Next thing you know they'll find the Akkala Ancient Tech lab.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:30 AM on May 7 [3 favorites]

Ah, these are the caves that appear in A Passage to India, lightly fictionalised as the Marabar Caves.
posted by Hogshead at 8:14 AM on May 7 [3 favorites]

I read the wikipedia entry first and then found it hard to take the first ten minutes of the documentary seriously as a result. If the wikipedia information is correct, there appear to be explanations for everything mentioned as inexplicable in the documentary's introduction, including related technology and artisanship and how it could have shown up in this location. Planning to watch some more, but it's giving a sensationalist "ancient aliens" vibe even if it doesn't seem that's where it's going at all.

Ancient peoples did all kinds of astonishing shit all around the world! I am at least thankful to know about these caves now, which I didn't before.
posted by Captaintripps at 8:47 AM on May 7 [17 favorites]

These are astounding. Beyond astounding.
posted by BlueHorse at 9:16 AM on May 7

Yeah, the invocation of "modern precision" is definitely giving "ancient aliens" vibes- it is a classic ancient aliens thing to point at precisely cut ancient stone as having required modern tools.

The fact is, it doesn't. It just requires an amount of patience and expertise that we don't really have much experience with. One-off wonders (to a certain degree of precision) can be produced by armies of skilled artisans. You only need modern machine tools to mass produce such wonders.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:26 AM on May 7 [22 favorites]

I always think people underestimate the sheer amount of boredom that must have existed back in ancient times. Have to do something, might as well beat on a rock and carve something
posted by drewbage1847 at 9:30 AM on May 7 [10 favorites]

Yeah, the invocation of "modern precision" is definitely giving "ancient aliens" vibes- it is a classic ancient aliens thing to point at precisely cut ancient stone as having required modern tools. The fact is, it doesn't. It just requires an amount of patience and expertise that we don't really have much experience with. One-off wonders (to a certain degree of precision) can be produced by armies of skilled artisans. You only need modern machine tools to mass produce such wonders.

You're missing the point: they weren't European, or even white!
posted by signal at 9:46 AM on May 7 [16 favorites]

an AI summary tells me the video gets into mathematics.

the thing is that sometimes it might take advanced mathematics to describe a thing, without needing advanced mathematics to make the thing. this happens in evolution all the time, and it happens in arts and crafts and other built things too.

one example I am familiar with is M C Escher's "Print Gallery." It is describable as a particular function of complex numbers. M C Escher was not a mathematician (though he corresponded with and was inspired by them). He certainly did not create Print Gallery using complex numbers, but instead found it, so to speak, "by hand."

This sort of thing happens all the time.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:02 AM on May 7 [10 favorites]

there's often some sort of trick or rule-of-thumb that allows a skilled artisan to get close to mathematical perfection without ever using mathematics. if you don't know the trick it looks like magic, especially if you do know the fully-worked-out mathematics.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:08 AM on May 7 [3 favorites]

You're missing the point: they weren't European, or even white!

I'll have you know my people were doing marvelous things with wattle and daub!
posted by elkevelvet at 10:21 AM on May 7 [7 favorites]

You're missing the point: they weren't European, or even white!

There's an offshoot of ancient aliens thought that ends up being filtered through nationalism, so instead of "aliens must have done it, the locals could never" it's "these ancient peoples (who we claim descent and legitimacy from) must have had modern (or better) levels of technology." So you get stuff about ancient Indians having nuclear weapons as an Indian nationalist idea.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:25 AM on May 7 [8 favorites]

Mauryan expertise in polishing has been known about for a fair while, and has multiple exemplars. I'm not sure why this person is getting so breathless about it.
posted by aramaic at 10:26 AM on May 7 [3 favorites]

So you get stuff about ancient Indians having nuclear weapons as an Indian nationalist idea.

Yeah, I was kinda picking up this Narendra Modi vibe from the moment the introduction stated Sanskrit was "India's most sacred language"
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 10:32 AM on May 7 [4 favorites]

> I always think people underestimate the sheer amount of boredom that must have existed back in ancient times. Have to do something, might as well beat on a rock and carve something.

That, and also there seems to be a tendency to think that ancient humans didn't have the same range of intelligence of modern humans. Mostly driven by confounding knowledge and technological achievement with intelligence.

"I can't figure out how they did it myself, so how could they have figured it out without help?" is a common theme among ancient aliens enthusiasts.
posted by moonbiter at 11:22 AM on May 7 [4 favorites]

As Benjamin Disraeli put it to Daniel O'Connell, "While the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon."

What's so often missed is that intelligence and technical sophistication are two different things. Within the bounds of what they knew, ancients in any culture were as perfectly capable of being clever as we are. They were primitive, not stupid.
posted by Quindar Beep at 11:32 AM on May 7 [2 favorites]

We also badly underestimate geometry-without-algebra.
posted by clew at 11:57 AM on May 7 [5 favorites]

We also badly underestimate geometry-without-algebra.
This X 1.000.000

There is a passage in the Bible, or actually two different passages, about surveying and building and they underline how ancient construction was built on the practice of measuring with a rod and a string/rope. Which can be pretty accurate. Add in some triangles and you are good to go. And then of course they had far more accurate tools as well.

Imagine what would be left of our culture after 3000 years, specially if there are some horrible crises in between now and then. I can't even open my old WordPerfect documents.

Apart from the initial breathlessness of the video, it seems like an interesting project. (I haven't seen the whole video yet).
posted by mumimor at 1:28 PM on May 7 [2 favorites]

anyway the video's website boasts interviews with Graham Hancock ("Fingerprints of the Gods", probably the most prominent ancient aliens booster) and Christopher Dunn ("The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt", proposing that ancient Egypt had modern technology).
posted by BungaDunga at 1:34 PM on May 7 [7 favorites]

anyway the video's website boasts interviews with Graham Hancock ("Fingerprints of the Gods", probably the most prominent ancient aliens booster) and Christopher Dunn ("The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt", proposing that ancient Egypt had modern technology).

Oh bother, I hadn't seen that
posted by mumimor at 1:35 PM on May 7

My wife and I have lots of disagreements about the ancient alien thing (actually the whole alien thing since I'm skeptical and she's a believer), but she knows that while I don't have any problems with talking UFOs, etc - the ancient alien thing actually really irritates me because of the inherent racism and superiority complex built into it. Our ancestors were absolutely wickedly intelligent and probably better at observation than we need to be!
posted by drewbage1847 at 1:40 PM on May 7 [2 favorites]

Current thinking, supported by works published by some of the most distinguished ancient philosophers of our time, are that the caverns were polished by the actual Tutankhamen after he was driven from Egypt. (The mummy that was buried in his sarcophagus? The secret can finally be revealed-- it's Moses!)
posted by phooky at 1:57 PM on May 7 [3 favorites]

Ok, doing some math checking here, on the "(re)discovery of the meter" section. The idea is that there is a real mystery of why the measurements used by the ancients (in this case the Barabar yard) turn out to be geometrically related to the meter. I'm not so sure that their calculation is special. In other words, this could be analogous to finding hidden codes in old books, just by searching for any message you like (deleting some letters and keeping others) and then reverse-engineering the pattern that gives you that message.

The math is: take the measurement in question (85.411 cm) and relate it to 1 meter by:
1) finding the circumference of the circle with its diameter (d=85.411),
2) dividing the circumference by 6 to get 44.72, then
3) finding the diagonal of a stacked pair of squares with that side.

So they discovered, after some algebra and the pythagorean theorem, that pi*d*sqrt(1^2+2^2)/6 = 100. (actually, 99.99...)

The key is you get to pick the 1, 2 and 6 for free! Divide the circle any number of times, and stack as many squares as you like. So, for any d, you can go searching for 3 whole numbers (instead of 1,2 and 6) that give you 100.

I tried d = 77. After a quick search I used 2, 8, and 20. (The 2 and 8 are how many squares to stack, and the 20 is how many times to divide the circumference.) 99.7...Pretty close to 100!
I don't know how special is is that they found smaller whole numbers than me.
posted by TreeRooster at 8:00 AM on May 8 [2 favorites]

It's even worse than that, the video producers presumably had free choice as to what geometry they were using to make the calculation work out, and could find one that had small whole numbers, eg using the yard as the diameter instead of the radius of the circle. Then just reverse engineer a reason why that's the geometry to use, and Bob's your uncle.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:40 AM on May 8 [1 favorite]

It's even worse than that...

Right! Just imagine if they allowed an ellipse instead of a circle. Of course they can argue that squares and circles are more fundamental shapes, but how about cubes, etc.?
posted by TreeRooster at 9:17 AM on May 8

In search of an algorithm for the circle and squares method: what we want is a way to find a, b, and c three positive integers such that given any positive real number d, we have pi*d*sqrt(a^2+b^2)/c = 100.

Solving, and letting r = (100/(pi*d))^2 (so r can also be any positive real), we want to find a, b, and c for any real r so that (a^2+b^2)/c^2 = r. Of course sometimes this is impossible, for instance for irrational r, so we are really hoping that there will be an approximation that's as close as we like, for rational r!

Thus we want (a^2+b^2)/c^2 = p/q, where we choose p/q =r (or to approximate r as close as we want). Thus (a^2+b^2)/c^2 = pq/q^2, so just let c = q and pick any two squares that sum to pq. To guarantee that pq is a sum of two squares, we need that pq has prime factors that have even powers when those primes equal 3 mod 4. For a quick hack, just look at the decimal expansion of r, and round so that the result without the decimal is a prime with remainder 1,2,or 0 (when dividing by 4). For the example of 77cm, r = (100/(pi*77))^2 = 0.1709 (rounded) so I'll take c = 10000 and pq= 17090000. Using the sum of two squares theorem and a spreadsheet I find 1132^2 +3976^2 = 17090000.

So pi*77*sqrt(1132^2+3976^2)/10000 = 100.002. Not bad.
posted by TreeRooster at 2:15 PM on May 8 [2 favorites]

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