lmao. There was some show I saw, I think it was on the History Channel. They were at some river in the South and they spent the entire episode with some guy who insisted that there was a giant 10-foot catfish in the river (maybe multiple giant catfish? I can't remember), and that the catfish was responsible for the various pets and occasional people who went missing and were never found. They went off and talked with ichthyologists who talked about limits on catfish sizes, and I forget who else, exploring all the edge cases which might allow a giant ten foot catfish to live in the river. And at the end of the episode, they're talking to the guy again, going over their findings that it's possible, theoretically at least, that at a very very edge case, this giant catfish might exist, and the guy was like, "I knew it! Everyone around here keeps sayin' it's the alligators, but I jes' knew it was th' catfish!"
The wheel part reminds me of something I learned from 3blue1brown:
"Pi seems to magically appear everywhere, until you realize that wherever it appears there is usually a circle hiding"
Usually. Sometimes it really does seem magical. Sometimes the circle is very well hidden. Maybe we just haven't found it yet.
Honestly I've learned more math from that guy than any math teacher I ever had - one of the few YouTube channels I would absolutely recommend to anyone scientifically inclined at all. He's an incredible explainer.
Blow your mind with the video where he calculates pi through the repeated elastic collision of a pair of blocks... One digit at a time. If that sounds bizarre - yeah, watch the video.
The history channel's take, as well as others, that ancient civilizations could not have accomplished what they accomplished on their own, and therefore it's aliens is peak Right-wing cope.
"Obviously those backwards non-white civilizations couldn't have accomplished this on their own, because of their skin color. So therefore, the obvious solution is that they accomplished it because a hyper-intelligent space-fairing civilization took notice of their existence and arbitrarily decided to help them. This makes much more sense." - Thought process of the utterly deranged.
Genuinely the only reason this smooth brain take is so popular is because its been echoed in media as an admittedly fun story-telling mechanism. But that's all it is, a story. To put this on the history channel and claim it's history is just one of the reasons why the History Channel has had their reputation sink in the past 20 years.
We want to think it's aliens or some shit because we want to believe that we are super evolved and intelligent and every civilization before America was invented was composed of cavemen.
Ancient people were super intelligent. Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth with remarkable accuracy. Today's most commonly used calendar in the western world, the Gregorian calendar, derives from the Julian calendar which in turn is derived from the ancient Egyptian calendar, which predates the Julius calendar by millennia and was impressively accurate as well (it loses only one day every four year), and that one has roots in Mesopotamian astronomy. For years our ancestors harvested herbs and plants to heal diseases and wounds. "Cavemen" were building megalithic temples in Malta thousands of years ago.
Just because they didn't have Facebook and plastic bags, doesn't mean that they were stupid.
Alien conspiracy theories about the Egyptian or Mayan Pyramids, the statues on Easter Island, the Nazca Lines, etc also have the implicit racist undertone of "well it's not like the actual humans from those primitive and backwards cultures could build it!" Basically, non-white people built something too advanced and white people don't like that.
By comparison, we never see alien conspiracy theories for mediaeval castles and cathedrals. No TV show is saying "so you're telling me that a bunch of serfs who couldn't read and didn't know basic arithmetic could build a castle? Nah they were too primitive it was probably aliens."
History for Granite has some great videos on the construction methods of the pyramids. Fron how the casing stones were cut to size, to trying to figure out where the construction ramps would have been. Very interesting channel.
The bent pyramid of Sneferu is proof that the pyramids weren't built by some higher being.
Egyptian craftsmen simply knew how to make concrete. The idea of saves sliding around building size boulders on steep inclines never had proof
