Well, I just explained it- I said explicitly that I don't believe the Egyptians of that time frame built it, but people of a past, more capable civilzation built it, people that built many incredible structures in the Mediterranean area, maybe beginning with Gobekli and Karahun Tepi.

That's fair. It's at least plausible.

"finding the smartest guy on CP isn't going to find the guy that re-set society..."

Finding the smartest guy on CP will barely get you a cleared drain or a water heater that will stay lit.

It's gonna be funny if one of these days we find out that radio carbon dating is just quack science.

Because man, Gobekli Tepe put the world on its ear. NOBODY saw anything that old being that advanced.

(Because again, we seem to think that everyone back in pre-recorded history was stupid or something. I guess that'll happen when we keep saying we descended from Apes...)

Some of y’all never stayed up til 3am to watch an Indian dude build a pool around an underground house on YouTube and it shows

Nobody has ever found any complex tools at any of these ancient sites. Colossal buildings but never any tooling. Did the tooling just erode away under the sands?

But what did they do to fix the sluggishness of their servers and keep the bots away? Let's learn from them.

I think the thesis that DJ, Hammock and I would agree to is this: Historians tell us civilization began in the fertile crescent around 3400 BC...the first pyramid was compeleted 800 years later, and the most amazing of them only 900 yrs later. I find it beyond ludicrous that man would build something so difficult, complex, and arduous in such a short period of organized cohabitation. One could even say we peaked architecturally in our first millenium in relative terms. How could a society so new, with so few architectural feats build something that can't confidently be explained today? It just doesn't wash!

Was there a few years back. Ancient Egypt was fascinating, modern not so much. Walking through the national museum and being able to touch just about everything was appalling. Our guide kept most of the harassment at bay but its relentless.

The simplest answer is that the aliens that created us also created the pyramids.

And that is why we still worship them. Why all ancient cultures worshipped them.

LOL. That was twelve thousand years ago. Twelve thousand years ago the average human is trying not to starve to death and hunting game with sticks and Egypt was a hundred or so years separated from being a tropical savanna. Doesn't compute in my brain that hunter gatherers infected with parasites and unable to grow crops could build eighteen foot tall stone support columns.

Oh I don't think they were using steampunk style tractors or anything, no.

But I think they knew how leverage worked. I think they knew how to attach a thing to another thing to maximize mechanical advantage. I mean something as simply as using a lever to pull a rope through a pully system would technically be the combination of two simple mechanism and therefore make it complex.

Additionally, during the pre-agricultural era, stuff just got left behind. If you came up with something cool and the herd you were hunting moved, you just dropped it in the grass and moved along with it. Then if you die, whatever you learned went with you and certainly in the vastness of wild nobody was stumbling onto that thing again.

I mean something like the Antikythera Mechanism came along and just blew away anything we thought they were capable of using back then. It just managed to survive in a shipwreck until it got stuck in a box somewhere and then decades later someone noticed "hey wait, this thing looks like it might be something more than a hunk of bronze..." Turns out it appears to be some sort of computer and appears to use Greek letters and Egyptian calendars. That's pretty damn impressive.

I think what we don't know about what these societies were capable of far outstrips what we do know.

Hears hooves - looks for zebras.

Yep...the current "Timeline of Man" will one day look like a 1950s Food Pyramid with it's non-existent understanding of fats, and that eggs will kill you due to cholesterol spikes. Maybe we are getting dumber??

But that again presumes linear progression, does it not?

I mean you could take someone born in 1200 and drop them into 1700 and they'd be awed by it but I don't think they'd think they were on a different planet.

Take someone from 1800 and drop them into 2000 OTOH...

I don't think it's that farfetched to believe there was some triggering event (again, not hard to imagine if it's only in a single cultural region) that led to very fast development in that part of the world that then fell backwards due to a variety of factors that could be as simple as weather.