After doing some searching. The item I couldn’t remember is:
Egyptian core 7.
When I Google it, here’s the first result:
Egyptian Core 7 - Advanced Primitive Machining - viXra.org
https://vixra.org › pdf
Based on the chemistry of minerals, Petrie’s “Infamous Core #7” is shown to have been produced easily by milling techniques far less advanced than those …
4 pages
But it’s easy to misrepresent “we have 7 hypotheses and we don’t know which is correct” as “scientists have no idea how this was made!”
“Perfectly” spaced line do not exist.
Fair point
‘We don’t know how this was made.’ and ‘We don’t know how they made this.’ almost always mean the same thing.
But “they had no known technology to make this” does not mean the same thing as “they had seven different technologies to make this, but we’re not sure which one they used”
How is this relevant? I was noting the equivocation in a claim that scientists “don’t know”, where the two meanings are “we have no explanation” and “we don’t know which of several plausible explanations is correct”.
‘We don’t know how this was made.’ implies, for some, that the making of this object is totally beyond our understanding.
We don’t know how they made this.’ AIUI, never means ‘They had no technology to make this so aliens must have helped them!’ is now on the table. It just means they knew techniques that we’re not aware of.
I don’t see the distinction that you claim in constructing the sentence with passive vs active. To my ear, they are both ambiguous and admit either possible meaning.
And I’m confused, in your first post you said they mean the same thing, in your second post you say they mean something different?
Excellent! Thank you, now we can properly analyze the claim:
This is not exactly accurate. The core in question is not an artifact produced by Ancient Egyptians. Rather, it is what was left over after they drilled a hole in a block of granite. It’s a leftover, produced as a byproduct when they were making something else.
The lines in question weren’t carved onto the cylinder once it was a cylinder. Rather, when drilling granite, under some conditions these regularly spaced lines are produced, and the technique used by the Egyptians accomplished this.
As noted by others in the the thread, there are many ways for the Egyptians to have done this, and they definitely did have metal tools (Copper early on and later bronze). When paired with an abrasive (sand, emery, corundum, diamond) copper can certainly drill through granite. The only question is the detail. Is the abrasive loose, affixed to the pipe, or in a water slurry? Whicj method is the most practical while resulting in these regular spirals? That’s the question, not “how is it possible they did this at all?”.
Here is some solid info on Egyptian drilling:
When an actual scientist says them they mean the same thing, when Graham Hancock says them they don’t.
I’m still not really getting your point, but I think it’s not important. We’re in agreement that Hancock et al are deliberately equivocating to try to make it sound like scientists have no idea how this was possible, right?
Equivocating? Making shit up to make money more like.
“to try to make it sound like scientists have no idea how this was possible, right?” Exactly.
All are variants of “Science can’t explain this!!!” with all the numerous exclamation points.
The ambiguity turned into a negative is the secret sauce that creates doubt and wonder out of a mere lack of known precision.
Pyramids are the ur-example of this. (Pun deliberate.) Pyramids are literally the simplest possible way of building tall. That’s why every civilization used them. Not “discovered” or “invented” them because they’ve been around in nature for ages. Pyramid technology consisted of muscle power and organization, which ants and termites already had. They are the exact opposite of advanced unearthly technology. How exactly the muscle power was applied was not rigorously recorded, admittedly, and has to be deduced from various clues, which allows some doubt about techniques. That’s what gets exploited into “Science can’t explain this!!!”
All we can be absolutely, positively, beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt certain of is that no aliens need to have been involved.
There’s little new in the approach that Hancock uses. It has been the mainstay of religious groups since man first cowered from a lightning storm.
The tribe don’t know how it works, an enterprising shaman says he does and suggests that in the absence of a better explanation their “man in the sky” solution must be true.
It was balls in the neolithic and it remains balls whenever, wherever and however it is applied.
The lack of an alternative theory give precisely zero weight to your own, unsubstantiated hypothesis. The world doesn’t work like that. You make a claim, you back it up. Nothing else matters.
“Science has no explanation for this” can mean many things.
*I’ve not spoken to any scientists about this.
*I’ve not actually researched the science about this.
*Science doesn’t give a crap about it because any moron could figure it out
*I’ve never progressed beyond Hardy Boys mysteries in my reading
Add your own.
IMO it usually means:
- I’m deliberately lying to you in every sentence because our advertisers love gullible audiences for their commercials and my production company / network excels at attracting the gullible using pure BS-babble. Besides, it pays me very well.
A variant on this one would be
*Science doesn’t give a crap about it because you haven’t demonstrated the existence of any phenomenon that requires explanation.
Thus it is technically true that scientists have no explanation for ghosts, homeopathy, dowsing, free will, etc.
There’s a series on Hulu called “Found” that I tried to watch, because it seemed like a ‘found treasures’ type of thing. I made it through one episode. The guys that found one of the “treasures” thought that they had an ancient Minoan artifact (dug up in the back yard of their West Virginia home 
). It was clear from the get-go that the thing was made from manufactured material, and, as it turned out, was part of an old toy horseshoe tossing set.
Any of these types of shows that use the annoying format of rehashing the entire story after every commercial in order to stretch out the implausible bullshit they’re trying to sell is a non-starter for me.