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.
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.
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?
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.