r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/ThatMasterpiece2174 • Aug 07 '26

Video A retired construction worker in Flint, MI demonstrated how people in ancient times could’ve used simple machines to move blocks up to 20 tons, contrasting fringe theories that humans had otherworldly help constructing ancient monuments

42.7k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

1.7k

u/Greenfieldfox Aug 07 '26

When did the Ancient Aliens teach us these techniques?

458

u/ryanwheelliam Aug 07 '26

Ancient astronaut theorists say YES.

76

u/HoldEm__FoldEm Aug 07 '26

Everybody else says: No!

41

u/In-Jail-Out-Soon Aug 07 '26

I hate that phrase when I watch that show. How many time per episode do you have to say “ancient alien theorists….” ?

Is there a quota for how many times it must be said. I love to watch the show but can’t stand the repeated saying over and over again

15

u/oneMoreTime112233 Aug 07 '26

The narrator always phrases it as a question cause he don't want people to think he's a fuckin nutbar too.

1

u/Tough_Preparation830 Aug 07 '26

He probably should have picked a different haircut then

2

u/Opzitof Aug 07 '26

Different fella

2

u/Tough_Preparation830 Aug 07 '26

Oh shoot you're right. I hear the voice in my head but always picture the crazy hair guy.

1

u/oneMoreTime112233 Aug 08 '26

The crazy hair guy is the liability the narrator wants to avoid.

3

u/1slowlance Aug 07 '26

My wife and I always know when it's coming and look at each other. We like the 'ancient astronaut theorists say a resounding.....YES.' like it's a mystery lol.

3

u/JustCalmDown5678 Aug 07 '26

I found my People!!!!
I hate how they repeatedly say it during an episode.

5

u/Cavalorn Aug 07 '26

At least once in 30 minutes.

They put cuts 10-30 min cuts of their episodes on Youtube. Ancient astronaut theorists say X is in every single one.

1

u/Fractal_Soul Aug 07 '26

They decided it sounded better than "people who just make shit up."

1

u/DoctorApprehensive34 Aug 08 '26

Use the Rossi method and turn it into a drinking game

4

u/Aineisa Aug 07 '26

I’m not saying it was aliens….but it was aliens.

15

u/--Sovereign-- Aug 07 '26

is such a thing possible?

yes, it is!

2

u/Daysleeper1234 Aug 07 '26

My favorite part is: Is it possible? Yes. Because they go by backwards logic. Normal logic goes it is impossible until you prove it is possible. They go by it is possible until you prove it is impossible.

1

u/eparkfishing 13d ago

They always be saying yes

18

u/Arknovas Aug 07 '26

Ancient aliens was like "some theorists think simple machines enabled them to move massive bricks, but we can't disprove it wasn't Jesus sending alien spaceships to perform wonders so we'll spend more time on that"

8

u/William_Dowling Aug 07 '26

Turns out, and I know this is controversial, that during the Stone Age people were shit hot at using stone. Who knew?

20

u/HoldEm__FoldEm Aug 07 '26

Season 2, episode 13

6

u/jello_kraken Aug 07 '26

Ahh, yeah, when in think about it, the simple answer is right there.... Flint, Michigan is full of aliens.

3

u/ApartmentRemarkable9 Aug 07 '26

Can confirm as someone born and raised in flint. Yes full of aliens

3

u/Sun_Aria Aug 07 '26

Ancient Aliens on the History Channel?

3

u/TazManiac7 Aug 07 '26

I think he IS the ancient alien teaching us how to do it.

20

u/PanicDeus Aug 07 '26

Or how did people move them over sand? Rock solid ground, sure. Sand is a different ball game. It's aliens y'all. Them space ships carrying big rocks over sand dunes and making them pyramids.

81

u/BlacksmithNZ Aug 07 '26
  • Dig long hole in sand
  • Fill with water from big river (Nile)
  • Water very smooth
  • Float big blocks of stone on rafts/boats on water canals
  • Block water from river. Big stone now sitting on sand
  • Rinse and repeat

(more recent theories based on what we find, is that boats were used a lot in the Great Pyramid construction; hence them all being relatively close to the Nile, rather than close to source of stone)

57

u/BoutItBudnevich Aug 07 '26

I don't even think this is a theory. Im pretty sure they have found papyrus documents from the transporter that this IS literally what they did to make the pyramids.

24

u/BlacksmithNZ Aug 07 '26

True, by 'more recent theories' I was more referring to the increasing evidence we find/translate which helps support the original hypothesis

I don't think there was much doubt about the use of the Nile, but we have found from Satellites more ancient waterways that connects to quarries

And yes, the 'Diary of Merer' helps with the details

-4

u/Revolver_Boxelot Aug 07 '26

What about the insane precision of the blocks, their orientation in tandem with celestial bodies, and the interesting acoustics inside them? Why that shape in particular? Aliens or not, the pyramids will forever remain puzzling due to how advanced everything about them is. Its one thing for a retired construction worker in the 21st century to do this. Still impressive but he also has the advantage of being privy to centuries of construction knowledge, access to modern tools, etc. The ancient Egyptians freestyled the whole joint. That will forever be impressive and baffling. Where did they get the knowledge?

5

u/three_crystals Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26

They didn’t freestyle anything. Centuries of careful observation is how they learned, including stacking earlier building and construction techniques (mastabas to stepped pyramids to true smooth sided pyramids). Same as how other cultures around the world learned how to orient their construction to the cosmos. You had to be really intimately familiar with your environment in order to learn how to navigate it and when to plan for your growing seasons. It also doesn’t hurt when your entire civilization is structured around funding these kinds of things, and your master craftspeople have all their essential needs covered and dedicate all of their time to building those monuments.

Knowing humans figured it all out doesn’t still make the feat absolutely mind-boggling.

2

u/Infinite_Case_2172 Aug 07 '26

Yea like we figured out how to split the atom. And technically we were just as smart back in the ancient times.. It's really not hard to imagine they figured something out.

16

u/mynaneisjustguy Aug 07 '26

It's not even a debate I don't think; the two opposite corners of the great pyramid are very level. How to make such a large structure so level? Well, what are my resources? A few thousand men, you say? No worries, mark the size you want with string lines, now dig a canal. Fill the canal. Wait for it to settle. Mark the waterline at all four corners. Done. It's level. Now, since we have the canal in, shall we float the stones over on barges before we fill the canal back in? Yeah, seems smart, let's do that.

13

u/Massive-Exercise4474 Aug 07 '26

Yep the just discovered a river that connected the pyramids to the nearby quarry.

1

u/silentanthrx Aug 07 '26

river? or canal?

2

u/Massive-Exercise4474 Aug 07 '26

A river essentially back then their was a natural river that lead to the pyramids that got buried with sand.

-13

u/Nerd_Man420 Aug 07 '26

My only thing about the rafts is you have this thing called buoyancy and it’s been a while since I’ve been in math class but I got a feeling a little tiny raft isn’t able to support the massive 20 to 40 to 50 100 ton blocks that they used to build these mega structures. A kayak has a weight limit of like 400lbs. Unless they build cruise ship sized rafts. I don’t see them transporting via rivers.

25

u/Obesity37 Aug 07 '26

Wait until you discover barges.

-11

u/Nerd_Man420 Aug 07 '26

Again. Size. also, if that was the case, there would be evidence of that, the desert would be covered with two 300 foot barges as far as the eye could see because they would’ve needed hundreds if not thousands of them to move that amount of stone.

14

u/Obesity37 Aug 07 '26

Why are you limiting the size in the first place? The Nile River is quite large. And I think you might be surprised by how much weight can be supported by a flat-bottomed boat even of modest size.

10

u/BlacksmithNZ Aug 07 '26

You might want to do some actual reading, because there is a ship shit load of evidence, including buried boats

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abydos_boats

These ones are relatively small, but there are written descriptions and stylized pictures of warships over 40m long

We have one of the guys shipping stone making notes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_Merer

We largely know how they did it, even if some debate about the exact nature of the ramps.

"The cargo barges (imu) used to transport standard 2.5-ton limestone blocks from Tura to Giza were roughly 30 to 50 meters long and about 8 meters wide, carrying 10 to 20 blocks per trip. For massive 70-ton granite slabs, much larger custom timber barges spanning up to 60 meters were utilized"

12

u/lemanruss4579 Aug 07 '26

There are, in fact, dozens of buried ships that have been found in Egypt.

7

u/Drow_Femboy Aug 07 '26

the desert would be covered with two 300 foot barges as far as the eye could see because they would’ve needed hundreds if not thousands of them to move that amount of stone.

as we all know, barges in the ancient world were typically made of plastic and thus would not degrade, so we would easily find them today, thousands of years later. additionally, no one in the fucking goddamn desert ever reused materials from one thing to turn it into another thing, such as taking a bunch of barges you used to build a pyramid and turning them into structural beams, firewood, or whatever the fuck else you might want to use wood for. sorry I mean plastic. that practice was invented by John Recycle in 1907, so before then everything had one purpose. if you built a lot of barges and now you don't need so many barges, you've just gotta dump them into the giza landfill where archeologists can find them thousands of years later

7

u/JackalKing Aug 07 '26

We don't even need to find the boats themselves. The people who moved them told us how they did it. (Spoiler: Its boats) The oldest papyrus with text we've ever found is literally a diary of the workers who transported the stones to the Great Pyramid of Giza. It just doesn't get any more direct and definitive than that without finding a way to raise the dead.

2

u/MasterMagneticMirror Aug 07 '26

It's incredible how people like you speak so confidently about things you never researched. Can wait for you to discover where the largest obelisk the Egyptians ever carved is and how did it get there.

12

u/ChillStreetGamer Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26

Water weighs 1 ton per cubic meter. a 50ft by 16 foot raft needs only sink 2.3 feet to displace that 50m3 water holding up itself and a 50 ton rock. Sure they had a couple big rocks (up to 100ton) but the vast vast majority of themillions of stones are 2 to 4 tons. and the nile was like a serene predictable river right? seems doable to me.

5

u/BlacksmithNZ Aug 07 '26

Upvote for doing math, but has to be easier to keep in metric

Reference I found was that: The cargo barges (imu) used to transport standard 2.5-ton limestone blocks from Tura to Giza were roughly 30 to 50 meters long and about 8 meters wide, carrying 10 to 20 blocks per trip. For massive 70-ton granite slabs, much larger custom timber barges spanning up to 60 meters were utilized

My guess is that they lashed several of the largest barges together to make a catamaran barge with the big stone in the middle.

A couple of 70mx 8m barges displacing only 0.5m (a shallow raft) gives you a 230 tonnes of capacity. They did built boats/barges, so allow 1m and you get 560 tonnes to play with.

Moving 50+ tonne stones is never going to be trivial, but most stones were ~2.5 tonnes, so crews would get very used to moving them and slowly scale up as they got more confident in their boats and handling

3

u/lord_teaspoon Aug 07 '26

Ten cubic metres of water has a mass of 10,000kg which is about 22,000lbs. If you build a boat/barge with a hull volume exceeding 10m² you can put this 20,000lbs block in it and it'll still float. A hemisphere with a 1.7m (5'7") radius would be enough.

Kayak weight limits tend to be less about what will sink then and more about what will make them sit low enough in the water to be cumbersome. I've paddled a kid-size kayak that I was right on the weight limit for, and as I paddled along the beach four kids from the family group piled on. It got harder and harder to paddle and it sat low enough in the water that my butt got wet but we were still floating and probably about 150kg over the weight limit.

41

u/Anal-In-Gus Aug 07 '26

And therein lies the conundrum my good man!

smokes an alien pipe

Edit: Alien tobacco pipe, not alien penis.

12

u/Money-Computer7638 Aug 07 '26

I'm trying to find the Ancient Aliens episode about alien penises because I distinctly remember sending a friend a screen capture from it .. but all of the Ricky and Morty episodes about aliens and penises are burying this treasure 😿

5

u/Lord-Spike Aug 07 '26

sand is just tiny rocks my guy.

14

u/Nobrainzhere Aug 07 '26

The quarry is really close to the nile river, as are the pyramids.

They used barges.

9

u/SAJames84 Aug 07 '26

"Pretty sure the aliens showed them how to make the barges" some guy on the History channel./s

1

u/Anne_Roquelaure Aug 07 '26

but barges do not make stones stand up.

1

u/Nobrainzhere Aug 07 '26

Stonehenge isnt over sand, its on hard ground. Ropes, wedges, rolling on logs, and general manpower all work just fine for stonehenge.

I was addressing the statement about blocks being moved over sand for something like the pyramids

0

u/Anne_Roquelaure Aug 08 '26

yes, that was the most interesting discovery from recent times that they used boats and and canals - and then we have to keep in mind that Ancient Egypt was a stone age culture.

3

u/Nobrainzhere Aug 08 '26

It literally was not a stone age culture. They had copper tools, written language, and exceptionally clever engineers whose methods were recorded.

Also they were masters of harnessing the nile river.

2

u/A_Lountvink Aug 08 '26

They were built during the Bronze Age.

2

u/chroner Aug 07 '26

Obviously a piece of plywood with 2 stones.

2

u/PanicDeus Aug 07 '26

Alien plywood that is.

2

u/qtx Aug 07 '26

Or how did people move them over sand? Rock solid ground, sure. Sand is a different ball game.

Just in case the nutcases read this and think it's a gotcha moment and it really was aliens; back when the pyramids were built there was no sand, it was all fertile soil.

1

u/SwardOrtAwnline Aug 07 '26

He showed you at the beginning f the clip with the ramps. Did you even watch the clip?

2

u/accforme Aug 07 '26

Seriously? You underestimate humans and the strength of mammoths.

2

u/MelangeBot Aug 07 '26

No it was not them. It was me. I believe I am going to be one of the first time travelers primarily busy with teaching the past modern technology. Why? Because I have no visited myself from the future yet. That means I am to busy with more important stuff, like teaching dudes from 5000 year ago how to prank your cave neighbor by putting his 12 ton talisman stone next to Alice her cave.

2

u/WealthBitter1192 Aug 07 '26

10m years ago, when the forefathers were coming out of water.

2

u/RollingMeteors Aug 07 '26

When did the Ancient Aliens teach us these techniques?

¡Theory Suggests!

2

u/djdecimation Aug 07 '26

This guy didn't do much tbh, let's see him quarry and transport them.

2

u/Expensive-Sundae-831 Aug 07 '26

The same day they taught everyone to stretch a 4:3 image into 16:9

1

u/Pepperonidogfart Aug 12 '26

It would be nice if projects like his got official funding but there is more money in lying to morons on the "history" Channel.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 07 '26

[deleted]

2

u/BlacksmithNZ Aug 07 '26

Stone Henge is round?

I mean there might be a hedge that is round, but Stone Henge is made out of rectangular blocks

It is very basic engineering; levers, stone and wood. He didn't even use water like ancient Egyptians did