Why the pseudo-religion about ancient aliens?

[eir_de_scania]

Probably because many of the AncientAlien-believers really doesn't know the first thing about the old cultures they believe said AncientAliens have caused?

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Yeah, you're probably right. Hanlon's Razor, and all that...

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Over the past 40 years new discoveries and new technologies have revealed an amazing amount of information about our distant past, and have in general pushed back estimations of when our ancestors first learnt various technologies and formed complex societies. Is it totally unreasonable to think there might be another Nevali Cori or Golbekli Tepi under some place as yet unexplored by modern archeology?

There's a difference between that and some civilization knowing how to do open heart surgery, so the Aztecs get that idea from them.

 

[Jodie]

"Complex" is the key word here. You can not build a complex society, even if its a single city, without a large support infrastructure. Mines, farms, roads... These resources are not clustered at a small area. Bits would survive, bits enough for us to at least suspect about their existence at a non-woo, non-fantasy level. Iron tools and ceramics, for example. Remember, we have found remains of bonfires as well as bone and flint tools which are quite older than the ice ages. As other posters wrote, you are underestimating the geologic and archeologic records. I've seen the marks of raindrops and insect tracks in sands wich are tens of millions years old; I've seen ripple marks which are 2.7billion years old, for example.

Note also that any catastrophic geologic event capable of obliterating such a civilization (major volcanic eruption, asteroid impact, megatsunami, you name it) would have its geological records already known (ash/tuff layers, tsunami-related deposits of various types). So, sorry. Ignorance of Earth sciences, archeology and about the ways complex societies work are what keep beliefs in advanced unknown civilizations floating. Hidden archeology woo feeds on this.

I admit I am not as well read on archaeology as I should be BUT how do you explain the docks at Tiahuanaco and the slowly evaporating Lake Titicaca? There is debate as to whether the actual site is as young as some of the artifacts found there since some stones were found to be buried under 6 feet of soil in an area where soil erosion like that is a slow process Or is that just woo conjecture?

However, either way, I'm not attributing anything to aliens, I think our ancestors deserve more credit than that. Look at us, we managed to develop into what we are today in a matter of a few centuries. Why couldn't that repeat itself over and over again in the last 200,000 years. How do you know that everything that could be found has been found or properly interpreted if it was?

 

[Dinwar]

Over the past 40 years new discoveries and new technologies have revealed an amazing amount of information about our distant past, and have in general pushed back estimations of when our ancestors first learnt various technologies and formed complex societies. Is it totally unreasonable to think there might be another Nevali Cori or Golbekli Tepi under some place as yet unexplored by modern archeology?

In paleontology and archaeology you have to address FADs and LADs--first appearance datums and last appearance datums (yes, I know the plural of datum is data; FAD=First Appearance Datum, and I'm pluralizing the whole thing). Essentially, the first time you see something in the record is some time after the first one appeared, and the last time is (usually) sometime before it goes extinct. So people were probably making Clovis points prior to our first find, simply because the odds of the first one surviving are vanishingly small. So it's perfectly reasonable to expect some amount of plasticity in our estimations of origins and extinctions.

That said, there are limits to what can be expected. This is also based on the probability of preservation. Rare things and squishy things are unlikely to get preserved, so the difference between the FAD and the actual origin is likely to be fairly big. Hard things and common things are much more likely to be preserved (not individually, necessarily, but if you have ten million of them even a 1 in 1,000,000 chance will preserve ten), so the difference between the FAD and the actual origin will be lesser. There are some weird things found far outside of their expected range, but they're relatively uncommon.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

I admit I am not as well read on archaeology as I should be BUT how do you explain the docks at Tiahuanaco and the slowly evaporating Lake Titicaca? There is debate as to whether the actual site is as young as some of the artifacts found there since some stones were found to be buried under 6 feet of soil in an area where soil erosion like that is a slow process Or is that just woo conjecture?

However, either way, I'm not attributing anything to aliens, I think our ancestors deserve more credit than that. Look at us, we managed to develop into what we are today in a matter of a few centuries. Why couldn't that repeat itself over and over again in the last 200,000 years. How do you know that everything that could be found has been found or properly interpreted if it was?

Several reasons, chief of which being the communication problem. You can get to the next level by standing on the shoulders of giants before you. You have to have lots of people learning what was already invented before them, before get them inventing the next great thing. So you need not just a way to preserve what was discovered before, but also a way for it to circulate among a lot of other people. E.g., continent-wide trade routes.

All that just wasn't in place for primitive tribes. They had neither the number of people doing research and scholarship, nor writing to put that information down for other people. So anything you can discover are rather simple stuff that you can do by yourself, and often accidentally. And because you don't have a market for just knowledge, any theoretical observations, anything that isn't a directly usable tool, will be forgotten by the time someone else could have used it.

Basically there's a reason technology picked up the pace in Europe after the printing press, you know?

The second is not as much a reason why it couldn't have happened, but a reason why we're sure it didn't actually happen. Inventions in this time spread slowly, and sometimes not so slowly among tribes. E.g., the bow and arrow spreads explosively. Within a very short time -- by species timeline scale -- it spreads all across Europe, Africa and Asia. The better stone tools in Neolithic spread at incredible speed too. Etc. Some of the stuff even starts being used by Neanderthals.

Where technology didn't spread, it was because there was a non-trivial problem to it being used somewhere else. E.g., the Romans and Greeks had ploughs for hundreds of years, but they didn't work on the northern European soil at all. So you see those barbarians up north oblivious of agriculture simply because they CAN'T copy the tools of the guys down south. But as soon as a plough is invented that works at all on the soil up north, lo and behold, the Germanic tribes copy it almost immediately.

The idea that some tribe could keep all the stuff leading to even advanced metal working a secret for thousands of years, while being surrounded by people who live in the same conditions, is a bit absurd. If someone had invented all that, you'd find copies from the neighbouring tribes.

Furthermore, ancient people were not nice people. Which is the whole reason to exist of this thread, after all. When someone had a technological advantage, they went and conquered their neighbours with it. For example the guys who first made iron swords pretty much razed and replaced whole civilizations which were still using bronze. Even if they may not want it at first, as soon as they overpopulate and start starving, guess what happens?

So you wouldn't have some quaint technologically advanced city by the seashore, but a great empire. And all the infrastructure that goes with it. The ruins from that empire would be everywhere, and their wares found over an even wider area via trade.

 

[Dinwar]

There is debate as to whether the actual site is as young as some of the artifacts found there since some stones were found to be buried under 6 feet of soil in an area where soil erosion like that is a slow process

In the immortal words of Peanut: How do you know?

That's a serious question, by the way. The issue is, you're running head-first into the concepts central to Neocatastraphism. It basically works like this: low-amplitude, high frequency events dominate temoprally. They happen all the freaking time--sometimes quite literally (ie, they're constant processes). However, they tend to get overprinted by low-frequency, high-amplitude events. For example, tides in some areas deposit a certain amount of sediment each day. It's a small, constant amount in discrete layers. However, when you examine the geological record you notice that these layers are absent--what you see are tempestites, where storms re-work the sediment. Tides are low-amplitude, high-frequency; storms are high-amplitude, low-frequency. This is quite common in the geological record.

The specific application in this case is that we can't necessarily simply look at what's happening right now in these areas and say "This has always happened exactly the same way; therefore 6' of soil=X years". We'd need to examine the stratigraphy to determine exactly what processes were going on at the time of deposition. Depending on how you're using the term soil (there are many) they can be deposited in a surprisingly short amount of time. I know that the Modesto and Riverbank Formations in the San Joaquin Valley include some layers that are fairly thick and which were deposited remarkably quickly.

Even high-frequency events can make it impossible to analyze, however. Soils are frequently full of critters, and critters have burrowed for about 600 million years (depending on your interpretation of a few trace fossils). This churns up the sediment, until in some cases all you see is a homogenous block of sand. Really annoying, by the way--you can lose a few million years' worth of data very easily that way. A few thousand is easy. What that means is that it may in fact be impossible to know just how long it took to accumulate that sediment.

This is what I meant about this stuff seeming easy, but being incredibly hard. It sounds very, very easy to look at how thick the dirt is and figure out how old it is. The practical applications are incredibly complicated, however, and even experts often simply don't know. Soils are extremely complicated ecosystems, and paleosols have all those complications plus taphonomy and novel geochemical processes. This isn't something you can read a few articles online about and be knowledgeable in it. It's something that requires fairly intense study for years. I spent a semester in grad school studying ripple marks and I don't pretend to know all there is to know about those structures, and that's just ONE of the things someone doing this research will need to be able to interpret.

Why couldn't that repeat itself over and over again in the last 200,000 years.

Provide evidence that it did, and we'll talk. Until then, there's no reason to think it did, by definition. We can speculate about why (and that's really all it is, mere speculation), but the fact remains it DIDN'T--unless someone can provide the evidence that it did.

For example the guys who first made iron swords pretty much razed and replaced whole civilizations which were still using bronze.

Actually, the first swords WERE bronze. Tangless bronze swords, to be exact. They didn't exactly sweep through other societies, though--spears and the like were more effective for a long time. Iron swords did put an end to most bronze-sword-using societies, however.

A better example would be chariots. When Egypt was invaded by some group (Hittites?), they were wiped out because the chariots cut down whole armies. Then the Egyptions learned how to use them, and wiped out their invaders with their own technology.

 

[StankApe]

Several reasons, chief of which being the communication problem. You can get to the next level by standing on the shoulders of giants before you. You have to have lots of people learning what was already invented before them, before get them inventing the next great thing. So you need not just a way to preserve what was discovered before, but also a way for it to circulate among a lot of other people. E.g., continent-wide trade routes.

All that just wasn't in place for primitive tribes. They had neither the number of people doing research and scholarship, nor writing to put that information down for other people. So anything you can discover are rather simple stuff that you can do by yourself, and often accidentally. And because you don't have a market for just knowledge, any theoretical observations, anything that isn't a directly usable tool, will be forgotten by the time someone else could have used it.

Basically there's a reason technology picked up the pace in Europe after the printing press, you know?

The second is not as much a reason why it couldn't have happened, but a reason why we're sure it didn't actually happen. Inventions in this time spread slowly, and sometimes not so slowly among tribes. E.g., the bow and arrow spreads explosively. Within a very short time -- by species timeline scale -- it spreads all across Europe, Africa and Asia. The better stone tools in Neolithic spread at incredible speed too. Etc. Some of the stuff even starts being used by Neanderthals.

Where technology didn't spread, it was because there was a non-trivial problem to it being used somewhere else. E.g., the Romans and Greeks had ploughs for hundreds of years, but they didn't work on the northern European soil at all. So you see those barbarians up north oblivious of agriculture simply because they CAN'T copy the tools of the guys down south. But as soon as a plough is invented that works at all on the soil up north, lo and behold, the Germanic tribes copy it almost immediately.

The idea that some tribe could keep all the stuff leading to even advanced metal working a secret for thousands of years, while being surrounded by people who live in the same conditions, is a bit absurd. If someone had invented all that, you'd find copies from the neighbouring tribes.

Furthermore, ancient people were not nice people. Which is the whole reason to exist of this thread, after all. When someone had a technological advantage, they went and conquered their neighbours with it. For example the guys who first made iron swords pretty much razed and replaced whole civilizations which were still using bronze. Even if they may not want it at first, as soon as they overpopulate and start starving, guess what happens?

So you wouldn't have some quaint technologically advanced city by the seashore, but a great empire. And all the infrastructure that goes with it. The ruins from that empire would be everywhere, and their wares found over an even wider area via trade.

NOMINATED

it was a Stephen J Gould type simple explanation of a complicated concept that any laymen could understand! well done

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Actually, the first swords WERE bronze. Tangless bronze swords, to be exact. They didn't exactly sweep through other societies, though--spears and the like were more effective for a long time. Iron swords did put an end to most bronze-sword-using societies, however.

Considering that all I was saying is really your last sentence there, I'm kinda scratching my head about the stuff starting with "Actually".

I'm pretty sure that by the normal way English is parsed "the guys who first made iron swords" is not naturally read as saying that the first swords ever were made of iron. Same as if I were to say "Claude de Jouffroy built the first working steam boat", I'm sure nobody would parse that as meaning that there were no boats before steam

A better example would be chariots. When Egypt was invaded by some group (Hittites?), they were wiped out because the chariots cut down whole armies. Then the Egyptions learned how to use them, and wiped out their invaders with their own technology.

You mean the Hyksos? Well, the problem weren't just chariots, but the fact that the Egyptian army was thoroughly obsolete. As in, more than a millennium obsolete. Though, yes, chariots did probably play the biggest role.

Still, ok, it probably does make a better example than mine of how new and superior technology was used for conquest.

 

[Jodie]

In the immortal words of Peanut: How do you know?

I don't know but it's a very arid environment and has been for many years since before 800 BC when it's assumed that this city was built. Without rain, how would the soil move at a rapid rate to cover some of the stones up to a 6 foot depth?

 

[Lithrael]

I'm sure the terror aspect was part of it for the Aztecs, especially as far as intimidating the holy living #&^$ out of all the other groups in the area.. but don't forget they're one of the groups that also just really, really, went all-out with the self-sacrificing god theme. All the bloodiness wasn't even satisfying a blood debt so much as it was a gesture of respect and thanks to the gods that sacrificed themselves, and a way to be godly. I don't think every single person who was about to get sacrificed was feelin' pretty jazzed about it or anything, but people can get really attached to ideas like that. Compare women who'd throw themselves on funeral pyres in India when it was just the Done Thing.

ETA: Course the dynamic changed a bit towards the end when things weren't going so well and they got into doing stuff like symbolic conflicts just to get more sacrifices lined up.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Actually, no, while people can be crazy enough to jump on a pyre, they can't STAY there for an hour or two until they get burnt to death. They actually experimented with that millimetre wave ray that, for all practically purposes, gives you an approximate sensation almost up there with being burned alive. People just can't stay there. It's a primal instinct to get the heck out of its way.

I can imagine that maybe one or two people out there have the willpower to just stay and burn, but even then not more than one or two. Have you seen recordings those rare nutcases that douse themselves in gasoline and set themselves on fire to make a point? Yeah, they invariably start to run around and flail. It's a primal reflex to try to make the horrible pain stop.

That every woman -- including some little girls, judging by the palm prints on sati stones -- can just stay on a fire for an hour or two... no. Just no. No frikken way.

And sure enough, by some descriptions we have:

A) there was immense pressure on those women, and if they didn't go with it, they could lose caste for them and their children. Meaning pretty much they could just be murdered afterwards anyway.

B) most didn't seem to go with it, and just got beaten up, drugged and thrown on the fire, and, crucially,

C) the whole thing generally involved some men with long pieces of wood to pin her down, and oil or oil-rich seeds to throw in the fire.

Especially C makes it plain old murder. Even IF someone actually just wanted to jump in a fire, but then changed her mind -- as 99% would, sooner or later, usually sooner -- preventing her from leaving the fire and throwing fuel on the fire is plain old murder.

I can imagine that some woman or another would take a handful of sleeping pills in grief, but not choose to jump in a fire. And again, you can't actually STAY in the fire unless drugged unconscious and/or pinned down.

So let's drop the romanticized ideas that some women actually sat in a fire and burned because they wanted to. It is horrible murder, plain and simple.

And if I were some kind of supervillain ruler of the Earth with such power... every single person at those few recent funerals where supposedly some widow just, you know, unexpectedly jumped in the fire and stay there, I'd hang them all. Down to the last one. Because they're all accomplices to horrible murder.

 

[Dinwar]

Considering that all I was saying is really your last sentence there, I'm kinda scratching my head about the stuff starting with "Actually".

I re-read your post, and I was wrong. I thought you'd said that swords were first made of iron, and I was pointing out that they were first made out of bronze. You didn't say that, however, so my statement is irrelevant.

Without rain, how would the soil move at a rapid rate to cover some of the stones up to a 6 foot depth?

Any number of ways. Wind blows things pretty far, and can blow rocks of remarkable size. Debris flows can travel much, much further than people think. Flash floods can as well (believe it or not, most arid-environment sedimentation is driven by water). Without knowing some more details about the environment I can't say, but I CAN say with certainty that arid environments can have extremely rapid transport of extremely large amounts of sediment. There are a number of formations in the Antelope Valley where this is precisely how they were formed.

 

[Jodie]

Well it is prone to earthquakes, there is always that.

 

[Lithrael]

Actually, no, while people can be crazy enough to jump on a pyre, they can't STAY there for an hour or two until they get burnt to death.
(...)
So let's drop the romanticized ideas that some women actually sat in a fire and burned because they wanted to. It is horrible murder, plain and simple.

Whoa geez I wasn't trying to promote any romanticized ideas. I was only trying to come up with an example where SOME percentage of people meeting awful fate X were in favor of it ideologically and that was the first thing that came to mind. I would imagine even the most gung-ho for sacrifice Aztec would not be so excited about it once the flaying part was going on.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Tiwanaku was in a marshy area subject to periodical inundation, and seems to have had canals for transport. It seems to me like if something falls in a canal, and past a point it's no longer maintained, it can get easily buried in whatever the water and the wind blow into it.

The agricultural land was also on raised platforms, to control the flooding. I.e., there was a lot of soil which had been dug up and placed higher than normal. Again, it seems to me like no miracle that a lot of stuff would be blown or washed off the high places, and end up in the low places, i.e., the canals. Gravity tends to do that.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Whoa geez I wasn't trying to promote any romanticized ideas. I was only trying to come up with an example where SOME percentage of people meeting awful fate X were in favor of it ideologically and that was the first thing that came to mind. I would imagine even the most gung-ho for sacrifice Aztec would not be so excited about it once the flaying part was going on.

Well, maybe I overreacted a little, but sati is one of the things that make me see red. If I were to make up a religion, it would have a special circle of hell for the berks who perpetrated that horror.

And honestly, I don't think many women were actually looking forward to ending their life screaming in agony on top of a pile of burning wood. Even if you were depressed enough to plan a suicide, you wouldn't choose the most horrible way to die, and it would have to be your choice, not basically mandatory. Because for the upper class women marriage was a delayed death sentence, and pretty much guaranteed to happen. (Judging by the testimony of the Greeks, it seems to have been more widespread, but by the time the Brits got there, the lower classes had already said a big "piss off" to it.) It's one thing to commit suicide because you want it, and it's another thing to have a death sentence looming over your head for all your life.

And sure enough, what we learn from the Greeks is that the Indians did it to deter women from poisoning their husbands. (And I'd add, probably to solve any inheritance problems in one fell swoop too.) It wouldn't work as a deterrent if women were looking forward to it. It's only a deterrent if it's something you'd very much rather avoid.

Plus, about ideological reasons, people tend to favour ideologies that are in their favour, or which they think they can game. E.g., you might have Jews working for the Nazis (and there were a lot in WW2), if they think they're going to get special status for it, or at least delay the inevitable for long enough. You don't see many people looking forward to being themselves subjected to a horrible injustice.

Basically, you'd probably find enough people being all for YOUR being killed, or people going with it so THEY don't get killed, but you won't find many being all for THEIR being killed horribly. E.g., you'll find plenty thinking they should nuke Iran, but none saying, "please someone nuke ME."

For sati there was no such way to rationalize against it. Being all for it and cooperating with it, helped some Jews avoid the Holocaust, but it won't mean Jack Schitt for a woman supposed to be burned alive on her husband's pyre. You can't go "maybe they'll leave me be if I'm their useful idiot", because they won't.

 

[Lithrael]

Clearly it was a bad example then. OK, how about instead I say, compare it to that rare group of monks that try to mummify themselves to death.

 

[Correa Neto]

Well, to be fair there is one way in which a catastrophe could wipe out a civilization and all records: if it was an island nation, and the island exploded. Krakatoa-like event or something similar. That said, such a civilization would necessarily be fairly small; they'd only have the resources of that island, after all (otherwise we'd see evidence of them). And extremely small groups tend to not develop high technology by themselves.

Maybe. But we found Akrotiri, despite Santorini's KABOOM having been larger than Krakatau's...

The problem with civilizations restricted to islands is that they are doomed to rely on sparse resources. Geology will impose severe limitations to the types of mineral resources avaliable. If its a Hawaii-like island, or even Iceland, for example, they will be forever restricted to basalt and obsidian. No copper, no iron, no tin. I guess an island chain like Japan would be the minimum nedded to have enough diversity of mineral resources.

Jodie, sedimentation rates are very variable. Another thing you must take in to account is that deserts do receive rains and flash floods as well as temporary streams are important when it comes down to shape desert landscapes. Add to this salar-type lakes and you'll see there's absolutely no problem with thick accumulations of sediments happening relatively fast. Do not forget also climate variations. They happened in the past, will happen again and are actually happening. Again, whatever was your source regarding Tiwanaku, its lacking knowledge.

At last but not least, remember- the "you can't know everything" is flawed. Its the god-in-the-gaps.

 

[Jodie]

It was the tour guide at the site that talked about the debate over the actual dates of construction and mentioned the buried stones as evidence that it was older.