Ancient Aliens...

Wherein the writer pontificates on the arrogant beliefs held by one of the camps of this topic...

I just saw a show on the History Channel about "Ancient Aliens" where talking heads point to murky cave paintings, tapestries, carvings, woodcuts, and paintings, interspersed with paintings and drawings of modern origin, none of which were identified as such.

They did try to balance out the true believers, with one talking head who was the token skeptic.

The show was very biased towards the true believers, who basically retold every historic event as terms of aliens intervening in human affairs. That none of the great works of man were really built by man.

That is the arrogant belief. That our ancestors were too stupid to build the pyramids, that aliens had to build them for us.

Give me a break. C'mon, aliens will travel billions and billions of miles to move a bunch stones to build a temple? Especially when you backtrack these massive stones to their quarries and find not the pristine cuts made by super science devices, but the signs of stone and a bronze tools?

The extraordinary claims made by the ancient alienists fall apart when you watch the locals do the impossible all the time, or when you go down to a little coral castle in Florida and see stones bigger than the ones in Great Pyramid were put into place and perfectly balanced by a single man.

You need to move a forty ton stone? All you need is manpower, not ancient aliens, and a little intellect and some ingenuity.