I don’t see any water source for a mill/bandsaw anywhere near most of these sites located on hills or barren plateaus.
Have you seen the pics of the ruins of Puma Punku in Bolivia? Of all ancient ruins, Puma Punku is the most mystifying to me. Check out this story and accompanying pics.
http://daveearley.hubpages.com/hub/Ancient-Mysteries-Puma-Punku-in-Tiahuanaco
Note in the story that the stones are either granite or diorite which are extremely hard to cut and probably would need diamond cutting tools.
I don’t believe that you could develop the tools and the sophisticated technical knowledge of engineering without writing and a way to transmit the knowledge so you lose me there with the argument that somehow our same species was able to do all this and then completely lost the knowledge—on a worldwide basis. How and why?
I’m willing to be persuaded that civilizations 12,000 years ago had this technology and somehow we are left with only the ruins and not their tools—but I haven’t been persuaded yet. Remember that we haven’t found much of human existence on this planet back beyond 10-12,000 years.
I’m still looking for answers but I’m not sure why a visit from space by other worlders is more fantastic than the idea that Earth had insanely technological human societies that appeared full blown and then degenerated into primititive human societies.
“I don’t see any water source for a mill/bandsaw anywhere near most of these sites located on hills or barren plateaus.”
Yes, but the power source isn’t the essential element, you could just as easily power it by a team of oxen or donkeys pushing a wheel around. The essential thing is that some ancients at least were able to construct machine tools that were not too far from what we use today.
I haven’t heard of that site, thanks I will check it out. Regarding the granite/diorite, it’s very hard yes, but diamonds aren’t required to cut it, just to cut it more effectively. You could just do it with sand and water but it would take much longer. That’s why the “ancient aliens” hypothesis doesn’t pass Occam’s razor, as far as I’m concerned. All these structures are explicable by means that are less far-fetched than aliens flying all this way just to teach us how to build big buildings.
In some cases, we do have both the monuments and the tools, and there isn’t that much mystery as to how they were constructed. The Giza pyramids, for example, we have tools and toolmarks and half-quarried blocks that let us know with a certainty that humans milled these stones. We may not know the exact method they used to stack them up, but we know humans cut the rocks out, so there’s no reason to assume the rest wasn’t done by humans as well.
I think you are probably underestimating the odds of alien contact, while overestimating the technology needed to build these monuments. They are impressive, but at the same time, it doesn’t take a lot of advanced knowledge to figure out how to cut and move stones, just some simple machines, a little ingenuity, and a lot of manpower.
I also don’t think we lost the knowledge or technology to do these things. We never forgot how to build pulleys, ramps, saws, wedges, etc. We may have lost specific know how about building techniques, but that isn’t a big mystery. Someone in modern day France might have a hell of a time trying to build a Gothic Cathedral nowadays, even though we know they were built by man. We just don’t use the same techniques as those builders, because we came up with easier or more effective techniques. Once humans figured out how to cast concrete and fire mass amounts of brick effectively, we probably had no need to use those old stone building techniques anymore, and they died out with the masons who knew them.