Is our cultural origin story just a reset?

Post Reply New Topic

Yes. Dont know this West guy. But Eric Van Daniken ( of "Ancient Astronauts" fame) did the same thing in his "Chariots of the Gods" books.

What I find irritating about these "alien" allegations is the fact that they don't assume that HUMANS could have done all this stuff all by their lonesome!

And that the Mesoamericans couldn't have developed their technology without any influence from the "Old World."

Why couldn't an especially observant agriculturalist create a calendar?

I would say some of these people who created calendars were the "autistics" of their times. Their special interest was the Cosmos.

Exactly.

L. Sprague De Camp wrote "havent we taken enough from the American Indians without also taking away from them the credit for their own civilizations?" (he was famous for sci fi, but this was in a nonfiction book about notions about "lost continents" down through the ages).

Was always a big fan of Thor Hyderthal and all of his rafting adventures. But his theories are both a bit whacky, and a bit racist. So he sails a reed boat from Morocco to the Yucatan. The trouble is that the Egyptians stopped building pyramids around 2500 BC, and the Mayans didnt START building pyramids until around AD 800. So the maritime stunt doesnt really prove anything.

The similarities between the architecture of Mesoamerica around 1000 AD and that of 2500 BC Egypt and Mesopotamia (Mexican pyramids actually functioned more like the Ziggurats of Mesopotamia than like the Pyramids of Egypt of the same era) probably have more to do with both cultures going through similar stages of both social, and technological evolution than they do with any exchange of ideas between the Old and New Worlds.

But at least Van Daniken was equal opportunity. He thought all humans regardless of skin color were too dumb to do anything without the help alien astronauts! Lol!

The largest pyramids in Egypt and Mexico have very similar widths and lengths

Great Egyptian pyramid
756ftx756ft

Pyramid of the sun in Mexico

760ftx720ft

Is that just a coincidence?



I don't know if this link is valid but it talks about them mystery of sudden civilization

https://books.google.com/books?id=RNtlm ... on&f=false

Another strange thing is that the civilizations in central and South America get more primitive as time goes by.

Olmecs more complex than
Mayans
Mayans more complex than
Aztecs

Last edited by slenkar on 25 Mar 2016, 11:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yup. Until there's actual evidence suggesting it's not.

"There is nothing as powerful as the truth.

There is nothing as dangerous as a half truth."

There are dozens of pyramids in the Old World of various sizes and styles. And there are dozens of pyramids in the New World of various sizes and styles. The fact that you could find one from one hemisphere that happened to be similar to one from the other hemisphere wouldnt prove anything anyway.

But even if it did prove something:

Yes the base of the Mexican Pyramid of the Sun is vaguely similar in dimensions to the base of the Great Pyramid in Giza.

But: how tall are the two pyramids?

Giza is 455 feet tall today. Originally it was probably 480 feet tall ( slightly shorter than the Washington Monument).

The Mexican Pyramid of the Sun is all of 216 feet tall.

Whoever fed you your data forgot to mention that fact!

To put another way: have you ever seen actual pictures of the two pyramids?

If so then you would be gobsmacked by how DISsimilar the two pyramids are.

An ediface thats only as tall a 20 story building cant be called "similar" to another that is as tall as a fifty story skyscraper even if they are equally fat on the bottom. Their whole shapes are quite different.

And there other stylistic differences between them on top of that.

I really think a large part of this is just how badly the dialog between the sciences and the public is breaking down.

To write it all off as the public being credulous, naive, unwashed, etc. while there's a grain of truth there in some cases, also seems to be a prevailing excuse for laziness on the part of the kinds of people who are supposed to in the PR seat for the sciences - ie. the various meta-analysts, philosophers of science and natural history, etc.. What a meta-analyst or field philosopher needs to be doing primarily is clarifying these three zones a) what sets of facts we know relate to each other in an air-tight manner at this point b) in what areas we aren't 100% sure of the actual events but have the possibilities hemmed into a specific domain based on what we do have and c) acknowledging when someone has a maverick hypothesis that may very well be true but as of yet does not have enough evidence in its favor to back them up.

I remember listening to an interview Skeptico where Alex Tsakiris had Massimo Pigliucci on and things went downhill quite fast, partly that Alex is something of an unabashed new-ager but equal and opposite of his own flavor of credulity when the topic of various doctors doing near-death studies came up Massimo, a philospher of science, immediately invoked astrology and suggested that these doctors are not only tantamount to astrologers, that this particular field has about as much merit for funding as astrology, and that it's a long-closed case where some kind of cultural sickness or politics is keeping the thing going. To field controversial questions that poorly, especially refusing to back up language as bold as the pseudoscience and superstition cudgel with facts that validate that language, is about as conterproductive as you can get - even if you believe your 100% right and even if you had all the facts to call it a closed case. It's stuff like that which makes true believers and professional skeptics look like equal and opposite nutters. It happens far more often than this and there are a lot of people handling dialog far worse than Massimo did in this interview. This is where people get the impression that the mainstream scientific and academic communities are inbred bureaucracies who are too self-interested and self-absorbed to get at much in the way of truth anymore. Hence you get all kinds of cottage research that's all over the map in quality and people believing in everything from reptilian and Illuminati conspiracies to ancient aliens theories.

There are differences, just as there are skyscrapers built all over the world that have differences in size and building materials.

The Incas have
1-Sun-gods
2-Mummification
3-a belief that objects put in someone's grave are kept in the afterlife
4-pyramids
5-obelisks with carved images
Just like the Egyptians

So?

Every culture had sun gods. Even we celebrate the birth of Christ on the calender date of the birthday of an ancient Pagan sun god. The sun is up there in the sky. Its hard for any human culture to ignore it.

People in desert regions observe natural mummification, and they tend to evolve mortuary practices that enhance the natural tendency of the dead to mummify in their environments. Peru and Egypt are both deserts.

Even the Neanderthals buried people with grave goods. And so did countless cultures in historic times all over the world. The pre christian Anglo Saxon ancestors of the English buried a whole ship at Sutton Hoo with the body of a cheiftan.

Pyramids are hardly the monopoly of the Egyptians.

The Incan Empire was over twelve centuries after the start of the common era. They stopped building pyramids after the Old kingdom of Egypt 20 centuries before Christ. So these alledged Egyptian missionaries to the Incas would have to have traveled through time as well through space to transmit these so called "similarities" in culture.

Don't forget to rationalize the Incan obelisks
https://www.pics4learning.com/details.p ... belisk.jpg

Rationalize WHAT?

Incans had gold funerary masks for rulers
As did the Egyptians
http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/309959

And obelisks with carved images just like the Egyptians

http://www.realhula.com/Ancient_Stones/ ... Ditch.html
I've not heard of a good explanation for this finely crafted stone irrigation ditch--way beyond the abilities of the native Hawaiians that we know of.

The Incans used gold the way that we use aluminum siding. They covered buildings with gold, and even painted over the gold.

They "carved images" onto their obelisks, but they were completely different images than those carved by the Egyptians.

If you find an actual Egyptian heiroglyph on an Incan obelisk then that would be evidence of contact between the two civilizations.

Universities were founded by religions, Doctor of Divinity was an employable degree.

So the study of the past was fit to biblical times. All people were The Sons of Noah.

Genetics laughs at your ancestors.

Antiquarians studied things hundreds of years old, nothing was older than five thousand years.

While England had Roman cities, baths, aqueducts, roads, they had no record of the Romans.

Bede wrote about the Vikings in 900, 1066 was recorded as a tapestry. It was commonly thought that Stonehenge was built by the mythical Romans. This was among the educated, the common folk thought the Fairies did it.

Their history was Jesus's family came to England to flee the Romans, who God could not control. from them came the King, Author, who searched for the lost Holy Grail. Like Moses who lost the ten commandments, the Ark of the Covenant, the line continued to be careless with their gifts from God.

Questioning this story would get you burned at the stake up till 1799. After that transport to the colonies was considered a worse punishment.

99% of people were engaged in farming. Very few could sign their own name. One person who could write was enough for a town. 90% lived in total poverty, 10% were only malnourished, diseased, and the consumption of Gin was a quart a day per man, woman, and child. Most children died before five, most people before 32.

Upon this foundation the future was built.

By 1860, American Civil War, almost a quarter could write their own name, and they had switched to whiskey. Every thing else was the same. If you could read and write at a Third Grade level, you were made an Officer.

General literacy starts fifty years later when six year olds were taken out of mines and mills and ruined forever in schools. This did not apply to farms, and family businesses.

Thankfully most of them died in WWI and the 1918 flu. The next generation was properly starved through the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Then they died in WWII.

After the war hundreds of tons of Tetra Ethel Lead was put in the gas and caused mass mental retardation, to go with the atmospheric testing of Atomic Bombs, which dusted the whole country with radioactive elements.

Suddenly there were more stories of Angels, Demons, Gods from outer space, UFOs, Bigfoot, than during the Middle Ages.

Now we have reached the pinnacle of human development, and have true understanding of all things. We have TV.

There was probably no contact between the ordinary Egyptians and the Incas.

All of the similarities point toward a shared origin, pyramids funerary masks and obelisks are very stylized things that could have been any shape if developed independently.

Pyramids funerary masks and obelisks are also pointless and useless......outside of any religious use.

So the Egyptians and incans just so happened to share an ideology that called for the use of these pointless objects.