I’ve always been fascinated with megalithic structures. From the very beginning of my youth the main question was how these ancient civilizations had managed to carve such great monuments, or how did they transported them, how they lifted those enormous stones. But from some time now that question no longer intrigues me as much as why they did it or what for.
There are plenty of speculations and ideas about that but I’ve come across two that worth mentioning. The first one is that these structures (for pyramids for example) are machines to produce or manipulate energy in a way we do not know of to this day, the other one is that these megalithic buildings and monuments are a message for future generations (ours included).
Let’s start with the first one, about energy. Nobody can think of what kind of energy are we talking about, they assert that we didn’t know about electricity until we found about it, as so this kind of energy is completely unknown to us, but we can see the results, this being the monuments themselves. The flat surfaces carved with ease on heavy stone and the fact that quarries were far away from the resting place of these monuments are the undeniable evidence that they could do almost miracles with this supposed energy. I’m having a hard time trying to believe this, because a civilization able to use raw energy like this wouldn’t need to craft this monuments out of stone, neither I expect a civilization of this kind to have the level of vanity required to justify the tombs, temples, obelisks, protection walls, etc.
Now the second idea, the one about a message, has a little more credibility, to me at least. It says about a cyclic apocalyptic catastrophe, big enough to wipe out several species and reduce human headcount down to minimum. The amount of effort put in telling this message, considering the several geographic locations and the amount of time between the sender and the receiver of this message it’s a clear evidence that it is of the greatest importance, isn’t it? Attempts to decode this message has been performed by several individuals, two of the interpretations are the following: the first one tells about a magnetic pole reversal in our planet and the second one tells about the impact of rogue celestial bodies (i.e. comet, asteroid or meteorites).
On one hand, a magnetic poles reversion would produce great damage to everything on earth as it has been demonstrated in the Laschamp event, though science is still having trouble to link this to greater climate catastrophe it can’t be denied that a reduction of earths magnetic field intensity down to a 3% of its current strength would have a major impact on our current civilization. This event has been dated about 42000 years ago but we don’t know what triggered this magnetic excursion or if it’s ever to happen again. Anyway, in order to link this event to the megaliths we have to consider that an advanced civilization (almost as advanced as ours) was thriving before this event, and managed to survive somehow, keeping their industry alive during this cataclysm and then after all came to normal they decided to travel around the world building this megalithic structures. If that was the case, that civilization would have continued to thrive until our days, their knowledge wouldn’t have been lost. Think for a moment about our current civilization, our scientist have knowledge about a cataclysm triggered because of the climate change, even if they haven’t come to a conclusion about its origins being anthropogenic or not nobody argues that a 4 degrees Celsius increase in global temperature would give us major issues. Now, notifying future generations about it is certainly not a priority, less if we are talking about thousands of years in the future.
Let’s talk about the second option now, the cataclysm produced due to the impact of multiple celestial bodies. There’s also evidence of this in the so called “black mats“, several excavations have taken place over the northern hemisphere and this black mat is observable around 12800 years ago in multiple sites. To put it in common language, a black mat it’s a vitrified layer of soil which has been the result of high energy impacts. This constitutes the impact hypothesis for the origin of the Younger Dryas. Bear in mind there is evidence of both events, these things happened. We have to apply the same considerations for the supposed civilization in this case anyway, a thriving culture testified the event, survived and managed to build megalithic structures around the world afterwards.
I’ve traveled to Cuzco Peru, and I’ve seen with my own eyes the ridiculous amount of effort required to build that way. Everything suggest that this ancient civilization had the means to carve, transport and interlock these huge stones that compose, for instance, Sacsayhuamán, some of which weight over 100 Tons and their quarry is located 20 Km far from the resting site over the jungle and mountains. Some justify this interlocking way of building on the need for maximum material use efficiency due to the scarcity and the difficulty to transport it, but I can’t agree on that because the quarries are far from being depleted.
The megaliths are there, challenging our sense of feasibility, the evidence of powerful and precise tools it’s also there as evidence that the builders may well have chosen other materials or an easier way, but instead they decided to go for massive blocks of granite, basalt, limestone, andesite…
Maybe in our hope to find meaning we’ve eluded the biggest motivators of mankind; politics and religion. It is enough to check the list of taller statues in the world (available in the wikipedia) or the great wall of china to see that all of them may be categorized that way.