High Technology vs Low Technology in Ancient Civilizations - Gregory Aldrete

It SOUNDS like "sure, if we just extend the time frame and increase the labor, all of these large and incredibly precise building projects can easily be explained despite the lack of technology". Sorry, but no. As an engineer, I can confidently say that there are MANY issues that there is no amount of time or extra human labor won't solve, not even close. Yes, cathedrals are gorgeous and took hundreds of years to make. No one is arguing that those were impossible without high technology though. When it comes to certain things in Egypt... like the tube drills. We know you can drill that with a copper tube and some quartz, and just rotate back and forth and get through it pretty deep, but that doesn't even come close to matching what is actually THERE. It's not just that we find holes drilled... we find holes drilled that have consistent, single-track spiral cuts the whole way down. For that to be true, it means the whole thing was cut in only a few rotations, not by back and forth movement. We have no idea how that is possible. When you look at the Serapeum, those boxes.... we have no idea how it would be possible to even get those boxes down there, as the number of people necessary to even barely drag it, is multiple times more people than could even fit in the halls down there. It's not a matter of how strong they were or how many there were, as there simply is no way to fit enough people in the hall to move them. Then, the construction of solid one-piece granite boxes that you could fit 20 people in, that are made to an incredible level of precision. No amount of rubbing a rock with sand on it is going to result in that box. No amount of pounding with a bronze tool will ever result in that box. Not even using high-carbon tool steel can account for that level of precision, nor can it explain the tool markings that we can still see on unfinished ones. Tool markings can explain a lot, we know what kinds of marks tools make, we can tell the difference between what a high-powered diamond saw cut looks like and what a copper bow-saw and some emery powder looks like. There's no mystery in identifying these things. Yet, when we look at these artifacts, we can identify many of the stuff that was made with primitive tools, and it's amazing how skilled they were doing it. And then there are pieces that have obvious power tool marks. You can tell they are from a power tool by the over-cutting. Over-cutting only happens when you are cutting at exceptional speed, and go beyond where you meant to stop. If you are cutting at a centimeter a day, you don't make overcuts. Yet we see items with overcuts, where the saw was pushed like a foot beyond where it needed to stop, and the piece was ruined and abandoned. That kind of accident doesn't happen unless your tools are so powerful, that even someone paying close attention to their work can still go further than intended. And don't get me started on granite and corundum vases that are machined down to one thousandth of an inch in tolerances, that are only 2mm thick. I'm sorry, but again, no amount of pounding on that with another stone or a copper chisel will ever create that. It doesn't matter how steady your hand is, or how much time you take, even if it was over the course of 100 generations, those tools cannot produce something that perfect, it's not even remotely possible. We aren't talking about something that is ambiguous, or debatable, it would be LESS impressive to find a functional electric drill from 10,000 years ago. Because even with an electric motor that operated a computer controlled CNC machine.... it's still nearly impossible to build. Even the best stone workers in the world today haven't been able to come remotely close to reproducing the level of precision or the thinness of these objects, and will say without question that it's not possible for them to do so, regardless of their level of technology. And even crazier, to get that level of precision, you don't just have to have amazingly rigid and powerful tools with diamond-level cutting bits, bearings that have ZERO play in them, and tool holding that is far more rigid than even a large cast-iron lathe machine, you have to be able to measure your own progress. To measure your own progress, you need calipers and all kinds of equipment that we've only just created in the last few decades. To make measuring instruments that precise takes centuries of ever increasing levels of manufacturing ability, and an actual need for something to be more precise than is detectable by the human eye. And not just a little more precise, we're talking orders of magnitude, to where we need advanced computer technology just to measure and record it. And we don't just find a few things like this randomly here and there, they are all over the place. This was EASY for whoever made it. I know it's very EASY to just say "no no, they just had a lot of time, and a different mindset", but that does not even come close to explaining things that are at a higher level of precision than can be done by us today, that does not explain the ability to move several hundred ton boxes through a narrow corridor where only a few people can even fit. That does not explain nearly ANY of the things that we find. No amount of time or motivation or attention to detail can account for what we ACTUALLY find. You can't just point at a hole and say "you can just rub that for a long time and it will make a hole", you have to look at the tooling marks, and you have to be able to say how that was accomplished. I do appreciate that a LOT of the ancient world can be explained that way, but it doesn't account for many of the true mysteries we've found.

Mark is the CEO of Listening and Waiting

It is criminal you don't have a Gold Play Button yet Mark! Your curiosity, you guests, the beauty of the flow of conversation between... crazy underrated. I would not he surprised if you were down-trended because of the subject matter (which is literally just where one's curiosity takes one toward!). Your podcast channel here will be gigantic as more and more folks awaken. AND you're helping with that, as you have been this past decade + Keep doing these good, good things man. You're a crystallized inspiration to us 🙏🏼

I like that 'technological advances across time' chart, very nice 🙂 Hello mr skool and friends ❤ Have a good and safe weekend yall

You need to look into Perti's core #7, which shows those tube drill holes have a single continuous spiral running around it. This indicates it could not be the common explanation of using a copper tube, sand and water which produces lateral marks. The only thing that can produce a spiral is something like a drill bit.

@10.26 this does not explain the visible evidence of the tool marks that show a dramatically better feed rate of the rotating bit removing material much faster than the best core drilling bits we have today. The explanation of “with enough time/manpower/determination you can achieve an incredibly high quality of work” is very true, however, it does not explain the precision that is evident in many of these incredibly well made ancient artifacts. The boxes in the Sarepeum for example and the fact that the sides are almost perfectly parallel and corners are perfectly square while at the same time having a perfectly consistent radius along the transition (it’s not even a joint because it’s a single piece of material!) is so incredibly difficult that to duplicate it today would be a VERY difficult endeavor nevermind the cost. My main point with this stuff is that whatever your opinion may be on it (be it in agreement or argument with mine) if you’ve never actually built or made anything with your own hands, unfortunately your (opinion) is irrelevant because you simply do not have the experience to understand what is being achieved with these artifacts. I mean no disrespect when I say this either but you have to know what it’s like to attempt to make something precise and one wrong move or lapse in attention irrevocably ruins the entire piece to realize how difficult it really is to make precise things, and understand the impossibility of what the ancient creators built. Theory is great and it can explain a lot, but to fully grasp the concepts you must have hands on experience in building something.

@19:49 but the Middle Ages never produced anywhere near (if any at all) the amount of highly precise objects that the ancients did. Beautiful, yes, mind blowing, yes, but not precise down to the thousandth of an inch/micron like ancient peoples did. And I do absolutely believe it was done by human beings and not other forms of intelligence, but they had some sort of technology, process or knowledge that we no longer have access to.

While strongly agreeing on plentiful evidence for earlier, much more developed culture and in particular tooling and engineering required for many relics and structures way beyond what mainstream archaeologists claim, there is one point where we must stop and reflect on humanity because there is a slippery slope to deny its capabilities. The video thumbnail is perfect example of both. Yes, tooling way beyond mainstream claims is needed for the outstanding statue vs more crude one. However, we must not jump from direct tooling evidence to the next undocumented level just because of the work aesthetic quality. Given the tools capable of carving with that precision a talented, well trained HUMAN could produce perfection. If anything modern day AI slop shows us in practice that machine driven art is crap. So, we must think carefully where tooling requirements end and where human ability can take over. We have plenty of artists right here, right now who can hand carve that same "ideal statue" from same materials by tools capable of carving like that but relying completely on their own hands and minds for control of the tools and the perfect end result. We are capable and our ancestors were too.

Appreciate the quality of your work and conversations brotha. Your drawings and animations are also part of my inspiration to formally start learning to draw; life is so much better when we push ourselves to create

BTW, your outro graphic reminds me very closely to how Watts described The Light and how it is everywhere one looks. Starting from nothing, seeing the visible spectrum come in, the vibrations of sound coming in, then texture, then the dancing of the sounds, light, and textures...all the way to experiencing something very much akin to where one is now, in this moment of being a human being. Just stood out to me!