Babe Ruth, on 28 November 2012 - 07:29 PM, said:
In the final analysis, both sides are speculating, and for those who doubt we have been visited before, they are unable to offer any sort of plausible explanation for the points the AA folks present.
I beg your pardon? To my knowledge, that is completely untrue.
Babe Ruth, on 28 November 2012 - 07:29 PM, said:
How could stone surfaces be machined to tolerances we can barely meet today, when humans were still hunter gatherers?
You mean this workmanship?
I admit, not bad, but beyond human? Really? Did you by chance miss the post Boon left?
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AA: “Pumapunku is the only site on planet Earth that, in my opinion, was built directly by extraterrestrials.”
Ancient Aliens starts off with a false dilemma by making people think that it was absolutely impossible for ancient people to construct Pumapunku, even to the point of making outright false claims.
AA: “One of the most intriguing thing there is it that the stones that were used there weren’t sandstone, they’re granite and diorite. The only stone that is harder than diorite is diamond, so the only way this could have been achieved is if the tools were tipped with diamonds.”
This is funny because it’s totally wrong, the stones are not granite or diorite at Pumapunku, they are Red Sandstone and Andesite[1][2][3], but this is also funny because of the way he says it.
AA: “The stones that were used there weren’t sandstone, they’re granite and diorite.”
Well yeah, actually it is sandstone. You can’t blame him though for it becomes obvious that throughout the series he often just repeats things he has heard in Eric Von Daniken’s books. Von Daniken’s books are what the Ancient Aliens series is based on. Later we see Eric Von Daniken himself make the exact same, totally wrong claim.
AA: “Of course [Pumapunku was] made out of stones found on Earth, because you don’t transport granite or diorite from another solar system.”
Von Daniken continues building up this false dilemma:
AA: “One of these platforms is 800 tons.”
That is very incorrect, the heaviest block at Pumapunku is 130 tons[4], and most of the stones are much smaller than that. So he is off by a whopping 670 tons! Unfortunately we will come to expect this kind of thing from Von Daniken as we progress.
Ancient Aliens spends quite a lot of time pointing out the various features in the stone masonry at Pumapunku before declaring it impossible to do without power tools.
AA: “Each of these small drills holes are basically evenly spaced along this routed groove. To me it’s clear that power tools have been used on this unusual block of stone here.”
AA: “This surface is as smooth as a table top, like in your kitchen. There’s no wave to it. This was machined.”
The sandstone and andesite stones at Pumapunku would have been easily worked with the most basic stone working tools[5][6], the idea that diamond tipped power saws were needed is ridiculous. The red sandstone was relatively soft and easy to work with, and even though andesite is pretty hard, because of the way it cooled it could be easily flaked off using stones as soft as 5.5 on the Mohs scale.[7] Such pounding stones were found all over andesite quarries in the area.[8]
Contrary to Ancient Aliens’ claims that archeologists are baffled by Pumapunku, Archeologists know the basics about how Pumapunku’s stones were cut and shaped.[9][10] This is partly because there is evidence for this all over the site itself.
They actually used a method that almost all ancient stone workers used. They used hard -pounding stones to pound out troth like depressions; later on they used flat stones and sand to grind the stone to make a polished surface.[11] We will see later on that this is also how the Egyptians, 1000’s of years before this, made their flat surfaced granite monuments like obelisks.[12]
Sand, as we will see later when we look at Egypt, has extremely hard particles in it and, if placed between a flat surface and a rock, can polish even the hardest stones known to man. In fact, the harder the stone is the better it can be polished using sand.[13]
We will also see that how sand can turn a piece of copper into a very efficient granite saw or granite drill – a method which the Egyptians utilized quite well.[14]
Some stones at Pumapunku that Ancient Aliens would never show the cameras are the ones that were in the middle of this process. They show that at the same time a stone was being pounded by stone hammers, which created these troth like depressions, the grinding and polishing was taking place on the other end of the stone.[15] Unfinished stones like this one clearly show how they were shaped – and it wasn’t with lasers.
There is also unmistakable evidence of stone hammers having been used in the places that were never meant to be visible, like where certain stones would be connected with one another.[16] And because of that, it’s hard for me to believe Eric Von Daniken’s next claim, because it would mean that the alien tool box had a laser gun right next to a stone hammer.
AA: “How these massive blocks of granite were moved from their quarries and brought here to Pumapunku would have required some kind of super technology. Levitation; anti-gravity, huge lifting vehicles…something that ancient aliens would have had.”
If they did know how to levitate these stones then they put far too much effort in creating places in the stones to attach ropes to.
Many stones have grooves several centimeters in width and depth on two adjacent faces for holding ropes.
[31] They even had special places cut into the stones that Pumapunku scholars call “hoisting grips.”
[32] These are all very strange things to do if they could simply levitate these blocks.
To make matters worse for the Ancient Astronaut theory, according to archeologist Jean-Pierre Protzen, an expert on Pumapunku, there is almost no stone at the Pumapunku site that does not have what he calls “drag marks” on one of its faces
[33], where it has been…well dragged to the site.
Ancient Aliens throws another false dilemma here:
AA: “What nobody talks about is the irrefutable fact that we are at an altitude of 12,800 feet which means we are above the natural tree line. No trees ever grew in that area, meaning that no trees were cut down in order to use wooden rollers. The wooden roller theory falls by the wayside.”
This is like saying that there is no way that the Egyptians used wood because trees didn’t grow in Egypt. The difference is that while the Egyptians had to import wood from places like Lebanon, it would have been far easier for those at Pumapunku to solve this problem for all they would have had to do is walk down the hill a little bit.
this stature is made from Dorite.
Very good material to carve fine detail as you can see. There is much "poetic license" used with ancient aliens. Have you seen the Puma Punku Elephant?
I mean seriously.........
This is an insult to the accomplishments of man. Historically, man has shown himself to be innovative and clever. Did you know the Romans had power tools? -
LINK
Babe Ruth, on 28 November 2012 - 07:29 PM, said:
How could the Mayan calendar be more accurate than our atomic clocks today?
Honestly I have no idea where you are getting this from. Can you provide supporting information that proves this claim. It sounds like outright BS to be frank.
Babe Ruth, on 28 November 2012 - 07:29 PM, said:
How is it that the value of Pi could be annotated on cave walls many thousands of years before mathematicians existed?
Could you be more specific, I take it this is not related to Puma Punku?
Thousands of years? You do know that Archimedes officially recorded Pi in like 300BC? Thats
before Puma Punku. And by quite a bit at any qualified estimate. Again, from Boony's link:
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Ancient Aliens says that Pumapunku is 17,000 years old!
This is what Vranich said of this claim:
“The idea that Tiwanaku is 14,000 years old is based on a rather faulty study done in 1926. Since then, there has been a huge quantity of work both on the archaeology and geology of the area, and all data indicates that Tiwanaku existed from around A.D. 300-500.”[36]
For more information on the faulty study he is referring to here I will quote at length from Jason Colavito, who has been debunking ancient astronaut theories for years in his books and blogs. He said the following about this claim.
“Tiwanaku is not 17,000 years old. This date derives from the work of Arthur Posnansky, who tried to apply archaeoastronomy to the site but did so in ways that modern scholars do not recognize as legitimate. Posnansky proposed a date of 15,000 B.P. (before present, i.e. 13,000 BCE), which the geniuses on Ancient Aliens misread as 15,000 BCE, adding an extra 2,000 years to Posnansky’s already flawed dates.
Here’s what he did wrong. Posnansky assumed that the Kalasasaya temple at Tiwanaku was laid out with perfect accuracy to align to the equinoxes and solstices that he felt (but could not prove) were important to the Tiwanaku people.
Thus, on a certain day the sun was supposed to rise above one rock at the temple and set behind another – ah, but which rock should we choose? Since the current ruins do not align with these celestial events accurately, he concluded that the ruins must have been built at a time when they would have alignedwith that event.
Since the sun and sky change positions at a predictable rate due to gradual changes in the angle of the earth’s axis, he concluded that Kalasasaya was built in 13,000 BCE as a solar observatory, despite no other evidence of solar astronomy at the site.
The long and short of it is that Posnansky assumed celestial alignments and assumed flawless construction and then used his assumptions to “prove” that his assumptions were correct.
Honestly, there should be a tin foil hat award for AA episodes like this.
Edited by psyche101, 28 November 2012 - 11:15 PM.
I like the Tin Foil hat award Idea !
