Science Vs - Ancient Aliens: Who Really Built the Pyramids?

Episode Date: March 24, 2022

[REBROADCAST] Is it possible that the pyramids were built with a helping hand ... from aliens? If not, how did the ancient Egyptians build them without modern technology? To get to the bottom of this, we speak to author Erich von Däniken, paleoanthropologist Dr. Shelby Putt, Egyptologist Dr. Mark Lehner, and archaeologist Prof. David S. Anderson. Check out the transcript here: https://bit.ly/3LbPnoJ This episode was produced by Rose Rimler with help from Wendy Zukerman, along with Meryl Horn, Kaitlyn Sawrey, Michelle Dang and Odelia Rubin. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Michelle Harris and Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Emma Munger. Music by Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. A huge thanks to the team at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, as well as Professor Pierre Tallet, Professor Roland Enmarch, Jens Notroff, Professor Erin L. Thompson and everyone else who spoke to us for this episode … thanks for your help. A special thanks to Sarah Hendricks, Jake Finnicum, Frank Lopez, Joseph Lavelle Wilson and the Zukerman Family.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. Today, we're pitting facts against pharaohs. As we return to one of our favourite episodes, which asked, who really built the Egyptian pyramids and how? Because some people say the pyramids couldn't have been a purely human achievement. That's something else. Maybe even aliens had to have stepped in to help out.

Which, all right, might sound a bit silly, but just stick with us. Because the more we learned about how impressive the pyramids are, the more we were like, wait a sec, how did they get made? So producer Rose Rimler and I went on a bit of a discount tour of Google Earth. We sent the little avatar down to the pyramids so we could see them ourselves. Can we go in closer? Yeah, we can drop the little guy. I love dropping the little guy.

Can we go in closer? Yeah, we can drop the little guy. I love dropping the little guy. Whoa! Here we go, into the map! Oh, wait, this is the wrong pyramid. Let's go out of the map. Out of the map! Whoa! Rose wanted to show me the biggest, baddest pyramid of them all, which is appropriately called the Great Pyramid.

Okay, so here we are at the foot of the Great Pyramid. That's huge. It's taller than the Statue of Liberty. So the rocks are about the size of, about the height of like your hip or something. Just about, yeah. So all these blocks, there's over 2 million blocks that make up this pyramid. And on average, they weigh like two tons a piece. Some of them came from hundreds of miles away.

And yet they're so precise. The sides of the Great Pyramid are even to within like a few inches. Really? Yeah. They are almost perfect. That's crazy. And they're almost perfectly straight going along the north-south axis and the east-west axis. Okay. So what did humans have back then, like, to build such a structure?

Nothing. Not even steel, right? They didn't have steel. They didn't even really have iron. They didn't use wheels, like carts and wheels. No wheels yet? No wheels yet. Everything we think we need to have a big, stable building that would last a long time,

they didn't have any of that. And Rose told me that these pyramids aren't just huge piles of rocks. They actually have secret rooms and passageways and mysterious shafts cut through 200 feet of stone. And we're still learning more. Even these days, scientists are doing stuff like scanning the pyramids with cosmic rays to see exactly what's inside. And so the idea that these pyramids were all put together more than 4,000 years ago, before Euclidean geometry was even around, it is amazing. And because they were created without any modern technology, it has opened the door to this possibility that perhaps the ancient Egyptians got a little help from ancient aliens.

And this idea has gotten so mainstream that archaeologists told us they hear it all the time. There's even a TV show about it called, appropriately, Ancient Aliens. It's so popular that it's been running for 18 seasons. Since the dawn of civilization, mankind has credited its origins to gods and other visitors from the stars. So today we're asking, where did this idea come from, that ancient aliens helped build the pyramids? And could it be true? Because even if you don't believe that aliens were mingling

with the ancient Egyptians, you do have to wonder, how did they pull this off? When it comes to ancient aliens, there's a lot of... Whoa! But then there's science. Science vs. Ancient Aliens is coming up just after the break. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey.

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The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. Welcome back. Today, we're talking about the Egyptian pyramids. And we're asking, how on earth did they get built? Perhaps something not of this earth helped the Egyptians out. And as we started diving into the research for this, we started wondering where this idea of ancient aliens even came from. And it turns out that you can basically trace it back to one man. My name is Erik von Däniken.

I am Swiss, I'm a writer, and I have published so far 41 books all about the same subject. I speak about extraterrestrials who visited our planet some thousands of years ago. Are you the reason that people think the aliens helped build the pyramids? I think so, yes. Eric is in his 80s now, and he kind of looks like William Shatner's long-lost Swiss cousin. And Eric told us that his path to becoming the grandfather of the ancient aliens idea

started when he was a teenager in the 1950s. I visited the pyramid as an 18-year-old young man. And what did you think about them when you first saw them? The first time you're just impressed and you have a lot of questions. And later in your life, you come on with more and more scientific questions. Scientific questions. Questions like, who was living around Egypt thousands of years ago? And were they smart enough to design a structure as complicated as the pyramids? And Eric thought, surely not. The planning is too complicated to plan such a complicated building with so much rooms,

shafts, corridors, etc. So Eric starts looking around for answers and there were a couple of things that fed into what happened next. For one, the space race was ramping up. And people were starting to realise the possibilities of space travel and even alien contact. Eric thought, well, if humans have figured out how to fly around in space, then maybe aliens could have figured out how to do that long ago. So could it be that thousands of years ago, they stopped by and lent a hand with building stuff like the pyramids? After all, many of these ancient civilizations had stories of gods that came from the sky.

And so Eric thought maybe those gods were actually aliens from Pharaoh away. Now just imagine Stone Age people see how a vehicle descends from the clouds with smoke and fire and trembling and now loud noise, and they have no idea of technology. So they believed, erroneously, that this must be some gods. All these gods have come from the sky. As Eric was developing these ideas, he was working as a hotel manager in Switzerland. But by the mid-60s, he had a manuscript.

He sent his work around to publishers, but they all rejected it. And so it sat on the shelf. Until a guest showed up at the hotel, and the two got to talking. And this guest was very interested in Eric's ideas. And one day this man said to me, Eric, why don't you write a book? And I said to him, I have a manuscript, but nobody will publish it. And he said, I have an idea. I know a big publisher in Germany. And he simply phoned this man and he said to him, listen, I'm here in

Switzerland in a hotel and there's the hotel manager and he has written a complete crazy book, but the man itself is not crazy. You should listen to him. And that was the beginning, the start of Chariots of the Gods. Chariots of the Gods. It was published in 1968 and was a huge success, ultimately selling millions of copies, making the New York Times bestseller list. In fact, it was so popular that it was made into a film which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary. These stone masses were transported from a quarry

on the far banks of the Nile at a time when men had neither cranes nor trucks. Ha. The movie was even aired in US schools to help kids understand science. All around the world, people were going nuts for it. And so Eric kept honking his ancient alien horn, just like a Tutankhamen. He went on to write more than 40 books and gained disciples along the way, some of whom wrote their own books.

And so for decades, this idea has spread and spread. And you can find people talking about it all over the internet. And of course, there's the Ancient Aliens show on the History Channel, which Eric is a regular on, by the way. And Eric, why do you think this idea really took off and your book was so popular? What do you think it tapped into? This made people think. They say, hey, what if he's right? We should look at this possibility. That's the fascination of a story.

Once people know how impressive the pyramids are, how precise, how intricate they are inside, and how few tools the ancient Egyptians had to do all this, it does make you wonder, back then, were humans capable of designing and building the pyramids? That is, were we smart enough to do this? I'm a paleoanthropologist,

and I focus on the evolution of human cognition. And so if you were to tell, like like a three-year-old child, what do you study, what would you say? I would say that I study how people came to be as smart as they are. This is Shelby Putt. She was a researcher at the Stone Age Institute. Yes, the Stone Age Institute. It's where Pebbles and Bam Bam went to college.

She's now at Illinois State University. And we wanted to chat to Shelby to find out how smart humans were back when the pyramids were built. And Shelby told us it's a bit tough to know how powerful our brains were thousands of years ago. The problem is brains don't fossilize, right? Brains don't fossilize, but bones do. And Shelby told us that you can learn a lot from looking at a fossilized skull. You see, as our ancestors evolved, their skulls got bigger and bigger, suggesting that their brains were getting larger too. And this happened over millions of years. Around 300,000 years ago, we see the first evidence of modern Homo sapiens.

And after this point, people have normal looking skulls. Now, when it comes to smarts, brain size isn't everything, but it is an important clue. And our skulls have been roughly the same size for a long time, like at least 100,000 years. And the Great Pyramid is a measly 4,500 years old, which suggests that humans have had around the same brain power since way before the pyramids were built.

So I wanted to know, if you could magically teleport a baby from ancient Egypt to today, would that baby stick out in some way? Would it fit in when it grew up? They would not stick out at all. Really? Just a completely normal person. Yes, completely normal in intelligence and in the way they look. They would be just a normal person.

Wow. So 4,000 years ago, we were really the same people that we are right now. Absolutely. And we know that ancient Egyptians at that time weren't dumb, dumb Fred Flintstones. In fact, they had a pretty complex society. They played music, brewed beer, laid out cities, played board games. Couples could get divorced and women could own their own property. So yeah, if they could do all that, and they had brains like we do today, Shelby's like, surely they could map out the pyramids. The fact is, they are modern people with modern intelligence, and we all in there have the capability of working together to accomplish something like this.

But even if the ancient Egyptians had the brainpower to dream up the pyramids, how did they turn those dreams into reality? Like how did people transport heavy blocks from hundreds of miles away without wheels? How did they build a structure so tall that it dwarfs many modern buildings and that's lasted for thousands of years? An amazing new discovery cracks the case of the pyramids wide open.

And it's coming up just after the break. Welcome back. So we just heard that, as best as science can tell, ancient Egyptians were smart enough to architecturally design the pyramids. But the question remains as to how they actually built them. And getting to the bottom of this hasn't been easy. Archaeological information is kind of like a homicide detective. You know, there's bloody socks on the floor.

You know, there's muddy tracks going. You have to infer what happened. This is Mark Lehner. He's been studying ancient Egypt for decades. And he still remembers walking into the main chamber of the Great Pyramid for the first time. It was back when he was just a tourist. The acoustics are amazing in there. They resonate.

And so you can find just the right chant to get the thing vibrating like a big pipe organ. So that's pretty cool. Really amazing. And still when I go in there, I can find just the right resonance to make it sort of start, you know. What's funny, though, is that Mark first got interested in the pyramids because he was a little wobbly, wobbly, wobbly, wobbly, wobbly, wobbly, wobbly. Back in the 1970s, Mark believed that ancient Egyptians did not build the pyramids alone.

He didn't think it was aliens, but the lost civilization of Atlantis. And yeah, my belief hung in there really strong. That was until Mark started really studying the pyramids, going on trips to Egypt, sifting through artifacts. And then one day he realized that this Atlantis thing, it just didn't add up. The whole thing had slipped away from me like a glacier separating, and I didn't believe that anymore. So now he didn't believe the Atlanteans helped build the pyramids. But he still didn't know how the ancient Egyptians did it. And one question that really puzzled him was this. He'd learnt that a lot of the stone for the pyramid actually came from nearby,

but the ancient Egyptians still needed to truck heavy granite from very far away. Yeah, the granite came from 600 kilometres away. How did they do that? Well, over the past few decades, Cairo has been doing a lot of construction around the city, like installing a new sewer system, which meant they had to dig. And when archaeologists heard about this, their ears pricked up. Because, you know, archaeologists love digging.

Now, during these digs, they found the remains of ancient docks, harbours and canals. These canals went all through the city and up to the Nile River, which connected to quarries filled with granite and other stones. This means that when the Nile River rose, water would rush through these canals from the quarries to where the pyramids are, which suggested that the ancient Egyptians were moving these enormous stones hundreds of miles

by stacking them on boats and then moving them through the canals. So now Mark had all these clues about how the river worked and the canals, but then a team of archaeologists hit the ultimate jackpot, their most concrete evidence yet. They found fragments of an ancient diary written on papyrus. And it was written by this middle manager type who actually worked on the pyramids. And this guy described exactly how they moved the stones day by day.

Morning, we loaded our boats. Afternoon, we spent the time sailing to Giza. Evening, we docked. Morning, we're dragging blocks to the pyramid. Literally, day by day, it was just like, boom, opening a window. The next best thing to being there, which I've often wanted to do, I've often thought I would love to be here just for five minutes, 10, 15, just to see it. These papyri were the next best thing. Papyri. It is the plural of papyrus. You should try it in a sentence.

Like, this bowl of papyri really makes the whole house smell like Christmas. Anyway, that's potpourri. Anyway, so these papyri described teams of 40 or so men piling boats high with stones and then taking them straight to the building site. So roads, they didn't need roads or trucks or even wheels. They had the Nile. All right, so we know exactly how they moved these huge stones hundreds of miles to get to the pyramids. But then, how did the Egyptians hoist these huge stones hundreds of

feet into the air to create a pyramid taller than the Statue of Liberty? Well, cranes? They didn't need cranes. They had sleds, rollers, and even ramps. Yeah, a few years ago, the Egyptian government announced that they'd found the remains of what looks like a ramp. And it's about the same age as the pyramids. The Anglo-French team had been working in an ancient Egyptian quarry when they discovered a ramp with stairways. A stone ramp with a series of post holes on both sides. So you'd push a stone up, wedge the poles in the holes,

and then go to the next level. That's amazing. That is some early Egyptian scaffolding. So it looks like the Egyptians used ropes to pull and push the heavy stones up higher and higher along a ramp. And this was possible because they had thousands of people working on the pyramids for decades. Oh, and the ancient Egyptians didn't get this right on the first try. You can see the evolution of building and designing the pyramids over time.

There are earlier first drafts, older, smaller, crappier pyramids that aren't as impressive as the Great Pyramid. They're still around, they just don't attract as much attention. Probably because they're a bit ugly. To Mark, there's just all this evidence, not only of how the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids, but also of how these people lived, the layout of their homes, their broken pottery, their pieces of clothes, and even jewelry. And to him, this is proof enough that this ancient aliens idea is bunk, that there's just no way a whole other culture could have come down, hang around for a while, give directions on how to build a cheeky pyramid

and then leave with nothing behind. Civilizations can't get lost. Civilizations are messy, garbage-producing networks of people, and they leave all kinds of crap. Crap like diaries, canals, ramps, everything that tells us the real story of how the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids. And if you're still not convinced,

well, all we can say is that denial ain't just a river in Egypt. All right. The last thing we want to talk about is this. Why do so many people seem to love this ancient alien story? These claims of lost civilizations, of ancient aliens, of all kinds of mysterious things happening in the ancient world, they're powerful, they're seductive, they're interesting. And if they were true, they would be amazing. This is David S. Anderson. He's an archaeologist at Radford University in Virginia. And he speaks a lot about why people hold on to these alternative theories like ancient aliens. And David says this isn't about dum-dums getting sucked into a hoax. The reality is these kind of claims play not on stupidity, but they play on fascination and interest.

They play on the notion that we want there to be more. And it's a little more depressing to think, well, actually, archaeology has good data on how the pyramids were built and where they were built and when people lived there. That's not as fun. That's not as interesting. But as exciting as it is to think of aliens whispering in a pharaoh's ear,

you need to build a ramp. David told us that these ideas are actually quite troubling. Not only do they fly in the face of hard evidence, like a fleet of wayward UFOs, but also you can trace this kind of thinking to the earliest days of European colonisation. Centuries ago, colonisers were visiting places filled with people that they thought were primitive. And yet they would see these huge, beautiful, sophisticated structures.

And for them, it just didn't add up. And so there was a strong tendency, and we see it repeated over and over again, for European colonizers to come up with stories about how these ruins must have been built by lost white civilizations. This happens in the United States. There are earthen mounds all over the eastern half of the United States that were built by Native Americans. And for centuries, American colonists would claim that those must have been built by some lost white tribe. David talked about this with producer Rose Rimler. He says now, instead of a white tribe, it's aliens. Either way, it's taking the achievements of one group of people away from them and handing it to somebody else.

Have you made that argument to an ancient alien believer? I have. Typically, the response from the believers that I have engaged with is, no, no, no, this is just all about technology. And this is just, there's no way people could have built X building or raised X block. There's usually little interest in engaging with the data that shows, oh, you can build those buildings or you can raise those rocks. David says it's just really hard to convince people to follow science and forget about their fun but flawed ideas.

That was our experience with Eric, the grandfather of this ancient aliens idea. We brought the evidence to him, but he stuck to his guns. All the experts that we spoke to said we just don't need aliens to explain how we have the Great Pyramids. We have all the evidence in front of us. Why do you think differently? No, they have not all the evidence.

And all these scientists who say we have the evidence, we do not need extraterrestrials. I'm sorry, they never understood the story of Erik van Deniken. They probably never read it. In the meantime, it's 41 books. Yeah, so Erik isn't giving up. He's holding on to his ancient aliens and has even written a few more books since we last spoke to him.

That's despite all the evidence that's been uncovered since he first came up with this idea. The canals, the ramps, the literal diary that says, this is how we did it. So it turns out the biggest puzzle isn't how the pyramids were built, but how to change people's minds,

how to make people see the facts when they don't want to see them. The mystery of the pyramids was inside us all along. Hmm. Hi, Rose Rimla. Hi, Wendy. Producer of Science vs. Ancient Aliens. My claim to fame.

How many citations in this week's episode? There's over 90 in this week's episode. Over 90? Somehow we squeezed 90 citations out of this ridiculous topic. Where can people find this? They can find the link to the transcript in our show notes. Whoa. Out of the studio.

This episode was produced by Rose Rimler, with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, along with Meryl Horn, Caitlin Sorey, Michelle Dang, and Odelia Rubin. We're edited by Blythe Terrell, fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Erica Akiko Howard. A huge thanks to the team at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, as well as Professor Pierre Tallet, Professor Roland Enmark, Jens Nottroff, Professor Erin L. Thompson,

and everyone else we spoke to for this episode. A special thanks to Sarah Hendricks, Jack Finnecombe, Frank Lopez, Joseph LaBelle Wilson, and the Zuckerman family. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.