using basically common sense, practical experience, and a hands-on approach.

ROGER HOPKINS: Right. Exactly.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/1915mpyramid.html

 

[Ann K]

Let me get this straight: the claim is that ancient civilizations didn't have the technology to do this but even more ancient ones did? That's a hypothesis that surely needs some evidence before it can be considered, and "they couldn't have done that" is a claim that does not constitute evidence for a different scenario.

They're talking about stone. Methods like cracking stone with wedges of wood (which were then wet so they would swell) have been postulated and tried, and depending on the particular stone could have given flat surfaces that would not have required much additional smoothing. We don't know all the methods used by long-ago civilizations, but we continually find out that our distant ancestors were more sophisticated than we once thought.

 

[Mick West]

@Mick: How about some backyard megalithic constructions? ;-)

I'd actually love to do that. Unfortunately it's not the most practical hobby.

Probably mentioned in Miano's videos, but a simple way to fit two giant rocks together with a hair-thin tolerance is to chisel them roughly flat before assembling, then use the top rock as a giant sanding block (with some long levers, and lots of muscle power). That would be interesting to replicate.

 

[Mendel]

When I consider what a sculptor can do to stone with hand tools, "make this rock flat" seems a rather simple-ish task.

 

[NorCal Dave]

That would be interesting to replicate.

I'm a little North of you Mick, but I got rocks. Lots of rocks.

Which got me to thinking, "how much can I do by myself in a short amount of time with rocks?"

I'm not saying that a razor blade wouldn't fit, but I managed this in about 40 minutes. A lot of that time was spend trying to stabilize the rock so I could hit it efficiently and finding a good striking stone. I am NOT a stone mason, but even in the short time I was doing this, I started to see how to strike in a certain way to remove material while leaving a ridge that could tuned to the setting rock.

So I started with these two guys:

And then started to shape the top one with another rock:

And after maybe 15 minutes of actual pounding, I got this:

Again, the Pharaoh isn't going to be hiring me, but here's what one dumbass can accomplish in less than an hour with NO machines or metal tools, just rocks.

Now imagine an army of guys that had spent their lives learning how to do this.

And no, I didn't change the angle of the shots to make the finished one look better or hide something. The sun had moved just enough that was making a big shadow on the finished one.

 

[Ravi]

The many nicely made granite boxes (the Serapeum at Saqqara) are not as great as always is made believed (series on tv, youtubers). Although it is a great achievement, the flatness and squareness of the boxes is far from perfect. The angles deviate sometimes degrees, and the flatness is in most areas not even close to the flatness we can create in modern days. Again, it is masterful work and it would take ages to make, but it is human effort and this means non-perfect. I guess that is the biggest pointer to them being man made and not alien (not proposed here, but on youtube etc..).

EDIT

Ah, I found the channel that goes in depth about stone work etc. He has many videos explaining stone mason work of the past and present.
SGD Sacred Geometry Decoded

 

[Tedsson]

There is a strange sort of logical fallacy whereby people seem to assume that our distant ancestors were somehow "stupid", "uneducated", "less intelligent" etc than modern people. This is manifest nonsense as they were just as "intelligent" as modern man. But the assumption is that the ancients couldn't have done the things they did because they were "nowhere near as intelligent as us" and therefore must have had some advanced/alien technology.

This is compounded by the argument from ignorance. "I don't understand how they did that. I couldn't do that. It is beyond my comprehension". Ergo it was aliens/Atlanteans.

There are many examples of constructions built within recorded history that are adequately explained and documented without having to resort to mumbo jumbo. Good examples are the large cathedrals in Britain - we know all about the construction of these masterpieces and the skills of the master masons who ran the construction projects. A good example is how they knew about parallax and tapered rows of columns slightly outwards to avoid convergence when viewed from the end. They didn't need CAD/CAM to do this. Just skill.

Somebody upthread made the valid point that if the remains of cars could be seen it should be possible to find the source of their manufacture. With the pyramids we have discovered these "factories" - buried towns which housed tens of thousands of skilled labourers.

There is a sculpture in the Vatican which depicts some ancient hero fighting a bunch of bulls. It is about 20' square and is quite exquisite. I have absolutely no idea how the remarkably talented sculptor managed to carve it but it wasn't with 3D printing or robots. It was just immense skill. I can't imagine how one could even start to convert a huge block of marble into beautiful statuary but he did it.

Humans have always been inventive and have always developed skills and techniques for building both huge and intricate artefacts. There is no need to invoke some agency to explain this.

 

[Mendel]

There is a strange sort of logical fallacy whereby people seem to assume that our distant ancestors were somehow "stupid", "uneducated", "less intelligent" etc than modern people. This is manifest nonsense as they were just as "intelligent" as modern man. But the assumption is that the ancients couldn't have done the things they did because they were "nowhere near as intelligent as us" and therefore must have had some advanced/alien technology.

This is compounded by the argument from ignorance. "I don't understand how they did that. I couldn't do that. It is beyond my comprehension".

If the ancienty did something I don't understand, the logical conclusion is "I'm nowhere near as intelligent as they".

However, if I believe that I'm the pinnacle of creation, that conclusion is unacceptable; and therefore, to maintain that belief, these achievements must have been accomplished by something alien/with alien help.
But that's not an argument from evidence, but rather an argument from belief: it's dogmatic.

 

[markus]

I recently learned quite a bit about pyramids and even as a non-expert it became very obvious very fast that they couldn't possibly have been built by some advanced civilization. Take for example the pyramids that modern people build: compare the pyramid at the Louvre with the pyramid at the Luxor hotel in Vegas. It's clear that whoever built one could've pretty much built the other. They're build with basis on similar physical principles, with similar core load-bearing materials, and to similar accuracy. It's clear that their shape is not structurally essential, either, they could've been built much taller given the demonstrated construction techniques. Wherever such structures are different, they're different pretty much because their builders wanted them to be different.

Such is not the case with ancient Egyptian pyramids. First you have the mastaba, relatively simple, flat-roofed funerary structures.

Then you have a natural progression, placing a bunch of mastabas one atop of one another, as in Djoser's pyramid:

Then you start seeing people make flat-sided pyramids... but oops, they tried building them too tall, so they had to reduce the angle halfway (Bent pyramid):

Okay, we learned our lesson, next pyramid we build is just going to have the same smaller angle throughout (Red pyramid):

Okay, maybe we were being conservative... let's go big or go home (Khufu's pyramid at Giza):

You see a very clear pattern of technological development together with material and economic constraints being determining factors to the size and shape of the pyramids. Why would this be so, if they were built by aliens / atlanteans / ultraterrestrials / snakelike brain parasites posing as gods? They'd have their technique nailed down, and they wouldn't necessarily need to source the material locally either.

One particularly interesting bit of evidence in this story (has little to do with the main topic but it's too fascinating not to share) is about the technique used by Egyptians to align the sides of the pyramids with the cardinal directions. Unlike these previous pieces of evidence, which show more or less continuous improvement, alignment accuracy improves up until Khufu's pyramid, and subsequently gets worse. This mystified archeologists, but then a beautiful explanation was found that concisely explains the observed pattern in the errors:

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/35042510

The Egyptians weren't aligning the pyramids to the true North: they were using an astronomical reference consisting of two circumpolar stars that happened to circumnavigate the celestial north pole when Khufu's pyramid was built. Those stars were known as "the indestructibles" because they never set, which gave them cosmic significance in Egyptian religion. In previous and subsequent reigns, those stars were not quite centered on the celestial north pole due to precession of the equinoxes so pyramids built then were not as accurately aligned.

Surely the goa'uld could just use a theodolite.

Again, I'm not an expert or even a student on any of this so I welcome corrections. But I think the main message is solid: if these incredible structures are made by some hidden advanced civilization, how come we can see the obvious builder-candidates learn how to build them?

 

[FatPhil]

if these incredible structures are made by some hidden advanced civilization, how come we can see the obvious builder-candidates learn how to build them?

They might be the master builders on their home planet, but that's only because they used planet earth as their sandbox for prototyping. (And yes, obviously I jest, but if ones universe of discourse already contains silliness, why wouldn't one continue to use more silliness to support ones point?)

 

[NorCal Dave]

You see a very clear pattern of technological development together with material and economic constraints being determining factors to the size and shape of the pyramids. Why would this be so, if they were built by aliens / atlanteans / ultraterrestrials / snakelike brain parasites posing as gods? They'd have their technique nailed down, and they wouldn't necessarily need to source the material locally either.

Indeed! It would seem obvious once this evidence is presented. But I've been into "Alternative-Archaeology" for years and the standard response is to just ignore whatever doesn't fit your pet theory.

People like Graham Hancock have, for years, been saying things like: "Egypt sprang up as a full civilization with the ability to build monuments overnight."
Bold by me:

"Ancient Egypt, like that of the Olmecs (Bolivia), emerged all at once and fully formed. Indeed, the period of transition from primitive to advanced society appears to have been so short that it makes no kind of historical sense. Technological skills that should have taken hundreds or even thousands of years to evolve were brought into use almost overnight — and with no apparent antecedents whatever."
— G.H.

*

Source: https://medium.com/borealism/understanding-ourselves-a-guided-quote-tour-of-graham-hancocks-controversial-theory-fc6723d489e9


Note, that what you have shared took hundreds of years to develop, just like Graham said it should. He, like many others, just ignores it.

It remains to be seen what "lost tech" this YouTuber has in mind. He, like most of us, is dually impressed with what the "Ancients" did, but then fails to realize, that as impressive as it is, it's piled up rocks. What they did is totally consistent with their level of technology, lacking structural steel, or concrete, they did what they could. They shaped and stacked rocks.

This mystified archeologists, but then a beautiful explanation was found that concisely explains the observed pattern in the errors:

I'm not sure if it "mystified" them. A puzzle, surely, but at the risk of sounding like Alt-Arch proponent, technology does get lost. Particularly in pre-printing press and/or societies with limited literacy. The Romans used a form of concrete extensively, but it was "lost" for a period of time following the fall of Rome.

600 BC

– Rome: Although the Ancient Romans weren't the first to create concrete, they were first to utilize this material widespread. By 200 BC, the Romans successfully implemented the use of concrete in the majority of their construction. They used a mixture of volcanic ash, lime, and seawater to form the mix. They then packed the mix into wooden forms, and once hardened, stacked the blocks like brick. After more than 2,000 years, Roman concrete structures stand tall due to their ingredients colliding with Earth's natural chemistry.

Technological Milestones: during the Middle Ages, concrete technology crept backward. After the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 AD, the technique for making pozzolan cement was lost until the discovery of manuscripts describing it was found in 1414. This rekindled interest in building with concrete.

https://www.giatecscientific.com/ed...– Rome: Although the,seawater to form the mix.

*This is not the best quote of GH, in that, it's from a page of some of his quotes, but doesn't say where they're from. It's what I could find in a hurry, and one can easily hear him saying stuff like this all over the internet.

 

[SkepticSteve]

Ban van Kerkwyk worked together with some metrologist to get some measurements on a vase made out of rose granite from a private collection of ancient Egyptian artificats. They claim that the manufacturing precision of of the surfaces makes the use of hand tools highly unlikely and suggest that an advanced manufacturing technique was put to use (begins at 16:51) :



Note: STL file of the vase is likely to be released within the following up weeks with supplementary reporting and documentation.

 

[Ann K]

Ban van Kerkwyk worked together with some metrologist to get some measurements on a vase made out of rose quartz from a private collection of ancient Egyptian artificats. They claim that the manufacturing precision of of the surfaces makes the use of hand tools highly unlikely and suggest that an advanced manufacturing technique was put to use :

He is a computer science guy. He is neither a metallurgist nor a geologist, and I've found no evidence that he has any skills at sculpture either. When I looked him up I immediately found his opinions on "the Richat structure being the site of Atlantis", so I know for darn sure he is (1) not a historian, and (2) not a person troubled by the facts uncovered from serious scholars. His claims appear to be invented to earn a few bucks. Perhaps you need to brush up on your skepticism.

 

[Mendel]

Ban van Kerkwyk worked together with some metrologist to get some measurements on a vase made out of rose quartz from a private collection of ancient Egyptian artificats. They claim that the manufacturing precision of of the surfaces makes the use of hand tools highly unlikely and suggest that an advanced manufacturing technique was put to use :

Have they used this methodology on samples of known handmade vases of high quality? Without any comparison data, it's just the old CT staple, argument by incredulity, again.

 

[JMartJr]

Ban van Kerkwyk worked together with some metrologist to get some measurements on a vase made out of rose quartz from a private collection of ancient Egyptian artificats. They claim that the manufacturing precision of of the surfaces makes the use of hand tools highly unlikely and suggest that an advanced manufacturing technique was put to use :

Assuming that is correct, for the sake of discussion, I wonder if it is more likely to be evidence that so much that we think we know about history and prehistory is wrong, or that a fake antique vase made its way into a collection...

 

[SkepticSteve]

He is a computer science guy. He is neither a metallurgist nor a geologist, and I've found no evidence that he has any skills at sculpture either. When I looked him up I immediately found his opinions on "the Richat structure being the site of Atlantis", so I know for darn sure he is (1) not a historian, and (2) not a person troubled by the facts uncovered from serious scholars. His claims appear to be invented to earn a few bucks. Perhaps you need to brush up on your skepticism.

On the basis of these same arguments I could probably also dismiss the skeptic "expertise" of about 66% percent of Metabunk's user base. Sorry, you are not qualified, only accepting opinions of PhD-level users here.

Assuming that is correct, for the sake of discussion, I wonder if it is more likely to be evidence that so much that we think we know about history and prehistory is wrong, or that a fake antique vase made its way into a collection...

That's always a possibility.

You can certainly use a turning machine to craft objects today that are superficially similar looking (neglecting any precision measurements). I wonder though if such details such as the handles can be easily crafted with modern available tools.

 

[Ravi]

I have worked with large XYZ sample sets, pointclouds (laser scanned) of (mainly) precise mechanical objects for a number of years, so I know exactly what they are doing. The creation of a reference frame based on the centre of the top of the vase is logical, and also the flat on top as the origin is correct. This means all the rest of the data references to this xyz-frame, making it very easy to see symmetry etc.

The availability of having so many datapoints however, gives the user the freedom to "filter" out larger data outliers, because you fit a geometry to a dataset. This is why he is talking about cylinders and plane (top).

I am pretty eager to see the full pointcloud of the scan of the vase. They (from the video in post 20) use Polyworks for their analyses, I used to use Spatial Analyzer, but now I don't have access to that SW anymore.

 

[Mendel]

You can certainly use a turning machine to craft objects today that are superficially similar looking

Article:

The potter's wheel is an example of an early mechanical invention: it can be traced back to the ancient Sumerians as early as 3,250 B.C.E.

Source: https://www.colorado.edu/classics/2018/06/15/potters-wheel

 

[Mendel]

When I looked him up I immediately found his opinions on "the Richat structure being the site of Atlantis", so I know for darn sure he is (1) not a historian, and (2) not a person troubled by the facts uncovered from serious scholars.

On the basis of these same arguments I could probably also dismiss the skeptic "expertise" of about 66% percent of Metabunk's user base. Sorry, you are not qualified, only accepting opinions of PhD-level users here.

We do not dismiss qualified expertise (from "serious scholars") out of hand.

But you have to watch the type of expertise: ancient vases exist, so there can be experts on them; UFOs are not confirmed to exist, so there can't be experts on them.

 

[FatPhil]

Ban van Kerkwyk worked together with some metrologist to get some measurements on a vase made out of rose granite from a private collection of ancient Egyptian artificats. They claim that the manufacturing precision of of the surfaces makes the use of hand tools highly unlikely and suggest that an advanced manufacturing technique was put to use (begins at 16:51) :



Note: STL file of the vase is likely to be released within the following up weeks with supplementary reporting and documentation.

They're false in thinking that you can only get sub-thou accuracy circles (they keep going on about spheres - spheres are irrelevant for this vase shape, but then again, they call ellipsoids "non-geometric"!??!) only by spinning/turning. A fine abrasive embedded in a cloth can be used to achieve more accurate circularity than they're measuring. You can use the shininess of the material to show you which bits are too "pointy", and address those areas specifically, and then go back to the band technique. I've done this (with soft materials) using technology and materials no more high-tech than blankets (to provide a smooth curve), socks (to address small areas) and toothpaste (the abbrasive). (I made my own squidgers when I was a competitive tiddlywinker - I used to to be ranked #15 in the world, you know! - some were so precise they were pretty good lenses.)

Wait a sec - doesn't this quote (from the bottom guy, at 45:16 - 45:25 demolish their thesis: "Even if it was possible, it would have taken a long time. [garbled] it could take months, years, whatever. The value would be vey high." So it's possible then? And these peices that have been best preserved - were they of high value? So were they considered exquisite pieces by their owners? Is that because of the skill level and attention to detail of the craftsman who made them?

They seem to be conflating etymology and definition: "incredible" does not mean "not believable".

 

[Ravi]

They're false in thinking that you can only get sub-thou accuracy circles (they keep going on about spheres - spheres are irrelevant for this vase shape, but then again, they call ellipsoids "non-geometric"!??!) only by spinning/turning. A fine abrasive embedded in a cloth can be used to achieve more accurate circularity than they're measuring. You can use the shininess of the material to show you which bits are too "pointy", and address those areas specifically, and then go back to the band technique. I've done this (with soft materials) using technology and materials no more high-tech than blankets (to provide a smooth curve), socks (to address small areas) and toothpaste (the abbrasive). (I made my own squidgers when I was a competitive tiddlywinker - I used to to be ranked #15 in the world, you know! - some were so precise they were pretty good lenses.)

Wait a sec - doesn't this quote (from the bottom guy, at 45:16 - 45:25 demolish their thesis: "Even if it was possible, it would have taken a long time. [garbled] it could take months, years, whatever. The value would be vey high." So it's possible then? And these peices that have been best preserved - were they of high value? So were they considered exquisite pieces by their owners? Is that because of the skill level and attention to detail of the craftsman who made them?

They seem to be conflating etymology and definition: "incredible" does not mean "not believable".

I am missing in their story the roundness of the shape(s). The only one they mention is the inside of the neck.
If they claim the neck roundness deviates only by 0.001" (25 micrometer for normal people) from a perfect circle, I am pretty impressed a actually. Impressed by workmaship, and indeed it would have likely taken a very very long time to make.

 

[SkepticSteve]

Article:

The potter's wheel is an example of an early mechanical invention: it can be traced back to the ancient Sumerians as early as 3,250 B.C.E.

Source: https://www.colorado.edu/classics/2018/06/15/potters-wheel

Working with a potter's wheel requires a soft material than can be actively formed and shaped. A turning machine is doing carving. The granite vase was certainly carved.

Wait a sec - doesn't this quote (from the bottom guy, at 45:16 - 45:25 demolish their thesis: "Even if it was possible, it would have taken a long time. [garbled] it could take months, years, whatever. The value would be vey high." So it's possible then?

Question is whether one can consider it reasonable that a craftsman of ancient times spends ressources on working on these kind of pottery for several years. If of course mechanized tools were available (e.g. water driven) it puts it into a different light...

 

[Ann K]

On the basis of these same arguments I could probably also dismiss the skeptic "expertise" of about 66% percent of Metabunk's user base. Sorry, you are not qualified, only accepting opinions of PhD-level users here.

If and when any of us make fantastic and unprovable claims that disregard all the known science in a field and contradict the great bulk of qualified experts, and if and when we do this in the popular media for "clicks" without submitting a scholarly paper to be evaluated by experts, go right ahead and feel free to dismiss our opinions. We will, of course, do the same.

 

[Ann K]

Question is whether one can consider it reasonable that a craftsman of ancient times spends ressources on working on these kind of pottery for several years. If of course mechanized tools were available (e.g. water driven) it puts it into a different light.

If "reasonable" is your criterion, you have to question how "reasonable" it is to presuppose an even more ancient civilization that could do things they couldn't in later times. You're just adding in an unnecessary civilization over, say, several unnecessary millennia, throwing in a complexity for which there is no evidence. Let me repeat, for which there is no evidence.

Our ancestors were quite capable of tool-making, metallurgy, navigation, measuring time, building complex structures of stone, crafting beautiful and delicate objects of gold and gemstones ... and carving stone with extreme skill, and none of that dependent on "advanced manufacturing capabilities", whatever you think that may mean. Whatever your doubts, THAT is what all the evidence points to.

 

[Mendel]

you have to question how "reasonable" it is to presuppose an even more ancient civilization that could do things they couldn't in later times

pretty sure more people could plow a straight furrow with an oxen in ancient times than now

tool invention means skills get lost

 

[Mendel]

Working with a potter's wheel requires a soft material than can be actively formed and shaped. A turning machine is doing carving. The granite vase was certainly carved

Yes. So if they had put a piece of granite on a potter's wheel and carved it , wouldn't that work?

 

[Mechanik]

Yes. So if they had put a piece of granite on a potter's wheel and carved it , wouldn't that work?

Exactly! A vertical stone lathe is a tool which would be an incremental step up from a potter's wheel. Easy to imagine how that could be accomplished by someone with a lot of patience and a lot of apprentices.

 

[Ann K]

pretty sure more people could plow a straight furrow with an oxen in ancient times than now

tool invention means skills get lost

Absolutely! People who have to get out their cell phones and call for a tow truck considered themselves "advanced". But you don't have to go too many generations back before people went off with horse, mule, or covered wagon to live in a place where they'd have to be their own builder, farmer, doctor, dentist, and veterinarian, have to be able to deliver their own children, construct their own grist mill or saw mill, manage their own wood lots, weave their own fabric, bury their own dead, and butcher and cure their own hogs.

But while our recent ancestors could teach more of us the old skills, they wouldn't be handing down any "advanced technology" to us. They couldn't teach us anything that some of us don't already know.

 

[FatPhil]

I am missing in their story the roundness of the shape(s). The only one they mention is the inside of the neck.
If they claim the neck roundness deviates only by 0.001" (25 micrometer for normal people) from a perfect circle, I am pretty impressed a actually. Impressed by workmaship, and indeed it would have likely taken a very very long time to make.

They aren't particularly good at describing what they're measuring, a few diagrams would have helped disambiguate (as I mentioned before, if a sentence like "an ellipsoid isn't a geometric shape", or whatever it is he said, can be uttered, then mere words are failing as a communication mechanism - I think he may have meant "an ellipsoid isn't a primitive in the modelling package we've used to model the shape", which might well be true, but even that would be odd).

They address the flatness of the top surface, and its circularity first, and treat that as a plane of reference, I think they are taking cross sections down the object, and calculating the circularity of each slice, and how much its best-fit centre deviates from the perpendicular from the centre of the top surface. A turned object will obviously have minimal deviation, because the axis from which the measurement are taken will be the axis around which the object is rotated. However, low deviation is not sufficient to prove the object was turned. Their largest deviation was I think the off-centreness of some of the slices - that might be an argument against turning, I can't picture in my head whether that numerically large deviation measured in minuscule units is actually small or large.

Aside: When was turning invented? I genuinely don't know. I'm sure I've seen fire-starting drills from ancient tribes that are based on a spun spindle - the ancient egyptians surely should have had access to spindles for mounting pieces? I'd assert that you don't need high speed rotation to achieve the results they have in their hand - you just need a stable enough mount upon which you can manually rotate the piece (thus the handles are not the problem they think they are). Also, what range of abrasives did they have access to - the secret to getting close to perfection when grinding something down is to have a wide range of grits, and of course lots of patience - you don't move on to a finer grit until you've perfectly happy your object has no flaws on the scale of your current grit or larger; if you have to return to a stage, you have to do all of the subsequent ones again. (My "toothpaste" earlier was an exageration - I had Brasso and sometimes jewellers' rouge as finer abbrasives, and a wide range of wet-and-dry paper as courser ones. Toothpaste was merely the "goes from rough to shiny" phase.)

I'm not casting the experts off as being wrong in the technical things they said - they rightly say that data is data, and data, if measured competently - again which I have zero reason to doubt, does not lie. At least one of them clearly knows and cares enough about what he's doing that he instinctively immediately corrected his colleague's "2" to "3" early on when discussing the flatness of the top and how many stones are needed to achieve a known flat grinding surface. It's the interpretation of the data, and the estimation of the ancient capabilities that I consider misguided. However, again in their favour - they are inviting the world to prove them wrong, like good scientists do. I'm not sure how many craftsmen would be willing to donate a few thousand hours of their time for this goal - it's likely not very many. Maybe some crowdfunding would help grease the process?

Anyone know the precision with which the earliest telescope lenses/mirrors were manufactured? I'm just trying to get a mental image of the scales involved for precision manufacture over the aeons.

 

[tinkertailor]

A turning machine is doing carving. The granite vase was certainly carved

If you center something round on a potters wheel, whether it's hard or not, you can take something small and hard (a needle, a knife, a diamond, a carving tool) and hover it over the surface of the round object. Any protrusions will rotate into the needle and scratch the object, and you can then smooth them out when they are off of the wheel. This way you can tell which areas need more smoothing to maintain perfect roundness, but you're not using the wheel as a lathe for carving.

 

[Mendel]

But while our recent ancestors could teach more of us the old skills, they wouldn't be handing down any "advanced technology" to us. They couldn't teach us anything that some of us don't already know.

It wouldn't be considered "advanced" by us because it'd be a fairly manual technique, but still there's a chance no craftsman (or -woman) today could match the ancient top craftsman if you took away their power tools.

I agree it wouldn't feel like "advanced" technology to us because we can now achieve the same result with less effort.

 

[Mendel]

If you center something round on a potters wheel, whether it's hard or not, you can take something small and hard (a needle, a knife, a diamond, a carving tool) and hover it over the surface of the round object. Any protrusions will rotate into the needle and scratch the object, and you can then smooth them out when they are off of the wheel. This way you can tell which areas need more smoothing to maintain perfect roundness, but you're not using the wheel as a lathe for carving.

doesn't need to be "small and hard", I've used chalk to fix bicycle wheels when they had a whack

anything that leaves a mark will do