• mechoman444@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    It is amazing to me how these people call the ancient Egyptians primitive.

    Although they may be considered primitive by today’s technological standards, they were very, very smart and accomplished tremendous things with very little resource.

    They were not primitive intellectually. They were smart, capable and intelligent people.

    Two more points I’d like to address about the cutting of these rocks number one archaeologists replicated the way these rocks would be cut with technology they would have during the time that these rocks were cut. Number two. They would drag the rocks. They dragged the rocks.

    Oh, and constructions like the Great pyramids would often take generations to complete and these weren’t done in a couple of years these things took decades if not more.

      • HollandJim@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        If these people had the same brains as we do, we’d not be here right now.

        To all downvoting: whooosh!

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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          5 months ago

          What are you talking about? There has not been anywhere near enough time for evolution to change our brains significantly from theirs.

          • Obi@sopuli.xyz
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            5 months ago

            My best guess is they mean ours are full of lead and micro plastics and propaganda.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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          5 months ago

          The brain evolved like everything else. There has not been enough time for evolution to change the structure and size of our brains.

          Furthermore, IQ is a measurement of the ability to take IQ tests. An indigenous Amazonian might be the smartest person in the world but will fail practically every IQ test you can give them.

          IQ suggests there is only one sort of intelligence, which is nonsense and easily disproven by autistic people who have great difficulty achieving tasks by people determined to be of average intelligence but are able to do mathematics at a level that the average person couldn’t even comprehend.

          Kim Peek had a tested IQ of 87.

          https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-superhuman-mind/201212/kim-peek-the-real-rain-man

          He could read both pages of an open book at once, one page with one eye and the other with the other eye. This style of reading continued until his death in 2009. His reading comprehension was impressive. He would retain 98 percent of the information he read. Since he spent most of his days in the library with his dad, he quickly made it through thousands of books, encyclopedias, and maps. He could read a thick book in an hour and remember just about anything in it.

          Because he could quickly absorb loads of information and recall it when necessary, his condition made him a living encyclopedia and a walking GPS. He could provide driving directions between almost any two cities in the world. He could also do calendar calculations (“Which day was June 15, 1632?”) and remember old baseball scores and a vast amount of musical, historical, and political facts. His memory abilities were astounding.

          How does IQ make any sense as an accurate measurement of intelligence in the face of people like Kim Peek?

          Also, I have no idea why you think ‘training’ a brain would be any different now than it was 5000 years ago. That just means keeping your thinking skills active.

          • MonkderDritte@feddit.de
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            5 months ago

            This is not on the scale of evolution but about mental tools and training, limited to ones lifetime. For example, did ancient egyptians know the concept of “zero”? And there are plenty of examples of neglected children (especially in china because one-child policy) being dumber on the verge to being disabled – because they lacked stimmulation, mental training.

            Yes, IQ is limited as measurement, still an indicator.

            Kim peek was likely a Savant, different issue.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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              5 months ago

              Why do you have to know the existence of zero to do mental training? What does mental training have to do with numbers? I am betting that indigenous Amazonian I brought up, spending all of his life hunting, does constant mental training out of necessity.

        • Snowclone@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Do you ever think about looking into things before you decide you need to insist publicly they work this way?

          They weren’t primative, the Greek and Egyptian civilizations, some of the very first civilizations that existed, developed and exchanged technology, art, and information that we still use to this day. Western civilization wouldn’t exist without them.

        • HaleHirsute@infosec.pub
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          5 months ago

          Their world was just as complex for them to survive in as ours is, and maybe more so. They came up with ideas and solutions to problems and their thinking gave us that tech we have today.

    • Sockenklaus
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      5 months ago

      Although they may be considered primitive by today’s technological standards, they were very, very smart and accomplished tremendous things with very little resource.

      They were not primitive intellectually. They were smart, capable and intelligent people.

      This is exactly the point many people don’t understand: People in the past were not less intelligent than today’s people.

      We developed more ways to discover stuff and more precise tools to measure and detect things and of course with computers we got the ability to handle extremely complex data. All of this gives us an edge over past people science wise but we had very capable thinkers 200, 600 and 4000 years ago. All basic principles of mathematics have been developed a long time ago.

      • Barbarian
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        5 months ago

        The pithy version of that is that we know more things than our ancestors, but we’re not smarter than them.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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        5 months ago

        They also see something like an expertly-knapped flint hand axe and think “I could do that in my back yard in five minutes” because they don’t understand that something that looks primitive might actually be a really useful tool and actually not easy to make.

      • masquenox@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        This is why I have a hard time taking anyone seriously who calls any human society, past or present, “primitive.”

    • Landsharkgun@midwest.social
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      5 months ago

      Also the current theory is, get ready for it…they used boats. They flooded the area the Pyramids were being built and just floated them in on barges. With water.

      ‘Beyond human thinking’ my ass.

      • fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de
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        5 months ago

        They flooded the area the Pyramids were being built

        I don’t think that’s “the current theory”.

        I think you might be talking about digging canals. It’s conceivable that a canal would be built to take the rocks to the construction site. Just recently however we’ve found evidence of a tributary of the nile that flowed past the sites of a number of pyramids.

        • Jumi@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          I’ve read tributary as trebuchet first and was equally impressed and confused for a moment.

          • Obi@sopuli.xyz
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            5 months ago

            Just launching them to the top with extreme precision so they land right into their spot.

    • Aux@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      They weren’t super smart, they simply had an infinite supply of slaves.

      • Mirshe@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        The “slaves built the Pyramids” thing has been pretty well-debunked by anthropologists and archaeologists, who both agree that something as monumental as building the vehicle of the Pharaoh’s ascent to the afterlife would not have been something Egypt would’ve forced slaves to labor on. Aside from the obvious chances of revolt, there’s a lot of religious reasons, and many agree that it was likely seen as a GREAT honor - backed up by inscriptions of the masons that worked the stone (found in some reliefs), or painters, etc. It’s not unlikely that they used slave labor to quarry and transport the stones to the building site, but not to actually physically haul and build things AT the site.