And the cyclopean thing is an odd tangent, but does have a pretty well accepted modern explanation. Some fossilized skulls have extremely prominent nasal and sinus cavities that have long led amateur investigators to conclude that there were one eyed giants in the past. This is most likely nothing but a basic error of anatomical analysis. It is difficult to correctly understand fossilized skulls if you don't have a reasonable grasp of the kind of skulls that creatures living today have.
Since the stones are still there for anyone to walk up and touch, it's pretty much incontrovertible. Go to Mallorca and you can find megalithic towns that date from thousands of years before Rome, which had to have come from a culture with some degree of technology because they were able to sail there and colonize it in the first place.
That said, you don't need giants to explain it. In Tarragona the foundations of the fortress wall are made of tight fitting stone blocks the size of a car that were quarried and moved hundreds of feet up the hill by regular Homo Sapiens Romans.
Anyone who lived in or visited a third world country and watched people produce works of astounding precision and perfect finish with their bare hands will understand that in the 1st world we are just not very capable with our hands since the industrial revolution.
We do not learn how to make physical stuff any more as part of our curriculum growing up. And everything we use daily is produced by machines.
But the conclusion that thusly anything that you can't imagine creating with your two hands couldn't have been created by someone else's is a fallacy.
I really like e.g. this youtube channel[1] since the creator uses mostly techniques that where available since hundreds of years and you see the results looking often like they came out of a CNC.
Stones that fit together perfectly, so that no even a knife's blade fits in-between them, do not require modern tech to make.
This is too true. I realised this in the last few years after getting into wood carving and deciding to learn how to sharpen a blade properly. You don't need some fancy contraption or machine to put a good edge on a knife or other cutting tool, using just my hands and eyes with a few small stones I can put a consistent razor edge on just about anything. It's shocking to me how common it is for people to have dull or completely blunt chefs knives in their kitchen, freehand sharpening is a basic skill that I think 90% have the dexterity and capability to learn, but proper hand skills just aren't a priority anymore.
A lot of still quite relevant traditional building methods are being overlooked or forgotten too, a relative who does slate roofing and various other work for housing in the UK often expresses dismay at the state of building education and common practices.
I have a hope that eventually hand skills for maniplation of objects in 3D space might once again become something of a priority, with some kind of future haptic technology. See Bret Victor's excellent Humane Representation of Thought talk - http://worrydream.com/cdg/ResearchAgenda-v0.19-poster.pdf He doesn't know exactly how such technology could be made exactly, just that it probably will one day and we should think about designing software and interfaces to build towards that.
The accompanying text is BS from beginning to end, solely excepting the complaint that modern historians wish we would stop asking them about these things.
There is a wikipedia page[1] concerning megalithic architecture in Lazio (the region of Italy in which Rome is), which unfortunately is only available in Italian but contains some information about the estimated age of most of the structures from the linked submission, as well as attempted explanations. For example archeologists suppose that some of the most advanced walls where built by local populations helped by wandering Greek builders based on similarities with the temple of Delphi and Greek acropolises. Wikipedia also has individual pages for some of the ruins[2][3] (also not available in English) where other theories are suggested, for example the acropolis of Alatri could have been built by the Hernici[4].
[1] https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architettura_megalitica_del_...
[2] https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acropoli_di_Arpino
This sentence, for instance:
> "Today’s archaeologists and anthropologists don’t express nearly as much interest as you would think in these 18th, 19th and even 20th century descriptions of giant skeletal finds, in part because there is no evidence left to examine. Amazingly, all evidence of these giant bones somehow disappeared..."
Hysterical!
How fun! There are people who genuinely believe Atlantean giants actually existed and wandered around looking inward with a third eye!
There is a very great deal we still don't know about Egyptian stonework, and how it was done, that historians are aggressively not interested in discussing. Anyway what they insist was done is physically impossible. So, there is plenty left for our grandchildren still to puzzle out.
The Egyptians loved cutting tunnels, and new tech will help us locate the miles of still unexplored tunnels crisscrossing the sites.
> The complex was built by the Inca in the 15th century, particularly under Pachacuti and successors.[6] They built dry stone walls constructed of huge stones. The workers carefully cut the boulders to fit them together tightly without mortar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacsayhuam%C3%A1n
- - - -
For my money, the mystery of how huge monoliths were manipulated and moved around was solved by Wally Wallington, who has used the methods he discovered to build "a concrete Stonehenge-like structure using only materials and techniques that do not rely on any modern machine-powered technology."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wally_Wallington
Wonderfully, just as the legends say, the stones walk... :D
But fascinating nonetheless.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=mega...
Interestingly, this dictionary lists three meanings of the word: https://www.thefreedictionary.com/cyclopean
The first is “referring to a Cyclops”. The second is “huge”. The third is in reference to these types of (megalithic) ruins.
I wonder if the first meaning is the original one, and the others evolved from that meaning as our understanding of human history changed.
"vast evidence"?!
Surely this is some kind of satire that's simply so good I can't be sure?!
There is a wide range of conspiracy theories, from “completely outlandish” to “unlikely” to “plausible.”
Consider these three:
1) The Soviets attempted to put a man into space before Yuri Gagarin. The attempt failed, he died, and the Soviets covered up the attempt to avoid the negative publicity.
2) The US has a second, secret space program managed by the military.
3) The US secret space program is based on recovered alien technology, which was reverse engineered and put into practice without ever being declassified. They have several very large spacecraft (“Solar Warden”) that are manned by people who are taken as young adults, spend twenty years of service in space, and who then have their memories wiped and are transported back in time to a point before they enlisted. This program is called “Twenty and Back.”
… there are people out there who believe all three of these.
I find the first to be completely plausible - even likely - though I’ve not seen enough evidence to be convinced it’s necessarily true. The second is plausible but unlikely to be true on a scale that would be really surprising. The third… c’mon.
As it is, as a culture we seem to lump people who are open to believing things like the first two may be true in with people who believe the the third. That’s probably doing us a disservice.
