And, of course, because there is plenty of evidence that humans built them.
True. That all real evidence supports the reasonable null hypothesis of the ancient peoples of the respective lands coming up with the ideas and applying them w/o any need for otherworldly powers(*) is how we know that the batshit theories are either implicitly or explicitly racist. Not the other way around.
(* ok so maybe it took some leader with great charisma to be the first to make it stick that “the gods want us to haul all these 50 ton rocks down the river and up the hill and pile them up in this specific way”, as opposed to being told where to shove his rocks, but that’s still earthly.)
Since that’s not the conclusion, I’m not sure why you’d bring it up. The conclusion of AA believers is that the non-Western civilizations couldn’t be smart enough to do something so complex or advanced.
Which was what prompted the question in the first place, that and the fact that aspect had never crossed my mind. Thank you for your link, @MrDibble I had no idea that von Däniken was so overtly racist.
I believe that this is a strawman, and exactly on my point. While I’m sure there are racists who believe what you said, you are ignoring that non-racists may also believe it but take it in a different way.
So in the end what you are arguing is racist tend to see things in raciest ways. So yes in that I would agree.
Pre-1800 beliefs are irrelevant. I had earlier very carefully laid out a history of the development of modern-day racism, setting its rise in the 19th century. But that leads to a question that would make a very contentious thread. Are any of the ideas devised the theorists (or their successors) who placed the “Negroid race” into an inferior or even sub-human category correct? I can’t think of any, but stopped clock and all that.
Since the brown humans were literally the only humans in the specific areas at the specific times, this may not be as good an argument as you think it is.
Yes, Roman concrete.
And there are no mysteries about the pyramids. There are things we don’t know about how they were built, but that’s just because we know of many ways they could have done those things, and we just don’t know which specific one they actually used.
But it mostly only gets said of things made by brown people, not things made by Europeans. Humans have made fantastic and wonderful things all over the globe. Where Europeans made wonderful things, people say “Look at the magnificent work those people did”. Where non-Europeans made wonderful things, people say “Look how magnificent that is; it must have been aliens”.
Or the pre-alien spin on it: “I wonder where the white people that made it went?”
The IDEA is racist. It was created by racists and at its core is only applied to non-Western cultures. The fact that people may not be aware of the origins, and may not themselves hold racist beliefs doesn’t change the fact the Ancient Astronaut idea belittles black and brown cultures.
And occasionally they’d throw a sop to the possibility it may be one of the “Lost Tribes”. Boy did they get around…
I disagree with your assertion. Many cultures including white Europeans have given credit to God or the gods or their helpers for structures and inventions. God(s) are ET’s (OK some, but not all, of the ‘gods’ do live on earth). The conversion from using god(s) (and their assistants) to advanced interstellar civilization assistance is just a modern twist on this, but it is essentially the same thing.
There is a difference between people saying structures in their own lands were not built by their own ancestors, and people saying that someone else’s culture could not have acheived accomplishments on their own. An Irishman believing fairies built a mound or castle in Ireland is different between than a white American or European believing every marvellous structure from antiquity that was built in Africa or South America had to have been built by aliens.
So what is an example of an ancient white culture that huilt strange megaliths that weren’t ascribed to ancient aliens?
Roman concrete doesn’t cut it. There was never anything about it that made us go, “Humans of the time couldn’t do that!” We just didn’t know the exact mix of materials they used. And Roman engineering was heavily documented, so there weren’t many mysteries about how their things were built.
The real disconnect that makes some people think that aliens must have been involved to build something like the pyramids is that we have lost the sense of what can be accomolished through sheer brute force if you are willing to work on something for decades, or centuries.
We wonder at how a large block weighing many tons could be moved many miles because we can’t imagine 1,000 slaves pulling on something for months or years to move it into position. On the face of it, it seems like primitive Island people would not be able to move multi-ton blocks - not because of their skin color, but because they don’t have access to machinery. Then we learned how they did it, and the mystery went away.
I already pointed to the antikithera mechanism from Greece, which has been attributed to aliens. There was also delta-winged toy that was claimed to have to come from aliens that came out of the new world.
For that mayter, Egypt is a strange choice because it wasn’t a ‘black’ nation. It wasn’t white either. It was multi-ethnic, with skin color that ranged from dark black to white.
Before we assume racism, we should consider things like lack of documentation of methods, methods lost to history, and the construction of megaliths that seems impossible to laymen without heavy machinery. Unless there’s an example of a similarly well built megalith from a white civilization where everyone just says, “Of courae they built that - they were smart”, then it seems to me that the accusation if racism is based more on assumptions than evidence.
Mrs. Homie believes this … stuff. There isn’t a racist bone in her body.
I think that the heart of AA is the belief that “primitive” peoples of the past were dumber than modern people and didn’t have the brainpower to figure out how to do such obviously difficult things. Especially without all those wonderful machines us smart modern folks have invented – why, that just proves it! No way those stupid peoples could have known how to do engineering and construction and stuff beyond the basic mud hut!
Which is, of course, ludicrous.
I think you guys are going overboard by saying that the reasons must be racist. I have no doubt that racism played a significant role in the origins of this idea, and that most people that believe it are engaging in at least a little bit of implicit racism, but there are other explanations.
The first and easiest: There are a lot of people who will believe the dumb shit you throw in front of them as long as it’s not the “official story.” They’ll believe every conspiracy theory even when they’re contradictory with each other. These people would gobble up pretty much any psuedoarchaelogy even if they’re at the bottom end of the racism scale.
There is also a pervasive idea that ancient peoples of any sort are simply dumber than we are today. They don’t seem to get that the brain genetics really haven’t changed in the last few hundred or thousands of years. On average, we’re probably smarter, because of better nutrition and medicine allowing us to both reach our physical brain potential and also gives us the time for more thinking and more education. But of course that doesn’t mean that there weren’t plenty of very clever people at the time.
We’re all well versed in European history. Both because Europe has done a better job at preserving their history than most places in the world, and because our education system is strongly biased in favor of European history. So European history is both more understood and less exotic and mysterious. It’s much easier and more interesting to make up shit about mysterious places.
And this one is much more arguable and I’m not really interested in arguing the point, but you can have ethnocentric ideas (that European values/culture/history is superior to others) that aren’t inherently racist, though there’s a lot of overlap there. Particularly about Greek and Roman civilizations in the ancient world. As mentioned in this thread, Stonehenge is the target of a lot of these theories - they’re white but not part of the Greek/Roman lineage.
So, is there a lot of racism tied up in those beliefs? Sure. Are the people who believe such things more racist than average? Probably. But are all the people who believe that shit inherently doing it for racist reasons? No.
Ever see any depictions of black aliens? Ever see any with hair? Clothes, or suits? All aliens are depicted as skinny, harmless, nude, grey, versions of white people. Very bland features. Big hands, big eyes that make you want to go “ahh, I want one.”
Poor, uneducated, brown people couldn’t have made these monuments with just a hammer, some time, and motivation. So it must be some un-tanned, little, grey, caucasian aliens.
Yes, everything about the Ancient Astronauts is racist. And the reason that we don’t see real depictions of aliens remains, there aren’t any, anywhere, at all.
Well, we’re all racist to varying degrees.
But FYI, Von Daniken thought that aliens built Stonehenge too.
So it’s not just brown people, but Earth people.
I was going to dispute this, but the more I thought about it the more I agreed with the core statement, with some caveats.
Some peoples at some times have lost their history and ascribed feats done by their ancestors to imagined higher powers. This is not a universal - many cultures are proud of ancient structures and know who made them - but history and mythology mix in all ways from bouillabaisse to gravy.
Some present-day people are credulous, willingly ignorant, simply lazy, or looking for god substitutes. They are easy prey for the ethnographic con men who offer easy ways out of thinking.
None of that overrides the fact that the concept was created out of racism and still contains racism as an element that can’t be eradicated.
Or that aliens as higher powers as modern equivalents to gods as higher powers states that gods are no more real or the cause of any material structure on earth than aliens.
How could they raise those stones so high/
Completely without the technologigh/
We have todaigh?