I find most of that Ancient Aliens show to be silly but i did see one episode that really made me think. They showed what is required by our current technology to move a single stone that weighed some 50 tons or so IIRC to a site from the quarry to a location in LA some 50 miles away. The best we could do with our technology was it cost millions, required thousands of man hours, and took days. One unfinished stone. With the best modern technology.
When you look at those stones in South America that predate the Incas and think about it, as primitive as we would like to consider them they were able to accomplish something our economy would struggle to replicate today.
“as primitive as we would like to consider them they were able to accomplish something our economy would struggle to replicate today”
One of the reasons we struggle to replicate it is because we aren’t primitive. We have been using technology like concrete so long (since the Roman era), that we hardly ever have any need to move huge stones. Instead we just make them in place.
The ancients that did move these stones regularly doubtless had a lot of simple tricks we have simply forgotten about because they weren’t needed for anything other than moving huge stones.
The cost of labor, which was often a slave’s wages, was much less for the ancients than it is for us today.
a spindly small tuberculosis infected man created a coral castle out of huge blocks of coral, all by himself- not only that- but after it was completed- he was forced to move the whole thing- block by block- by himself to a new location- it’s a fascinating read!
and consider that stones all over the world used in Megalithic structures frequently weigh 100 tons with other weighing the gamut to over 1000 tons.