asked the question “So if humans have been around pretty much at this same evolutionary state for thousands of years, how come we are the first ones playing Halo on Xbox?” or something similar? My g/f asked me a question like that a few months back and I started to explain that well we don’t really know what all has been accomplished in the past because of our perverse religious side which has us constantly conquering anyone who doesn’t look and think the same and then burning everything in the loser’s culture and attempting to completely eradicating any proof of their existence. On top of that we have had a few cases where disease has knocked civilization for a loop by wiping out some large percentage of the race and when that happens, survival mode kicks in and specialization mode goes out the window… e.g. Who cares about which stars are going to go supernova or which insects have wings and which don’t when you aren’t sure where your dinner is coming from.
Midway through the explanation I thought, I wonder if anyone has done any real exploration in this to see if they can find any kind of proof that by gosh, there were people who lived before us (like Atlantis, Rama, or Mu) who had higher engineering skills than we have right now other than the really obvious things like Pyramids and Easter Island monoliths and other megaliths that we can’t for the life of us duplicate or figure out how to do now…
I found on Amazon and then proceeded to read “Technology of the Gods: The Incredible Sciences of the Ancients” and wow, what a great book. It is interesting to me (read: scary) how it shows how our own scientists will find something they can’t explain and so just toss it off to the side and ignore it. Like archeologists who in 1959 found belt buckles in China that were thousands of years old… but made out of Aluminum[1]???
Absolutely great book. I highly recommend it. It seriously will get you thinking. Has lots of photos and images and links to other sources of information to follow up. The book is only $12 and is eligible for Amazon Prime if you have that (and if you don’t, why not?).
joe
[1] If you don’t know, to our knowledge, the only way to create aluminum is to process Bauxite ore with A LOT of electricity… We have only been producing aluminum in commercial quantities (this last go around at civilization anyway) for roughly 100 years… So who has the chutzpah to make belt buckles out of the stuff thousands of years ago.
Does it actually list the primary sources of these mysterous discoveries?
There are seven pages of footnotes of the sources of the various subjects. In some cases the book quotes passages from the books where the original discovery was being discussed by the discoverer. There are for example, several pages discussing the quality of the work of the artifacts in the pyramids and the tests that were done on them indicating that the popularly accepted methods of doing that kind of work were clearly insufficient. Maybe go to a local library and see if they have the book available. If you look at the book on Amazon, it also has a look inside option so you can take a peek at the writing.
The bibliography reminds me of nothing more than Umberto Eco’s _Foucault’s Pendulum _. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of primary sources or reputible publishers\journals in the field.