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Wasabi the J posted:Oh gently caress you reminded me, I am requesting any ancient angels = alien poo poo. I was obsessed with that poo poo and I remember reading a book as a kid about how an ancient alien nuke explains Sodom and Gomorrah. You're probably thinking of Erich Von Däniken and/or Zecharia Sitchin. Alot of that goes back to the book Chariots of the Gods and its spin-offs in the 60s. There's also the book The Spaceships of Ezekiel in the 1970s by a NASA engineer who was way into that scene. f/e: pseudo-science snipe ~~
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Dec 31, 2019 17:14
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Erghh posted:Chariots of the Gods Yes! ... Yesssssss!
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Dec 31, 2019 17:49
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Breitbart Is Rightbart posted:Jacobs Ladder was a UFO and Joshua used sonic weaponry to conquer Jericho. Marching around Jericho could have been a clever way of disguising the noise of sappers undermining the wall, but I don’t think that kind of siege warfare happened back then.
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Dec 31, 2019 19:26
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Warning: a lot of the ancient aliens stuff is super racist. Which is more plausible: Black people being smart enough to cut stone into blocks and then stack them in obvious ways OR aliens came to earth and left no direct evidence other than stacked stone blocks? One weird white guy who grew up in the segregation era has an opinion!
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Dec 31, 2019 21:17
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DontMockMySmock posted:Warning: a lot of the ancient aliens stuff is super racist.
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Jan 1, 2020 01:26
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You can really get a lot pf stacking done when you have unlimited time plus unlimited people that you don't consider human, be they slaves or plain ol non royalty, at your disposal.
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Jan 1, 2020 03:53
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DontMockMySmock posted:Warning: a lot of the ancient aliens stuff is super racist. I pretty much assume anything is racist. So that's been helpful i guess
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Jan 1, 2020 04:03
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mysterious frankie posted:You can really get a lot pf stacking done when you have unlimited time plus unlimited people that you don't consider human, be they slaves or plain ol non royalty, at your disposal. It's also easy to forget that ancient farming was only particularly labor intensive at planting and harvest, so having something for all those bored farmers to do was, uh, kinda useful in terms of keeping the population under control when wars weren't actively being waged. Also, to address the initial question, I haven't seen anything about UFOs and the Bible that isn't, at a minimum, a gross and willful misinterpretation of the text itself, and it usually comes with a heaping helping of racism/antisemitism. Like, even as someone who is amenable to Jacque Vallee and in particular the arguments offered in Passport to Magonia, interpreting the text of Ezekiel and the wheel, for example, as a UFO sighting is about as valid an interpretation as looking at Genesis and coming up with Young Earth Creationism. There's lengthy exegeses from scholars of many different traditions on exactly what is going on there that are far more compelling than UFO. Sorry to be a wet blanket on that one.
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Jan 1, 2020 08:39
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"but how could they have made straight lines?!?!? the ancients could have never figured out how to stretch out a rope and then use the shadow as a guide!" Similarly one thing I've run into a couple times from Christian fundies as a "ATHEISTS = DESTROYED!" argument involves tongs for metalworking. Variously the argument or "idea exercise" (the one I encountered was "make HMS Victory entirely from scratch") all leads to the proposal that "you can't work metal to make blacksmith tongs without first having tongs", so therefore god exists. However what little information exists on pre-colonial blacksmithing in Africa provides an example otherwise, that wooden tongs were used. Using sticks is acceptable enough for basic working of copper or iron blooms (as they burn up you can just get more sticks) until you can work it to the point where you can put metal tips on the ends of your wooden tongs or stretch your iron ingot out enough that you can hold the cooler side with them. IIRC there's a South African movie from the late 1930s that shows some actual Zulu blacksmiths in part of a "village life" scene and one of the smiths is using some wooden tweezers to hold a ingot while he hammers it out on a rock.
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Jan 1, 2020 08:57
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C.M. Kruger posted:"but how could they have made straight lines?!?!? the ancients could have never figured out how to stretch out a rope and then use the shadow as a guide!" The devil put iron tongs in the fossil record to destroy the faith of the white man.
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Jan 1, 2020 18:28
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"Ancient peoples couldn't have made the pyramids!" is such racist horseshit. Imagine what goons could get done if we didn't have the internet to distract us.
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Jan 1, 2020 21:39
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a tribe of goons marching across the sonoran desert, laden with strollers just like Hobo Nick used.
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Jan 1, 2020 21:42
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Ralph Crammed In posted:"Ancient peoples couldn't have made the pyramids!" is such racist horseshit. Imagine what goons could get done if we didn't have the internet to distract us. Don't have to imagine. There have been plenty of failed goon projects.
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Jan 1, 2020 21:49
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I've been listening to a bunch more of that John Keel audiobook I mentioned, and it...just kinda continues along that same path. Just tons of very credulous reporting and wildly baseless speculation, along with regular anger at  SCIENTISTS!! for not uncritically accepting all manner of paranormal reports.Typical example: did you know that it's well established now that there was a race of 10+ foot tall giants in our relatively recent past, with proof in museums all over the world that SCIENTISTS!! won't study because they're afraid of going outside the status quo in our understanding of evolution? (ignore the fact that this proof is largely just the usual mix of bunk, uncertainties, and fringe theories you can easily find online, and that any number of scientists would give an arm and a leg for the eternal fame they'd get by studying said proof if it were actually as incontrovertible as he asserts). It all goes on and on like that. It's entertaining enough and charming in its own way, just don't go into it expecting it to be any kind of thoughtfully skeptical reporting.
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Jan 1, 2020 22:00
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Captain Hygiene posted:I've been listening to a bunch more of that John Keel audiobook I mentioned, and it...just kinda continues along that same path. Just tons of very credulous reporting and wildly baseless speculation, along with regular anger at Keel is important to understand on a historiographical level, if not for his credulous reporting. There's a direct line from him to the conspiracy culture that grew on the early internet to what we have today. Also, fresh on the heels of me saying that I don't know of a good UFOs and the Bible source, the Not Alone podcast dropped the first of three episodes on The Miracle of the Sun. The first episode is background on the three children and the second episode will be the miracle itself, with the third episode being devoted to UFO interpretations. Obviously, no way to know how it'll turn out, but I thought it was a nice bit of ... synchronicity
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Jan 2, 2020 01:31
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Oh gosh, synchronicities. I was watching Hellier and had to give up in increduity in the middle of the second season because they stretched things a little too far. Seriously, they ~had a conversation with a being~ by using THE GOD HELMET, conveniently the only non-academic version!
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Jan 2, 2020 02:06
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Azathoth posted:Keel is important to understand on a historiographical level, if not for his credulous reporting. There's a direct line from him to the conspiracy culture that grew on the early internet to what we have today. Oh definitely - I recognized his name beforehand, I was just expecting him to come down on the other side of the topic based on the little I knew. It's still an interesting book, just different than I expected going in.
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Jan 2, 2020 02:37
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Captain Hygiene posted:I've been listening to a bunch more of that John Keel audiobook I mentioned, and it...just kinda continues along that same path. Just tons of very credulous reporting and wildly baseless speculation, along with regular anger at Ah jesus, those goddamn giants/nephilim skeletons. Apparently the mound builders buried them all over the US but those guys up in the Smithsonian decided to hide the evidence away in their giant Indiana-Jones-style bunker because [idiotic conspiracy theories] A lot of the bigfoot believers were also pretty keen on that conspiracy theory, they love to tie those giant skeletons in with bigfoot. The National Geographic Society actually had to publish a statement clarifying that they hadn't found proof of giant skeletons and that all those photos and articles online saying they had were hoaxes: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/12/skeleton-giant-photo-hoax/
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Jan 2, 2020 03:39
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:Ah jesus, those goddamn giants/nephilim skeletons. Apparently the mound builders buried them all over the US but those guys up in the Smithsonian decided to hide the evidence away in their giant Indiana-Jones-style bunker because [idiotic conspiracy theories] Imagine publishing a racist porn mag and having to print that smhd and maybe lmao?
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Jan 2, 2020 03:59
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Captain Hygiene posted:I finally got around to starting one of the John Keel audiobooks mentioned earlier (Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings), and its intro is quite a trip. It's all about the proof he wants to use, full of stuff like "actually, almost all random people tell the truth, we interviewed a bunch of the witnesses and they were all one million billion percent truthful". Keel is an ... interesting character. If you look at his background, he started out as an adventurer, going exotic places and doing and seeing interesting things. So he seems like a credible and open-minded reporter. But his later stuff, like Mothman, looks real different if you entertain the idea he was making it all up.
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Jan 2, 2020 13:18
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diatribe against ~~~scientists~~~, where he just rants against most of them as liars and cheats who steal from the only good ones, the pure and holy industry scientists who are too busy making good and useful inventions to do that stuff. Like, I know there are problems with academia, but drat dude, did a bunch of community college profs all just piss in your cornflakes or something? 
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Almost any book by Mike Dash is worth checking out for fringe subjects. He's a careful and thorough researcher and good writer without an axe to grind, a rare combination. It's old now, but his "Borderlands" is a dizzying tour through ... well, just about everything: monsters, timeslips, cryptids, UFOs. It's not clear for a lot of the book where he's going, sprinting from mystery to mystery, but he is working a hypothesis there that's very interesting.
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Jan 2, 2020 13:23
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Giants are one of my favorite bits of bunk. "There are legends of giants all over the world! That has to mean giants existed!" Meanwhile, 3,000 years ago... "What if...us, but bigger?"
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Jan 2, 2020 15:30
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OutOfPrint posted:Giants are one of my favorite bits of bunk. how do they explain the physics a giant wouldn't be able to be bipedal, it would weigh too much
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Jan 2, 2020 15:42
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Randaconda posted:how do they explain the physics Us, but thiccc
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Jan 2, 2020 15:53
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OutOfPrint posted:Giants are one of my favorite bits of bunk. It's great because we actually have an extensive historiography of the evolution of the Gigantes of Greek myth (where the actual word Giant comes from.) The earliest descriptions of the Gigantes in art and writing depict them as regular buff humans, then as centuries passed the Gigantes grew larger and more grotesque with each subsequent retelling. There's a lot of evidence that other cultures' mythological notions of giants grew out of a combination of similar folkloric one-upsmanship and cultural cross-pollination with cultures that had already started describing their mythical culture enemies as monstrously huge, although we don't have the historical documentation on them that we do for the Greeks.
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Jan 2, 2020 16:19
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OutOfPrint posted:Giants are one of my favorite bits of bunk. My favorite are the ones that, upon further research, turn out to be people who are like 6'6". Veritable colossi compare to the 5-foot-tall manlets of the day!
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Jan 2, 2020 17:01
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People that far back would likely be at or near modern heights. It wasn't until farming really took off that people shrunk from lack of protein during childhood.
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Jan 2, 2020 18:11
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I don't remember which example it was but I read up on a bunch of different accounts of ancient folks encountering living "giants", and one of them had a height disparity on par with that. But more generally I just like the number of old accounts that turn out to just be very tall but otherwise normal folks.
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Jan 2, 2020 18:36
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I remember reading an article about giant myths being fueled by ancient fossil finds, but I can't find it. It had some convincing* pictures. *) Convincing as in "yeah I'm convinced those dumb Greeks might have thought those bones were a hecking big dead man", not as in "yeah I'm convinced giants existed and probably made giant turds hehehe".
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Jan 2, 2020 18:53
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C.M. Kruger posted:Similarly one thing I've run into a couple times from Christian fundies as a "ATHEISTS = DESTROYED!" argument involves tongs for metalworking. Variously the argument or "idea exercise" (the one I encountered was "make HMS Victory entirely from scratch") all leads to the proposal that "you can't work metal to make blacksmith tongs without first having tongs", so therefore god exists. Wow, a Dwarf Fortress joke as a theological argument. Since you need an anvil to make a forge, but a forge requires an anvil to make, at some point the Fist Anvil (or forge) had to be provided by the divine. Or anvils are naturally occurring wildlife and dwarven civilization is how they reproduce. We just don't know.
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Jan 2, 2020 19:23
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Tying two bits of discussion together, the ancient Greeks had their own version of the ancient aliens theory that was pretty much the same as the modern variant, only without the racism. The Mycenaeans (late Bronze Age Greeks) built fortifications out of gigantic rough limestone boulders stacked on top of each other, with smaller rocks filling the gaps. The walls of Mycenae, for scale. Not my picture. Fast forward 1000+ years and a civilization or two collapsing and the Greeks came to believe that they had been built by cyclopes. Description of Greece posted:Going on from here and turning to the right, you come to the ruins of Tiryns. The Tirynthians also were removed by the Argives, who wished to make Argos more powerful by adding to the population. The hero Tiryns, from whom the city derived its name, is said to have been a son of Argus, a son of Zeus. The wall, which is the only part of the ruins still remaining, is a work of the Cyclopes made of unwrought stones, each stone being so big that a pair of mules could not move the smallest from its place to the slightest degree. Long ago small stones were so inserted that each of them binds the large blocks firmly together. Which is why that style of architecture is called cyclopean! 
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Jan 2, 2020 19:31
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I've mentioned this before, but my take is that human civilization itself is a lot older than the Sumerians. After all, even by the most conservative estimates, modern humans have been running around as a species for ~50,000 years, so it makes sense we'd be creating civilizations for more than ~6,000 years. Given we know there was a massive ice age ~18,000 years ago, and growing evidence of another smaller one that started and ended very suddenly about ~11,000 years ago, it also makes sense than any civilizations from around those times could have been wiped out by cold snap induced famines, glaciers, desertification, and flooding. Incidentally, the last ice age has evidence of ending over the course of under a decade. Given humanity's propensity of building cities along waterways and oceans, this rapid heating and melting of glaciers 11,000 years ago could have inspired the global existence of flood myths. Over the course of tens of thousands of years, anything but the biggest, baddest stone monuments would have decayed to non-existence. That's why I can buy the pyramids, Sphinx, pre-Incan cities, and sites like Gobekli Tepe are older than commonly thought. Those are big loving stone monuments, and, in the case of the Sphinx and Gobekli Tepe, were buried for centuries, if not millennia, preserving them. Now, let's look at time frames. Sumeria was about 6,000 years ago. The estimated time between the last two ice ages was about 7,000 years. Even if we assume human civilization existed prior to the 18,000 year back ice age and was completely wiped out by it outside of a few tribes better suited to adapt with the changing environment, those last people before the 11,000 year back ice age had a full millennium on us. I'm not saying they were as advanced, or more advanced, than us, just that there could easily have been civilizations capable of great works that could have survived up to now while still being old enough, and hosed up by nature enough, to not have any remaining evidence outside of those works. A lot of Sumerian and post-Sumerian civilizations have stories of advanced peoples teaching them things like boat making and agriculture. The ancient aliens believers point to the skies. My thinking is that these peoples, if they existed at all, could have been survivors from these older civilizations. That makes a hell of a lot more sense to me than spacemans coming from the stars to teach ancient people how to grow wheat and make pigs gently caress. Spacemans clearly taught those civilizations how to grow wheat and make pigs gently caress. That said, if anyone has any evidence to share poking holes in my logic here, please share it. I genuinely like being proven wrong with this stuff, because even in the worst case scenario I learn something new.
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Jan 2, 2020 20:06
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Jerry Cotton posted:I remember reading an article about giant myths being fueled by ancient fossil finds, but I can't find it. It had some convincing* pictures. I've heard similar suggested for protoceratops skeletons and griffins, and pygmy elephant skulls and cyclopes, but it's mostly at the level of speculation without a lot to back up the link.
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Jan 2, 2020 20:46
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The flood myths thing is way more easily explained by the fact that early civilizations were all in dank river valleys that flood a lot (because that's how you get good soil for agriculture). So floods were common disasters, and it doesn't take much imagination to say "what if there was a really big disaster." It's telling that Egypt doesn't have a big flood myth, because to them, floods weren't disasters, since the Nile flooded regularly.
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Jan 2, 2020 21:48
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The biblical flood myth is weapons-grade victim-blaming. Kinda hosed up, really.
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Jan 2, 2020 21:53
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Tulul posted:Tying two bits of discussion together, the ancient Greeks had their own version of the ancient aliens theory that was pretty much the same as the modern variant, only without the racism. The Mycenaeans (late Bronze Age Greeks) built fortifications out of gigantic rough limestone boulders stacked on top of each other, with smaller rocks filling the gaps. A lot of Lovecraft makes more sense now.
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Jan 2, 2020 22:26
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DontMockMySmock posted:The flood myths thing is way more easily explained by the fact that early civilizations were all in dank river valleys that flood a lot (because that's how you get good soil for agriculture). So floods were common disasters, and it doesn't take much imagination to say "what if there was a really big disaster." It's telling that Egypt doesn't have a big flood myth, because to them, floods weren't disasters, since the Nile flooded regularly. Also tsunamis, from earthquakes or landslides are a possible threat most places where people live alongside water. And around 6000BC Mt Etna off Italy had a large eruption that triggered a 'megatsunami' that pounded a lot of the mediterranean sea. The sight of the sea just pulling back and then slamming back up to destroy nearly everything along the coast is something I imagine sticks around in folklore for a while, for the survivors. Localized landslides into bodies of water can also wipe out towns and cities with little notice, there's plenty of townships and etc here in Norway that just got scoured off the face of the earth because a loose landslide went down into a fjord. e: hell, the town I went to high school in is along Geirangerfjorden, they regularly have alarm tests and the like for evacuation. Because of a mountain section that is going to drop sometime in the future. When it does, it'll obliterate a dozen+ towns. It'll be interesting to see if the fjord will still be crowded with tourist ships then or not. Those will be impossible to evacuate, even with significant warning ahead of time. It's easy to understand how flood myths can pop up, even in areas not affected by more regular flooding. SubNat has a new favorite as of 22:37 on Jan 2, 2020 |
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Jan 2, 2020 22:33
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OutOfPrint posted:I've mentioned this before, but my take is that human civilization itself is a lot older than the Sumerians. The oldest known permenant settlements like Jericho predate the Sumerians by several thousand years but there's no hard line between who does or does not get to claim the mantle of a civilized society so, like, it starts whenever you want. Even the generally-accepted criteria for civilizations all have some exceptions or counter-examples.
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Jan 2, 2020 22:40
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OutOfPrint posted:I've mentioned this before, but my take is that human civilization itself is a lot older than the Sumerians. After all, even by the most conservative estimates, modern humans have been running around as a species for ~50,000 years, so it makes sense we'd be creating civilizations for more than ~6,000 years. Given we know there was a massive ice age ~18,000 years ago, and growing evidence of another smaller one that started and ended very suddenly about ~11,000 years ago, it also makes sense than any civilizations from around those times could have been wiped out by cold snap induced famines, glaciers, desertification, and flooding. Possible, but without any evidence it’s just speculation. If they did exist they didn’t invent plastic or use oil, or discover nuclear energy, or use anywhere near as much metal as we did/do or we’d have noticed it in the geological record.
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Jan 2, 2020 22:42
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Phy posted:I've heard similar suggested for protoceratops skeletons and griffins, and pygmy elephant skulls and cyclopes, but it's mostly at the level of speculation without a lot to back up the link. I know it's been brought up before but I really love this might-be-a-fossil monster on a greek vase 
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