[thearn4]

Interesting idea, and maybe one worth investigating further. I've always liked the internal ramp theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws4O5LOCI68

In the end, lets all at least agree that it was human innovation and not alien technology that built the pyramids.

[skylan_q]

1. People, in general, are smarter than the ancients and civilization has progressed since then.

2. We don't know how they built the pyramids.

Either aliens built the pyramids, or we're dumber than the ancients.

[jjoonathan]

Hmm, Poe's law? I'll bite.

When it comes to engineering, domain knowledge is often far more important than any kind of inherent "smartness," and ancient Egyptians had thousands of years of block-stacking domain knowledge that we don't. While modern society has billions of tricks up our sleeve that would completely befuddle ancient Egyptians, I'm sure they had a handful of tricks that would catch us by surprise. Knowledge isn't strictly ordered.

Also, just because we aren't sure precisely which strategy they used doesn't mean that we didn't think of it, it just means that we can't find evidence to overwhelmingly support a single one of our hypotheses.

[akjj]

Umm, modern humans are perfectly capable of building pyramids or even much more complicated structures. You may have noticed that 21st century civil engineering is much more advanced than ancient Egyptian civil engineering. However, what we don't have is the level of experience with their tools that they had.

[rokhayakebe]

There are more smart people today than x years ago != The smartest people today are smarter than the smartest of x years ago.

I spent a bit of time over the past few years really old text (some 2000 years+). Nothing in those writings suggest we are smarter than those people.

[asveikau]

I don't know how it would be surprising that we could be dumber than the ancients at something. How about the dark ages? A good chunk of Europe lost touch with the accomplishments of the Roman empire. It took a long time to recover and it would not surprise me if some good ideas were never picked up again.

Or even take today's technology. We are in many ways coasting on the accomplishments of prior generations and very likely some of these would be difficult to recreate from scratch. I recall some rhetorical question: say we wanted to do it tomorrow, how much would it cost us in R&D to once again figure out how to get to the moon? Or, since most of us know tech, I can put it this way: how many folks on HN talking about js or ruby know how to write a kernel, or design a CPU, from scratch?

[moocowduckquack]

We don't know what the architects of the pyramids discussed in the pub either, but that is not because we are worse at conversation.

[saraid216]

> 1. People, in general, are smarter than the ancients and civilization has progressed since then.

All it really takes is one genius with influence in the right ears to achieve something remarkable.