Topic: Using a deductive approach, how would you test the following hypothesis: “The archaeological record contains evidence of enormous and often unexpected leaps forward in ancient science and technology (agriculture, pyramid building, writing, and so on)—these leaps and innovations are evidence of their introduction by extra-terrestrial aliens.”

In addition, deconstruct one of the cases outlined in Ancient Aliens Debunked, readings from Chariots of the Gods?, or the case of ‘Andean Alien Mummy’ case study (see links in the syllabus). Are there archaeological, cultural, or historic explanations for these cases (i.e., Occam’s Razor) that are more convincing than the extraterrestrial explanations advanced by von Däniken and his supporters?

There is a answer written by my classmate. Write a comment (at least 200 words) for his answer.

"That sort of statement is quite a leap, and not exactly easy to rationally claim. If, for some reason, I did want to attempt that, there would still be some fairly obvious places to start. We might expect to find the same technology appearing at the same time in multiple locations. After all, if the ideas behind pyramid building (to select an example) was given to us by aliens, then one could conclude that humans could not have figured these things out on our own. So, wherever pyramids are found, they should probably date from the same time period. This isn’t the case however, as there’s thousands of years between the construction of the pyramids in Egypt and those in Mesoamerica. We’d also expect to see similar designs built for similar purposes. Again, this is not the case. The same is true for writing, to use another example. If the idea of writing came from an outside source, there would likely be a lot of consistency in writing systems. The archaeological record, however, does not support this.

I find the “Ancient Aliens” interpretation of the Easter Island Moai to be interesting. Their case for the extra-terrestrial is not related to the creation of the Moai; after all, many civilizations have made large, monumental carvings. We also know where the material was sourced from, and archaeologists have found the tools used to create the Moai. Instead, “Ancient Aliens” claims that they were aided by extraterrestrials because…humans can’t move large things. In particular, they claim that the lack of trees on Easter Island means that they could not have used logs as rollers. This dismissal has two problems. First, it ignores other options for moving the Moai. Studies have been done to show it possible to move a Moai like one might move a refrigerator, “walking” it side to side. Despite their large size, the Moai are made of light volcanic rock, and therefore moving them isn’t as much of a challenge as might be expected. The other problem is that there were trees on Easter Island, as the archaeological record shows. Here, “Ancient Aliens” makes the mistake of assuming that the current climate and biosphere of today can be accurately extrapolated into the past, disregarding the actual archaeology."