this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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[–] HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml 27 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (9 children)

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."

[–] arken@lemmy.world 31 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

This is such an absurd take. There's people in Europe who believe that Europe's megalithic structures were built during the time of Atlantis and devote their whole existence to proving it, just to give one example. And of course, Stonehenge, neolithic Europes intergalactic landing site/astronomical calendar/astral energy power plant.

Megalithic structures like the Baalbek stones or Göbekli Tepe from preliterate times are aweinspiring enough to get anyone's imagination going, it's that simple. And some people then have a hard time distinguishing their imaginings from reality. They seem impossibly large and their purpose and methods of construction are lost to time, so it's easy to come up with fanciful ideas to fill in the blanks. Sure, we now have decent theories of how the pyramids were built, but that weren't always the case.

Castles and cathedrals were built too recently for even the wildest of wild brains to believe they weren't built by humans.

[–] kromem@lemmy.world 19 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It also implies aliens are dumb as dirt.

"Hey Xorglib, what did you do on your vacation to Earth? Did you teach them how to cure diseases? Or maybe advance their technology by a millennium or two?"

"Oh. Ummm...I helped them move some stones into a giant 3D triangle to immortalize their god emperor. And that was it."

"Asshole."

[–] Sway_Chameleon@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago

Just the alien version of building sand castles.

[–] abbotsbury@lemmy.world 18 points 2 years ago

We do see Stonehenge included in ancient alien theories sometimes though.

Remember one about the inca or something, and they said that there was no way they could cut perfectly fitting stone bricks for their walls, so it must have been aliens or something

Except maybe they just ground out the imperfections after excavating the stone, the exactly the way European masons did.

[–] someguy3@lemmy.world 9 points 2 years ago

They stacked things on top of other things? Must be aliens!

[–] linearchaos@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago

My social studies teacher was fond of pointing out that people in ancient times had the same size brain we have now and where they lacked academics for math literacy they spent all their time working out tradecraft.

[–] RunawayFixer@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago

Funnily enough (to me), the (white) Anglo-Saxons spoke of the Roman ruins in Britain as having been built by giants, because they could not imagine how they had been constructed.

[–] Demuniac@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago

You're talking about the same type of people that think the earth is flat. These people don't think about race, they see a mystery and try to see their agenda in it.

[–] Sunfoil@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

Yes let's make it a race thing. Have you considered that maybe the majority of ancient structures are found in those countries. These countries were more civilized and were building much more sophisticated stuff before white people were. The few ancient white structures that we don't understand how they built and still stand do have conspiracies around them e.g. stonehenge.