Doctor Plop said:
Most probably because it doesn't quite fit with the whole evolutionist view of:
Man in the past = Increasingly Stupider.
This belief system is one of gradual upward progress, therefore evidence of past human achievement, genius and civilisation has to be downplayed.
Rubbish.
The ancestors of humans WERE less intellectually capable than modern humans--we know this because we have their skulls and can get at least a first-order approximation of how their brains worked (ie, did they focus on scent more than sight? hearing more than taste? what lobes were present? that kind of thing). But the temporal scale is mind-shatteringly vast--millions of years. And you'll note that I said "modern humans". Biologically, the first members of our species were modern humans (again, I've seen some of the skulls and can attest to that). Their brains were, as far as we are able to identify, the same as those of modern humans.
The theory of evolution also doesn't demand "gradual upward progress". This is in fact accusing evolution of the flaws of previous beliefs--namely, alchemy. Evolution movement through fitness space, typically toward local fitness highs, through time. There are complications, and fitness space can be best thought of as an n-dimensional boiling sea where each dimension is a factor impacting the organism's ability to reproduce. There is no general directionality to evolution; sometimes there's directional selection (we've demonstrated it, multiple times), but evolution as a whole is going out into every direction all at once.
Thus we have the pyramids, Stonehenge and megalithic civilisation all around the globe portrayed as being the result of hairy, barely clad, superstitious* 'people' moving thousand ton stones around (sometimes for hundreds of miles) and placing them perfectly into position in accordance with various complex parameters... by using just logs, ropes and log rafts.
And the rocks to make these gargantuan megalithic structures were 'obviously' fashioned just by hitting them, by hand, with slightly harder rocks.
For years.
For some reason.
This is moronic. First, the people THEMSELVES portrayed themselves as barely clad. The Egyptians lived in a hot environment; clothing wasn't really necessary. Their own portraits show them wearing very little by today's standards. As for hairy, each society had their own norms in that regard. Egyptians often shaved everything, for example. Roman men shaved their beards. Germanic tribes didn't. It was extremely diverse.
As for moving the stones around, we've more or less figured out how they did it for most of the bigger projects. The solution is lots of manpower and lots of time to think about it.
As for the shaping, we know they used stone tools in many cases because we've found the tools. Of course, there were a lot of OTHER tools as well, some pretty ingenious. And there were techniques like rubbing the stones together to ensure a tight fit (they polished one another, essentially).
Of course, you only have archaeology's word for it, and every archaeologist I've met (quite a few, given the nature of my company [until last Monday technically one of my bosses was an archaeologist]) accepts evolution.
By the way: The Greeks weren't really that old. Certainly not as old as the builders of the pyramids, or Stonehenge. And we know they had some pretty advanced tech, including primitive steam engines and vending machines (they were used in temples).
It's terribly silly, and outside of the currently fashionable belief system it would obviously be seen as such.
Actually, what you're describing is a distorted view of both the current understanding of archaeology and the current understanding of evolution. You are essentially wrong about everything.
It's an outstanding example of the reality of a series of impressive phenomena having to be shoehorned into a thoroughly inadequate explanatory model due to wanting to stick to an overarching and radically incompatible worldview.
You got something right! Unfortunately, your aim is off. It's not the "evolutionists" (in reality, they're archaeologists) who are trying to shoehorn observations into an inadequate and flagrantly false worldview. It's the people who deny evolution's validity and the people who think the ancients were stupid who do that.
The truth about human development and acheivement may well be far more cyclical; being dependent on enduring states of political, socioeconomic, resource and knowledge retention stability - rather than on crude Darwinist beliefs about gradual upward progress.
Darwin didn't believe in upward progress. Darwinism only existed for a brief time and has been replaced as the dominant evolutionary biology paradigm numerous times. Cyclicity in history, particularly in archaeology, is notoriously difficult to demonstrate (as in, no one's done it); Gouldian contingency is almost certainly more dominant than any cyclicity.
Myriad said:
Is there another way that ancient people might have cut stone (or moved large blocks around, and so forth), that's higher tech than the perfectly good (if slow) low-tech methods that anthropologists have hypothesized, but lower tech than steam-powered (or hydraulic, electric, etc.) tools?
A curious fact that seems to slip by people like the good doctor here: Us folks who study the actual data both tend to agree with evolution, and tend to find the really curious and cool things. Every example of something in biology that's used by Creationists to counter evolution was found by biologists who agree with evolution, for example. Similarly, archaeologists have found the really cool ancient technology, while those criticizing archaeology for being "evolutionist" haven't. Like I said, the ancient Greeks had steam engines and coin-operated vending machines. Folks in the the Roman Empire had an ingenious solution to cutting stone:
water-powered saws. They used basically the same technology as anyone else who cuts stone (a flat blade and grit), but used a water wheel to power it. There's evidence of Medieval stone-cutting mills that had multiple cutting blades on them, for cutting uniform blocks all at once. (Such machines may be even older, but that's what I could find).
