Ancient Aliens

I watch that Ancient Aliens show pretty often. The places that they show are fascinating and their theories are interesting BUT… They get on my nerves with their idea that mankind is so stupid that it isn’t possible that they did ANYTHING without ancient alien assistance or guidance. Ancient Aliens theorists say YES to nearly anything!

They find stone walls all over the planet and to them this has to mean that aliens either did it or taught man how to do it with some sort of magical ancient lost technology. I see this totally differently. I watched my Grandbaby stacking blocks when she was tiny. I don’t think that aliens taught her this I think that it is a natural human inclination.

Our primitive ancestors were prey more than they were predators for a loooooong time. They found safety from predators in trees in the earliest days of our root species but when they came down out of the trees and became bipedal, they moved into places where trees were not always available. They sought out caves and high places like big hills. That allowed them to see trouble coming and controlling the high ground offered them the ability to throw and roll stones down on attackers.

Once again as mankind became a more mobile species they still needed safe places to sleep and a place that offered them some protection at night. They, in places where mountains, big hills or caves were not available, built their own hills and caves. Even when there were small hills only, they built their structures on top of those hills.

Their construction was made from stone, soil, and wood. The wooden structures rotted and so are not as easy for us to notice now. New technology though has spotted all sorts of huge wooden structures subterranean remains. The poles that were the walls rotted off above the ground but the parts below ground and the holes that they were placed in are now being discovered.

The problem with wood IS that it is very temporary. As time past man became to use more permanent materials. As their skills grew stone age people became masters at the working stone. That is why we call them STONEAGE people. They replaced their wooden structures with stone or with huge earthworks. This didn’t happen overnight. The places that were built with smaller stones over time became rubble piles so they built bigger and bigger. They LEARNED at each stage and were able to accomplish amazing things.

I have a hard time believing that an alien species that is capable of interstellar travel is going to build structures by stacking stones. How often do people now build with stacked stones? Nearly never and when they do it is on a small scale. There are just too many faster and easier ways to build walls or structures.

Prehistoric man was a massively intelligent creature. While they lacked out technology they were most likely much more intelligent than we are now. Without a written language all of their knowledge was kept in their memory. Without maps, they had to remember with amazing detail the places that they went to year after year in their migratory lifestyle. It wasn’t until man started farming that they could stay in one place all year long. Before that they moved with the herds of prey animals and from area to area as various nuts, fruits and grains became available.

In order to be at the right place at the right time, they needed a way to tell time. If they were late or early they might not find the food supplies that they needed in a hand to mouth sort of feeding. They needed to head south in time to avoid at least part of the cold winters. There is almost nothing to eat in a frozen winter world.

Their clock and calendar was the stars. They knew them intimately and were aware which constellations rose as the seasons passed. Even when they started being more agriculturally based they needed to know when to plant and when to prepare for winter. Places like Stonehenge were designed to clearly mark the passage of time and when the 4 major points in time were reached. Two times a year the day hours and the night hours are equal in length. Two times a year the days and nights are at their maximum difference. Each of these was marked in the placement of the stones but I suspect that other alignments told them when to plant and when to harvest.

You could go with so many moons past the winter solstice but that could land you a couple of weeks too early or too late. The stars would be in a certain alignment every year on the SAME DAY. You can bet that they were intimately aware of those times also.

People were smarter in the past for a simple reason. It was a hard life and stupidity got you KILLED, probably before you grew up and procreated. Nowadays there is not only no penalty for stupidity but at least in the West, we encourage it by supporting them and allowing them to breed like rats. Over time this degrades the average. With the advent of writing and near-universal literacy in the West, memory no longer had as much of an advantage. With the advent of the cell phones, now we will reach an entirely new level of stupidity. Lots of kids now don’t know the difference between KNOWING something and knowing how to look it up with their phones.

There is a lot of strange evidence that seems to indicate that we may have had visitors. There is evidence that we are still having visitors. What I don’t believe is that every advancement that man has ever had in the past or present was given to us by aliens.

I also still enjoy the show. Tonight I watched the one about Nan Madol and the pictures are worth listening to them for. It is a wildly beautiful place with a lot of mystery though not as much as they make it out to be. Ancient people could do a lot of things that our educated masses could never do without a ton of calculators and heavy machinery. They kept talking about the math that you need to calculate the structural pressures and even calculus to figure out the arches needed to hold that weight. Hogwash. I was stacking blocks when I was two and learned from trial and error what would work and what wouldn't work. Knowledge trumps math every time when it comes to building with a well known and understood building material.

Admittedly an architect or structural Engineer can shorten the time and greatly reduce the errors but in the end, once you know what you are doing you don't calculate every board that you put up. Whether you learned from trial and error or mathematical calculations once you know how to do it you can build safely on and on.

The same thing applied to them trying to figure out how to float the large building rocks to the construction site. They showed several efforts of moving them on rafts and boats but they tended to capsize and the rocks rolled off the raft. DUH!! The people of the Pacific rims have known for a long time that you stabilize your rafts and canoes with OUTRIGS!! Evidently the PHD educated designers of those rafts didn't ask for any local help.

Nonetheless, the photography is wonderful and you get to see some of man's incredible places that are not tourist traps.

I remember reading Chariots of the gods and it made such sense to me that it changed how I saw a lot of things. There was another book about that time called, "We Are Not The First" by Andrew Tomas that was also very good and thought-provoking. It proposed that in the distant past that there was a previous civilization of high order and that man of the things that Von Daniken had attributed to possible aliens were in fact leftover from this previously great civilization.

chariots of the Gods opened people up to asking a lot of questions that before were just not possible to ask and get a serious answer. For many decades our culture had turned its back on anything other than a rather plain and unimaginative view of the world we live in. The many mysteries were just ignored because anything that was even slightly off the side of the conventional theories was just impossible to be voiced on the threat of losing legitimacy in any academic position. Chariots of the Gods was so well received that this rigid structure began to crumble.

LOL, I sometimes think that the Ancient Alien Theorists may have gone somewhat too far. I wonder if it is time for things to swing back to a slightly more skeptical position. They are so carried away with their Aliens that they can't imagine a mere human or human civilization doing much of anything and that all advancement and amazing construction has to be from alien guidance.