> Be me

> Show prime minister of the UK fucking a pig to my high school classroom

> Lose job

> Am I fucked?

That could be the case! Good points.

Everything I’ve seen so far has two issues. First of all, sterility. Writers tend to have a mixed voice depending on the specific sentence or content in question. The AI stuff just seems to glazed over and plastic. It’s hard to put into words exactly what the give away is, but there is just something uncanny about AI writing that I think is pretty glaring is you’re used to reading/assessing prose.

Second, the emptiness and vagueness. Pretty much every prompt I’ve fed into an AI is decent for calling up rote information (although sometimes throws you a few oddball factoids), but terrible at being critical. Humans like to make a point which comes out in writing either explicitly or subtly. Not so with AI which is, from what I can tell, always “some people say X, other people say Y, so the important thing to know is that there is more than one way of looking at this.” If a human student wrote something like this, I’d tell them “ok, you got about 10% of the way there….where is the other 90% telling me what YOU think?”

I think it’s important to acknowledge that universal consensus also means something different today. We have the peer review process, which is objectively a sounder way of determining the validity of claims (compared to “the Pope agrees” or whatever). There’s a reason people like Hancock avoid submitting their claims to peer review.

Why do you think the pyramids at Giza were cast? Concrete hadn’t been invented yet, and we know that they were made of limestone and granite blocks.

I think the inclination to build upwards is pretty easily explained. Early religion was based on the natural world, and the most obvious way the natural world is observed is via the change of the seasons and cycle of day and night. So people, much like today, fixated on the sky. What’s out there?

Something like this would explain why early societies liked to build “upward” monuments. But again, beyond this pretty simple fact, the specific characteristics of pyramids vary pretty widely across the world. Plus, a lot of early structures (eg the temples at Malta) don’t really seem to be going for elevation.

I think the extent to which Neolithic buildings reflect astronomical patterns is a matter of debate. In some cases it seems pretty cut and dry, but some of the other stuff I’ve seen seems like a stretch. Overall, I am inclined to believe that, yes, the desire to map out time and the movement of celestial bodies went hand in hand with spirituality and played a big role in motivating early building projects.

Definitely! Feel free to hit me up with any random archaeology related questions if you ever want. Happy to do my best to answer.

Definitely, I understand where you are coming from. And I'll also say that a lot of the onus is on archaeologists here, since we haven't always done a great job of making what we do accessible to the public. A lot of that has to do with the shit funding we receive from public institutions, but that's another conversation altogether. Personally, I'm happy to discuss these things.

> So how is it that pyramids appear all over the world, supposedly made by hunter gatherers?

So, two things here. I am assuming by "hunter gatherer" you mean societies that did not primarily engage in agriculture. Depending on your definition of "pyramid," most of the very famous examples (the pyramids at Giza, for example) were most DEFINITELY built by agricultural societies. Earthen structures, meanwhile, like the pyramids or "mounds" at Cahokia, were built both by agricultural and "mixed" societies who relied on a combination of settlement + nomadic approaches to gathering resources. And yes, Cahokia (near modern St. Louis, MO) was a veritable CITY, something that has been pretty much completely ignored by modern Americans (but not the archaeologists who have studied it). If you want to find a real "lost city," look no further.

Basically, and this is a bit of an oversimplification but generally true, there is a linear relationship between the amount of surplus resources a community gathers and the likelihood they are going to build monumental features in stone. But pre-agricultural societies also like building fancy stuff when they can. I guess I fail to see why that's a mystery.

As for the pyramid itself, I'm not sure why it would be surprising that many civilizations in different parts of the world would all build large monuments as temples or funerary markers. Between them, lots of differences characterize the different "pyramid" structures built by various civilizations.

Also, rereading your comment, I’m not sure where you got this thing about people thinking there was only one planet less than 100 years ago. Humans have been aware of planets for thousands of years. The word itself comes from Ancient Greek.

It’s hard to evaluate your claim when you don’t provide any specific information.

It definitely means something when something is universally acknowledged. Yes, science has been wrong in the past, but it is highly unlikely that one dude vs the entire scientific community is going to have a legitimate point. And Graham’s points are not compelling. The thing is, we do have an idea of what people have been up to for the last 150k years. Lots of fascinating stuff, and archaeologists are constantly trying to expand our knowledge of early man. So, leaving aside the natural reaction of feeling somewhat personally insulted that someone would think all of us archaeologists are so stupid, I pose to you the question: if there truly were compelling evidence for lost cities, why wouldn’t archaeologists be the ones trying to publicize this? After all, countless sites have been discovered and publicized by archaeologists in the past decades…some which are pretty impressive.

What are the “more refined” C14 dates you’re referring to? Carbon dating usually gives you a window of 100-300 years.

Also, the idea that Da Vinci was some untrained amateur is really untrue.

Ok, so why haven’t we found evidence for it?

That’s one of the worst ones, because this stuff is SO mundane and Graham tries to pass it off like some huge mystery or conspiracy. Look up “remote sensing.” It’s a major part of what modern archaeologists do and has nothing to do with a conspiracy.

You mean C14 dating? That can only be used to date organic materials. So if used to date a structure, you’ve got to have a pretty compelling reason why, e.g., here is a trench dug to build a wall, and inside the infill of the trench there were some carbonized seeds.

But even this only gives you a “terminus post quem.” This means the earliest POSSIBLE date. In archaeology, confusing terminus post quem with an absolute dating is a very amateurish mistake.

Because he has no credentials, makes no evidence based claims, invents wild theories, and is universally acknowledged as a pseudoscientist?

That’s not how it works. The burden of proof is on the one making the claim.

What parts were compelling? I’d be happy to discuss. I’m an archaeologist.