• Darkard@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Remarkable feats of engineering that are recreated by children every day with blocks of wood.

    Truly baffling indeed.

      • Darkard@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Well if they could do me a solid and teach me how to use Unity in my sleep that would be fucking ace.

    • brey1013@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Kids: famously building the pyramids of Giza daily.

      Edit: dammit children! Will you please stop constructing thousand-ton monoliths that last millenia in the middle of the living room!? What home is that not a daily occurance in? Right? Right?

  • j4k3@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago
    Jagged tiny metal saw causes walls to open baffling Facebook users.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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      3 months ago

      Individual cultures coming up with the idea of carving and stacking stones? Independently? Without the help of aliens or an Aryan progenitor race?

  • Halosheep@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    I didn’t realize which community I was in and read this as if the account was roleplaying an alien posting about human history with genuine curiosity.

  • ApeNo1@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    “I like to stack. I want to go to an ancient civilisation now. No, now!”

  • azuth@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    Also the natural explanation for connections between civilizations across Bosnia-Albania-Greece-Turkey-Palestine-Israel is Nordic aliens with flying saucers.

  • Sprawlie@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    This post had me thinking and reminded me of something I wanted to share in relation:

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

    It is even possible in nature, for evolution to meet at the same place, despite isolation from eachother.

    There are some things in the world that just “make sense” from evolutionary, or invention stand point. Coincidence CAN happen without it needing to be the work of some aliens, or conspiratorial nonsense.

  • Optional@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I mean, who hasn’t carved and stacked ten-ton rocks into perfect form-fitting shape? Heck when i was but a wee lad, me and the boys would knock out fifty or sixty a day, down at ye olde Quarry ‘n Carry. Build huge town walls and knock ‘em down a week later. Then we’d invent agriculture and see who could spit the farthest.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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      3 months ago

      Why do you think that’s difficult to do? You carve a rock into a shape, then you see what gaps there are between that shape and the other shapes and you carve another rock to fit it. And when you have hundreds of people in the quarry carving rocks and years to do it, it gets done.

      • Optional@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Well sure - but in these pictures, look at the lower right one, say, there’s no rocks in-between, it’s just one bigass rock perfectly carved to fit another bigass rock, and so on. So at least it had to either be done before placement or using some sort of flexible template such that mortar wasn’t used. Which is pretty neat at least. And given the size, one expects it was an enormous PITA.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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          3 months ago

          Of course it was done before placement. It couldn’t be done after placement. It’s really not hard to carve one shape of a rock to fit another shape of a rock given enough time and patience.

          What is so funny to me is that these peoples achieved things like massive irrigation systems that enabled them to feed large populations and complicated textile processing and weaving, but these armchair archaeologists think that the wall is the important thing just because it’s the most prominent feature remaining.

        • EvacuateSoul@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          The template doesn’t have to be flexible. You can scribe the edge lines onto wood with a compass in 10 seconds.

    • ebc@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      People in this thread act as if the Romans were baboons.

      No, people 4000 years ago were still people, i.e. they had roughly the same brains as we do. This means their creativity and intellect was pretty much the same as we have now; they were more than capable of inventing techniques to carve and move large rocks. They didn’t have modern technology, but they still had technology.

      Also, building stuff by piling up rocks is so basic, it’s normal that it evolved in parallel on different continents. OP’s pic actually shows a few different solutions to the problem; some of them make neat rows while others are more “random” in their approach.

  • papafoss@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    To this person’s credit, the rate that the Inca developed advanced stone masonry techniques is considered a bit of a mystery. It’s believed that they got them from another culture. That also had very advanced masonry techniques. The mysterious part of it is that both cultures don’t have any developmental history.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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      3 months ago

      There is no “believed” about it, and there is a lot of developmental history, so I don’t know why you’re saying that.

      For example, there’s Tiwanaku. There are many sites preceding it and post-dating it.

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

      There were a huge number of Andean civilizations that came before the Inca and many of them had plenty of experience working stone.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Andean_civilizations

      The Inca were just the last in a long line of civilizations in that area.

      Furthermore, carving and stacking stones doesn’t take a genius.

      • papafoss@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        I think your under estimating how incredibly good at “stacking stones” these cultures where.

        Protzen, Jean-Pierre. "Inca Quarrying and Stone Cutting."Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. 44.2 (1985): 161-182. Print

        Protzen, Juan-Pierre. “Who Taught the Inca Stonemasons Their Skills? A Comparison of Tiahuanaco and Inca Cut- Stone Masonry.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. 56.2 (1997): 146-167

        Here is my source material. In it it goes over the extreme tolerances and incredible craftsmanship of the Inca and Tiahuanaco. It’s not like laying brick or stone masonry (also difficult) we do with mortar today.

        Also these structures are made by a bunch of people working over years and in the Incas over vast distances. All done with out written language or at least one we fully understand. (I am aware of quipu) So they had the infrastructure and advanced enough society to train and standardize there building techniques.

        Tiahuanaco are considered more advanced than the Inca and their collapse predated the founding of the Inca empire by roughly 600 to 500 years. Not saying they couldn’t of provided some sort of inspiration for the Inca. But it also makes them more impressive and proves my point.

        You should actually read the wiki if you’re going to cite it.

          • papafoss@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            I just looked up what Unidan was and talk about caring to much about internet points.

            Like where do people find the time?

          • papafoss@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Neither I am just explaining how you clearly have no idea what your talking about. That there isn’t a consensus on how these techniques came about and that they are impressive.

            Here I make it simple.

            Your wrong I’m right.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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              3 months ago

              Probably best to not do that when declaring someone to be wrong. I’m not even sure what I’m wrong about. If you don’t have any explanation other than that they learned it from previous cultures, I’m not sure why you know I’m wrong.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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      3 months ago

      First of all, a monolith is a single rock, not stacked rocks. Hence the word mono.

      Secondly, any carved rock, being a rock, is likely to last thousands of years.

      What you’re trying to say is that it is not easy nor is it trivial to stack rocks tightly like that. But it is both given enough time and manpower.