Remarkable feats of engineering that are recreated by children every day with blocks of wood.
Truly baffling indeed.
Kids: famously building the pyramids of Giza daily.
Edit: dammit children! Will you please stop constructing thousand-ton monoliths that last millenia in the middle of the living room!? What home is that not a daily occurance in? Right? Right?
Jagged tiny metal saw causes walls to open baffling Facebook users.
Because it's much more likely that aliens flew here, across the galaxy, in their space ships, with advanced technology that we can only dream of, to stack rocks.
Maybe they really did independently discover some masonry! We will never know!
Individual cultures coming up with the idea of carving and stacking stones? Independently? Without the help of aliens or an Aryan progenitor race?
I didn't realize which community I was in and read this as if the account was roleplaying an alien posting about human history with genuine curiosity.
Hold on. You may be on to something. Idiot aliens.
So LEGO lost their copyright to our ancestors? Or is it a knob thing only?
Also the natural explanation for connections between civilizations across Bosnia-Albania-Greece-Turkey-Palestine-Israel is Nordic aliens with flying saucers.
This post had me thinking and reminded me of something I wanted to share in relation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution
It is even possible in nature, for evolution to meet at the same place, despite isolation from eachother.
There are some things in the world that just "make sense" from evolutionary, or invention stand point. Coincidence CAN happen without it needing to be the work of some aliens, or conspiratorial nonsense.
“I like to stack. I want to go to an ancient civilisation now. No, now!”
This is not insanepeoplefacebook. This is stupidpeoplefacebook.
I mean, who hasn’t carved and stacked ten-ton rocks into perfect form-fitting shape? Heck when i was but a wee lad, me and the boys would knock out fifty or sixty a day, down at ye olde Quarry ‘n Carry. Build huge town walls and knock ‘em down a week later. Then we’d invent agriculture and see who could spit the farthest.
Why do you think that's difficult to do? You carve a rock into a shape, then you see what gaps there are between that shape and the other shapes and you carve another rock to fit it. And when you have hundreds of people in the quarry carving rocks and years to do it, it gets done.
Well sure - but in these pictures, look at the lower right one, say, there’s no rocks in-between, it’s just one bigass rock perfectly carved to fit another bigass rock, and so on. So at least it had to either be done before placement or using some sort of flexible template such that mortar wasn’t used. Which is pretty neat at least. And given the size, one expects it was an enormous PITA.
People in this thread act as if the Romans were baboons.
No, people 4000 years ago were still people, i.e. they had roughly the same brains as we do. This means their creativity and intellect was pretty much the same as we have now; they were more than capable of inventing techniques to carve and move large rocks. They didn't have modern technology, but they still had technology.
Also, building stuff by piling up rocks is so basic, it's normal that it evolved in parallel on different continents. OP's pic actually shows a few different solutions to the problem; some of them make neat rows while others are more "random" in their approach.
To this person's credit, the rate that the Inca developed advanced stone masonry techniques is considered a bit of a mystery. It's believed that they got them from another culture. That also had very advanced masonry techniques. The mysterious part of it is that both cultures don't have any developmental history.
There is no "believed" about it, and there is a lot of developmental history, so I don't know why you're saying that.
For example, there's Tiwanaku. There are many sites preceding it and post-dating it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiwanaku
There were a huge number of Andean civilizations that came before the Inca and many of them had plenty of experience working stone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Andean_civilizations
The Inca were just the last in a long line of civilizations in that area.
Furthermore, carving and stacking stones doesn't take a genius.
Furthermore, carving and stacking stones doesn't take a genius.
You have been banned from r/freemasons.
I think your under estimating how incredibly good at "stacking stones" these cultures where.
Protzen, Jean-Pierre. "Inca Quarrying and Stone Cutting."Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. 44.2 (1985): 161-182. Print
Protzen, Juan-Pierre. "Who Taught the Inca Stonemasons Their Skills? A Comparison of Tiahuanaco and Inca Cut- Stone Masonry." Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. 56.2 (1997): 146-167
Here is my source material. In it it goes over the extreme tolerances and incredible craftsmanship of the Inca and Tiahuanaco. It's not like laying brick or stone masonry (also difficult) we do with mortar today.
Also these structures are made by a bunch of people working over years and in the Incas over vast distances. All done with out written language or at least one we fully understand. (I am aware of quipu) So they had the infrastructure and advanced enough society to train and standardize there building techniques.
Tiahuanaco are considered more advanced than the Inca and their collapse predated the founding of the Inca empire by roughly 600 to 500 years. Not saying they couldn't of provided some sort of inspiration for the Inca. But it also makes them more impressive and proves my point.
You should actually read the wiki if you're going to cite it.
Waiting on OP to 'just stack rocks' to demonstrate just how easy and trivial it is to create huge monoliths that last thousands of years.
First of all, a monolith is a single rock, not stacked rocks. Hence the word mono.
Secondly, any carved rock, being a rock, is likely to last thousands of years.
What you're trying to say is that it is not easy nor is it trivial to stack rocks tightly like that. But it is both given enough time and manpower.
