Michael Shermer vs. "alternative history" Hancock and Crandall

[King of the Americas]

Easiest structure to make if you want to get up high in the sky, all these pyramids were built in different ways and had different purposes and were built thousands of years apart.

'World trade huh' so where are all the common 'bits' to be found on every continent?

Ever hear of Arikamedu. Silly me of course you haven't research is obviously not a big factor in your beliefs....chuckle

Roman trade port in India: Lots of Romans stuff there

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

THAT is what happens in trade between civilizations - not what your 'trade' causes - nothing.

*Cocaine found in mummies.

 

[Hans]

If you don't want a repeat answer, stop asking the same question.

Sorry no you just keep repeating the same claims. Why don't you saying them in Portuguese.

We are not obliged to accept your made up evidence.

 

[Hans]

*Cocaine found in mummies.

LOL, I guess you never read anything but fringe sites right?

I'll take that non-answer as a concession that that you have no evidence for your lost civilzation

 

[Hans]

Right, I am SURE he and his ilk are no longer 'in charge ' of Giza... pfft.

No you were wrong, you think, like many fringe believers, that somehow Hawass is in charge....he ain't, come visit the rest of us in reality world.

 

[Hans]

Use "pounders & abrasives" and cut a few descending squares with right corners, and let me know how that works out.

Works fine. How come you don't know that? Have you give up pretending your stone expert?

lol

 

[Hans]

So summary

KOTA provided: the same claims with no evidence.....lets see how long he will do that before everyone dies from boredom.

 

[carlitos]

Jesus, he’s still going on about Puma Punka. He was schooled on this here literally years ago. Refusal to learn is sad.


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ETA - some responses from back then:

.... the tiwanuku smelters used arsenical bronze.

In fact, you're indirectly pointing out a fault in your reasoning. If there was an advanced civilization teaching them how to do their construction they would have used the best material for the job. Tin bronze is much less toxic, much more malleable, has a better grain structure, a lower melting point, and less porosity than arsenic bronze. If they were tutored by experts, they could have used the right materials, which they did have. Casseritite and Malachite were available to them and even with their primitive co-smelting techniques they could have made modern alloys, which would have been ideal for the clamps they inset into the stone. In fact if they had advanced tutors, they could have made better furnaces, smelted the casseritite and malachite separately, and been able to combine pure tin and copper to make alloys specifically tailored to each specific use.

In fact, they used the materials they had, and they used them for every application, even though that meant that for some applications they were profoundly unsuitable. The alloy of the clamps and the alloy of the chisels is the same, within certain broad limits caused by the crude co-smelting of impure arsenic and copper ores. The alloy works for the chisels because arsenic promotes work hardening, and the grain structure and porosity can be reduced by forging. A forged chisel would be hard and strong.

The same alloy used to make the cast clamps resulted in clamps that were weak, porous, and coarse grained. Very few of them were found intact. Some of the sources I found believed them to have been ineffective enough that they must have been traditional and/or decorative only. This is not good engineering, and certainly not a sign of advanced knowledge. It's what would be expected from primitive smelting and casting techniques in an early stage of evolution.

As for the stone carving, we're left with your argument from ignorance. You don't know how to do it and can't do it even with modern tools, so you believe that no one knows how to do it, even in the face of plenty of people, including myself, stating that we do know how. Dunning Kruger much?

This is a synonym for looking for quotes to cherry pick, with little or no interest in actually learning about the subject. It took me a few minutes to read this chapter, and there is lots of interesting stuff in it, especially if you've read lots of other books on metallurgy and ancient history to understand the context. This isn't a paper aimed at the willfully ignorant.

By the way, your interpretation of the inset quote on page 24 is completely reversed, and I don't think you have a clue about the difference between oxidative and reductive smelting, the specific development that they're talking about there, and you completely missed the end of page 23 which talked about how the process evolved with the inca, who then imposed it on the rest of the region who had clung to their outdated technology, mimicking a leap, where in asia the evolution of the process was more straightforward. This happened AFTER the construction of tiwanuku and the puma punku, by the way. That tribe was still using arsenic based bronze until quite late. The rest of the paper goes on to talk about how cultural context and history have to be taken into consideration when looking at the evolution of technology.

Here is an excerpt from ‘Lost City of the Incas, The Story of Machu Picchu and its Builders’ by Hiram Bingham, on Inca metallurgy.

There is no mention of saws, but it is an excellent overview with some good details about how the people of c. 1400 Peru manufactured and employed metal tools. Machu Picchu was built about 900 years after Puma Puncu, but many of the technologies used overlap.

Here is a passage of interest to the current discussion:

Some [bronze] axe blades bear evidence that they were used upon stone. Their structure shows severe damage of a character which could only result from very hard usage. They were probably used in cutting square holes in ashlars and in making sharp inside corners. It is difficult to conceive of any stone tools that could have been used successfully for this purpose. Some writers have assumed that the Incas use bronze implements to a large extent in finishing their best stone work. It seems to me, however, that even their best bronze was too soft to last long in such activities. It is not likely that it was often so employed. Experiments made in our National Museum have demonstrated that patience, perseverance, elbow grease and fine sand will enable stone tools of various shapes to work miracles in dressing and polishing both granite and andesite.​

So here we have Bingham, the expert archeologist on this region and its people, discussing how bronze axes were used to cut square holes in stone blocks and "making sharp inside corners"; and that "Experiments made in our National Museum have demonstrated that patience, perseverance, elbow grease and fine sand will enable stone tools of various shapes to work miracles in dressing and polishing both granite and andesite."

Please place this in your proverbial pipe, and smoke of it.

KotA, the default position, held by mainstream archeologists and historians and based on good, empirical data collected over decades, is that bronze and other metal tools, and stone tools in conjunction with "perseverance, elbow grease and fine sand" are sufficient to the task of carving granite and andesite stone into the shapes as we have them at Puma Puncu and other ancient American and Incan sites.

Your claim, that such tools would not be sufficient to the task, is the opposing claim. Therefore it falls on you to demonstrate it.

It was sandstone - just as at Puma Punku.

Further.
Cutting granite with copper/bronze tools.

It is quite obvious that this stone can be cut with ancient technology.

very little <> none.
It is obvious that granite can be dressed with ancient tools, abeit less efficiently than with modern toolsThe descending squares were NOT in granite, but in sandstone.

The previous video link demonstrates that cold-hammered hardened copper chisels are able to dress sandstone very accurately.
ETA: Egyptians also used bronze, which is harder than copper.
http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/trades/tools.htm

ETA ETA: And iron. Just as the S.Ams had at Puma Punku. Copper, bronze and iron tools.

You have persistently (deliberately?) confused dressing andesite statues with dressing sandstone construction blocks in your posts in this thread.

Archaeologists say it's a copper-arsenic-nickel bronze alloy.

... I suggest you read a few basic texts about Tiwanaku. I suggest you start with Ancient Tiwanaku, by John Wayne Janusek, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008.

 

[Craig B]

When other posters 'repeat' where's the evidence of this lost civilization, I am FORCED to repeat the fact that they are ignoring the ruins.

If you don't want a repeat answer, stop asking the same question.

Nobody is ignoring ruins. People are patiently explaining that the ruins are not evidence for advanced civilisations or a world flood; that they were made by pounding and abrasion, and similar simple processes, not with lasers and diamond tipped drills, or indeed flint chisels; that they were made at different times, in different places, in different formats, by different cultures, some literate and some not so; that the materials which composed them were accessed in normal ways, from normal sources, and were amenable to the techniques used to transport and work them; that they were made by people who practiced agriculture or, in an early case, collection and fermentation of wild grains; that they are not associated archaeologically with industrially produced artefacts ... etc etc etc: but all you can invoke is some junk video, which you refuse to sustain with explanation or argumentation. Ignore them, you say? Not in the least.

 

[Matthew Ellard]

Are you saying that the Egyptian Pyramids and Puma Punku were built by the same global civilisation? Do you have any evidence that this is the case...?

King of America is currently channelling the opening "blurb" from the 1961 fictional fantasy movie "Atlantis : The Lost Continent". This is where the narrator asks why there are pyramids in both the Americas and Near East and then claims they both belongs to the world spanning empire of Atlantis. At the end of the movie the whole of Atlantis sinks.

Atlantic the Lost Continent (1961) trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDCWnvBk-DI

 

[King of the Americas]

Jesus, he’s still going on about Puma Punka. He was schooled on this here literally years ago. Refusal to learn is sad.


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ETA - some responses from back then:

Now insert 'time' into that ludicrous poppycock.

Look, a bronze axe with stone scaring does not a stone empire make...

In order to create those stone blocks, to interlock with one another, it would have taken hundreds and hundreds of stone masons working tens of thousands of hours and a written language! There would have been thousands upon thousands of those chisels employed, yet only ONE was recovered??

I am not saying their explanation isn't possible, but they'd need to show signs of a large settlement, tools, debris, 'a written language,' i.e. AN ADVANCED CIVILIZATION in order to fulfill the needs of this theory.

Stone hammers and abrasives would have required time and manpowered, not evidenced.

 

[King of the Americas]

TAKEN FROM HIS LINK-

Archeologists know that the ancient Egyptians had the skills to forge bronze and copper tools. Stonemason Roger Hopkins takes up a copper chisel, which works well when carving sandstone and limestone rock, to see if it might carve granite.

"We're losing a lot of metal and very little stone is falling off," observes Hopkins, which is hardly the desired result. Hopkins' simple experiment makes this much clear: The Egyptians needed better tools than soft bronze and copper chisels to carve granite.

 

[King of the Americas]

King of America is currently channelling the opening "blurb" from the 1961 fictional fantasy movie "Atlantis : The Lost Continent". This is where the narrator asks why there are pyramids in both the Americas and Near East and then claims they both belongs to the world spanning empire of Atlantis. At the end of the movie the whole of Atlantis sinks.

Atlantic the Lost Continent (1961) trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDCWnvBk-DI

There is no "King of America"...

Etthew Mallard.

 

[King of the Americas]

TAKEN FROM HIS LINK-

As he also noted, dressing were made of "andesite" NOT sandstone.

 

[Craig B]

Now insert 'time' into that ludicrous poppycock.

Look, a bronze axe with stone scaring does not a stone empire make...

In order to create those stone blocks, to interlock with one another, it would have taken hundreds and hundreds of stone masons working tens of thousands of hours and a written language! There would have been thousands upon thousands of those chisels employed, yet only ONE was recovered??

I am not saying their explanation isn't possible, but they'd need to show signs of a large settlement, tools, debris, 'a written language,' i.e. AN ADVANCED CIVILIZATION in order to fulfill the needs of this theory.

Stone hammers and abrasives would have required time and manpowered, not evidenced.

The stone pounders are seemingly evidenced. A written language is amply evidenced for the Great Pyramid, but not for Peru. These were not cultures in contact at the different times when these respective monuments were constructed. Why does stonework require writing? Assuming other methods of storing information are available when needed, e.g. Knotted string tallies. But that there was no unified advanced civilisation is very clear, from the fact that there are no technologically advanced artefacts, let alone similar ones on different continents. Pyramids and the like are not technologically advanced. The "flood washed them away" theory fails, because there are plenty of delicate fragile artefacts in excavated sites, all evident products of non-advanced technology.

 

[Hans]

I am not saying their explanation isn't possible, but they'd need to show signs of a large settlement, tools, debris, 'a written language,' i.e. AN ADVANCED CIVILIZATION in order to fulfill the needs of this theory.

Stone hammers and abrasives would have required time and manpowered, not evidenced.

Evidenced - could you please show where your imaginary civilization meets your own criteria?

to wit:

large settlement, tools, debris, 'a written language'

So again where is this for your civilization?

I love it when you self debunk yourself....hilarious.

 

[Hans]

TAKEN FROM HIS LINK-

Which is why they used stone pounders......but you already knew that.

 

[Hans]

LOL, I guess you never read anything but fringe sites right?

I'll take that non-answer as a concession that that you have no evidence for your lost civilzation

Cocaine mummies

Just a note: I see KOTA ran away but there is something amusing about his mentioning this.

He was asked to provide evidence of international trade at the time 12,000 years ago when he said his imaginary civilization existed.

Of the mummies that were tested, the oldest was from 1000 BCE the others from the Persian and Greek periods. So he was trying to use 'evidence' from 9,000 years later.............lol

Oh, and also of course there are a large number of reasons why that study has never been duplicated and the many caveats that must be applied to it. There was no international trade between Classical Egypt and the Americas.
(that we know of)

 

[Hans]

King of America is currently channelling the opening "blurb" from the 1961 fictional fantasy movie "Atlantis : The Lost Continent". This is where the narrator asks why there are pyramids in both the Americas and Near East and then claims they both belongs to the world spanning empire of Atlantis. At the end of the movie the whole of Atlantis sinks.

Atlantic the Lost Continent (1961) trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDCWnvBk-DI

Yeah well KOTA's knowledge of the subject is limited to say the least. I am still chuckling over his saying pyramids existed on all continents......uproariously funny.

 

[Hans]

Cocaine mummies

Just a note: I see KOTA ran away but there is something amusing about his mentioning this.

He was asked to provide evidence of international trade at the time 12,000 years ago when he said his imaginary civilization existed.

Of the mummies that were tested, the oldest was from 1000 BCE the others from the Persian and Greek periods. So he was trying to use 'evidence' from 9,000 years later.............lol

Oh, and also of course there are a large number of reasons why that study has never been duplicated and the many caveats that must be applied to it. There was no international trade between Classical Egypt and the Americas.
(that we know of)

Now for lurkers and the intelligent people here:

Updated: I made a mistake in the ages they are:

All the mummies tested were from the Egyptian Museum, Munich and they had been dated to a period spanning 1070BCE – 395AD. Cocaine and hashish were also found in all 9 samples and nicotine was present in all but one of the samples tested.

11. Balabanova, S., Parsche, F. and Pirsig, W. (1992) "First Identification of Drugs in Egyptian Mummies" Naturwissenschaften 79: 358.

A full look at this can be found here: http://www.hallofmaat.com/modules.php?name=Articles&file=article&sid=45

 

[Matthew Ellard]

Good news. I found the original 3 minute opening scene of the movie Atlantis : The Lost Continent (1961): "a series of Mysteries". It is from this three minute scene that King of America is getting his "evidence."

This is the "evidence" that Atlantis was real, due to things like pyramids and bananas appearing on both continents. It is very easy to spot all the holes.

This clip is impressive because it is from 1961 and almost a decade before Von Daniken used to same rubbish arguments in his film "Chariot of the Gods".

Entertainingly, the voice over artist is Paul Frees who later played Boris Badenov in the Rocky & Bullwinkle Show.

Turner Network / Classic Trailers / Opener "Atlantis : The Lost Continent"
http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/...ntinent-Movie-Clip-A-Series-Of-Mysteries.html