Remarkable feats of engineering that are recreated by children every day with blocks of wood.
Truly baffling indeed.
Okay, but we haven’t ruled out the possibility that the children are being trained by aliens.
Well if they could do me a solid and teach me how to use Unity in my sleep that would be fucking ace.
Nah, the aliens are too smart to use Unity after that run-time licensing bullshit they pulled last year.
Hey, listen. They’re a hyper-advanced space faring super race, but they’ve still got limits.
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?
Jagged tiny metal saw causes walls to open baffling Facebook users.
LMAO
Because it’s much more likely that aliens flew here, across the galaxy, in their space ships, with advanced technology that we can only dream of, to stack rocks.
Maybe they really did independently discover some masonry! We will never know!
Individual cultures coming up with the idea of carving and stacking stones? Independently? Without the help of aliens or an Aryan progenitor race?
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.
Hold on. You may be on to something. Idiot aliens.
So LEGO lost their copyright to our ancestors? Or is it a knob thing only?
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.
Also the natural explanation for connections between civilizations across Bosnia-Albania-Greece-Turkey-Palestine-Israel is Nordic aliens with flying saucers.
“I like to stack. I want to go to an ancient civilisation now. No, now!”
This is not insanepeoplefacebook. This is stupidpeoplefacebook.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The template doesn’t have to be flexible. You can scribe the edge lines onto wood with a compass in 10 seconds.
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.
Wtf? Lol. This is not the flex you think it is
Dude. Bro. It’s totally the flex I think it is. Fr
Ok?
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.
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.
Furthermore, carving and stacking stones doesn’t take a genius.
You have been banned from r/freemasons.
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.
No.
A decade or so ago, we owned a small rural house in Pennsylvania where the roads in the area were lined with 5’ high stone walls. Turns out, about a hundred years before, a rich family (for whom there were towns in the area named) had built themselves a giant stone mansion nearby, and to do so, they imported a bunch of Italian stone masons, and built little houses for them in the surrounding lands. To keep them busy when they weren’t working on the mansion (or whatever other projects they were doing), they had them build all of these roadside walls.
Everything was dry laid. No morter, nothing. Just rocks, stacked in top of one another. Not even particularly regularly shaped; they just jigsawed them together. The walls were 5’ high, 2’ across at the top and maybe 3’ at the base, and they lined every road for miles around. And this was the busywork these guys did.
I’m most places, these walls had stood unmoving for decades - again, with no morter or joining. When we bought our place, some previous owner wanted an actual driveway instead of just a road to the barn and had simply pushed a hole through the wall with a bulldozer and left these giant stones alongside the driveway.
A few years in, we hired some local Amish guys to use the stone to build proper end-cap pillars for the driveway. Those guys also did not use morter, except on the caps to make little roofs. They just lego’d the pillars out of the left-over stone, and we got a small discount for letting them take whatever they hadn’t used. I have no idea what these stones weighed, but certainly several hundred pounds each. The work crew was 3 guys, and no heavy machinery. They arrived in a pickup truck, were dropped off, and were picked up at the end of the day (it did take them a couple of weeks to do the job). They partially deconstructed the ends of the wall to integrate the pillars; it looked all of a piece at the end.
I think you greatly underestimate people’s ability to stack rocks, especially healthy, fit men used to labor.
P.S. I’m not saying it doesn’t take skill; I couldn’t have done it, even when in my prime; not well anyway. Not the first time. But none of those ziggurats were anyone’s first time stacking rocks.
Would you be able to show a picture of what you’re talking about? Not because I doubt your story or their abilities, but I’m convinced that the difference in precision would be immediately apparent. If it weren’t, we would not be scratching our heads about how these structures were built thousands of years ago.
Some people in this thread seem unaware that there really is no explanation about how these stones were so precisely cut. So when someone starts arguing about how it’s “just stacking rocks” or coming up with anecdotes to insinuate the feasibility with just some skill and persistence, it displays a lack of understanding of the issue in my opinion.
Nobody is arguing that it’s hard to stack rocks, but we are dabbling in quantum mechanics yet we have no explanation for the precision achieved in these structures. Just because it isn’t likely to be aliens or ancient wisdom from Atlantis doesn’t mean that dismissive oversimplified explanations are justified.
Would you be able to show a picture of what you’re talking about?
Oh, yeah. I took tons of photos of those walls over the years. Most of them are in archives, though; like I said, we lived there over a decade ago, but I have one in my front photo album:
I do have a picture of one end pillar, but that has pointing, and it’s not obvious that pointing is aesthetic and not structural mortar (although it is often applied over mortered stone). Anyway, you can’t tell the stone isn’t mortared b/c of the pointing, so it isn’t a useful illustration.
That photo above, however, is clear there’s no mortar, and yet that hundred y/o wall is astonishingly straight and level.
That picture illustrates my point though. It’s just a wall with stacked stone, something very common to see, especially as a European. The difference with OP’s pictures is immense, and given the difference in age only makes it more puzzling.
Am I witnessing a unidan moment?
I just looked up what Unidan was and talk about caring to much about internet points.
Like where do people find the time?
Feel free to explain it then. Which is it going to be, Aliens or Aryans from Atlantis?
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.
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.
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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.
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Sorry… are you saying that if I were a stonemason, I would be correct? As if that’s some sort of job that hasn’t existed since antiquity?
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When did I mention the pyramids?
Are you under the impression that they’re in Bosnia?
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I mean, I’ve built a stone wall before…
