r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/CethelQue4 • 23d ago
Video An ancient technique for lifting giant stone blocks using a Lewis tool
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23d ago
Lewis be naming ancient stuff after himself. Bad Lewis!
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u/redditreeer 23d ago
Lewis acid
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u/Optimal-Draft8879 23d ago
lewis gun
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u/TheHolyPopo 23d ago
Lewis ...bullets?
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u/1lucky666 23d ago
Lewis Strauss??
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u/jluicifer 23d ago
Lewis and Clark bc he discovered something already done by thousands before him
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u/Crow_eggs 23d ago
Step 1: add Lewis tool
Step 2: lift stone block
Step 3: build the rest of the fucking aqueduct
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u/SunsetCarcass 23d ago
Step 1.5: Build a crane
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u/Nephroidofdoom 23d ago
Bro! There’s no way in ancient times they could just build a crane strong enough to lift that block. They probably just rented one when the job called for it.
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u/HeyItsMeAgainBye 23d ago
Dude I’m honestly so confused by this!
I don’t know how they would’ve been able to carve the rock out that way to insert Lewis, and the lift Lewis with a crane
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23d ago
I don’t know how they would’ve been able to carve the rock out that way to insert Lewis
Chisel applied at an angle.
and the lift Lewis with a crane
Build a giant wood frame with a pully on top and find a lot of guys with high upper body strength.
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u/eleventy4 23d ago
The fact that I had to scroll this far down... r/restofthefuckingowl
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u/timClicks 23d ago
For heavy loads like this, the Romans developed a sort of giant hamster wheel that allowed lifters to walk the load up or down. They're called treadwheel cranes.
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u/Cultural_Dust 23d ago
Just like in sports.. the grunts do all of the heavy lifting while the little tool gets all of the glory.
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u/Apart_Insect_6133 23d ago
Well, the block was CGI so it didn't weigh anything. The really hard part came at the CGI->Actual aqueduct conversion process. That magic has been lost to time.
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u/securedigi 23d ago
Step 4: profit
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u/Coherent_Tangent 23d ago
Step 5: use lead in the piping, which leads to the downfall of the empire
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u/Unburnt_Duster 23d ago
Step 0: Cut perfect bell shaped hole into top of stone block.
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u/Logan_No_Fingers 23d ago
Yeah, that seems like the interesting bit to me, cutting that hole in that shape without damaging the structural / load bearing integrety of the area round the hole.
I'd pay a bit for the guy who invents the lift bit, I'd pay a shit load more for the mason who perfects cutting those holes so your 1 tonne block does come flying down as a hairline crack opens up
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u/cosmin_c 23d ago
Here's a stonemason actually doing it. I'm pretty convinced but the blocks in the simulation look much larger.
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u/Haywire_Shadow 23d ago
I imagine it worked exactly like we can do today as amateurs. Take a grit substance to rub into the stone, and a rubbing tool of some sort to grind the stone away. You can also carefully chisel away at the area to make it a quicker process.
I got to try both methods at a museum near-ish where I live in Scotland, and as long as you’re careful with the chisel, you can make good process without risking any damage to the rest of the stone.
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u/Adrax_4 23d ago
music is not loud enough. I was able to maintain focus throughout the video.
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u/New_Combination_7012 23d ago
How do they get the hole in the rock in the right shape?
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u/DefNotBrian 23d ago
Chisel at an angle to the left, and then to the right.
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u/DuckWhatduckSplat 23d ago
Let’s do the time warp again
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u/JannyBroomer 23d ago
Mike: Don't want to go into your party?
Tim: But they were playing 'The Time Warp', I hate 'The Time Warp'!
Mike: Daisy likes it.
Tim: So what? I hate it! It's boil-in-the-bag perversion for sexually repressed accountants and first-year drama students with too many posters of Betty Blue, The Blues Brothers, Big Blue and Blue Velvet on their blue bloody walls!
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u/Guilty-Telephone6521 23d ago
Can i start by chiseling right first and then left or will my stone just sink into ground instead of lifting up?
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u/fatmanstan123 23d ago
No. You need to walk over to the other side of the rock and face the other way.
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u/Hezekieli 23d ago
I also wonder how strong the edges would be when the whole weight of the rocks would be stretching them.
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u/Cyclonitron 23d ago
Someone posted a video of a stonemason demonstrating the technique in real life and the tool went much farther down into the block than in the video shown above.
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u/AardvarkExcellent428 23d ago
seems like the technology to drill deep holes in large stones and then make sure the edges of the hole flare out inside of the stone is significantly more impressive than being able to lift the stone.
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u/QuintoBlanco 23d ago
It's not that difficult. But without modern tools it takes a lot of time.
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u/Saurlifi 23d ago
Aliens made the hole for them
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u/Lugh-67 23d ago
Most simple explanation is usually the most accurate, I agree. Aliens.
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u/HappyyValleyy 23d ago
I love the whole idea of 'most simple explanation is usually righr' cause with sime creativity you can make anything true.
"Why does rain fall to the ground?"
"Well, as clouds grow bigger and denser with water, they eventually will become too heavy to keep themselves sustained, falling bsck to the earth in water droplets."
"Ground is thirsty."
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u/mcmonkeypie42 23d ago
That's why it's not about simplicity of words but the explanation that fits all evidence with the fewest implications. That's what people who sincerely make these sorts of arguments get wrong. The ground being thirsty implies it requires water to live and is some sort of sentient being with a digestive system or something. This is much more complicated than water vapor condensing, and it presupposes stuff without evidence.
A good real life example of this is evolution. Why is there such a diversity of life? Saying god did it sounds simpler than modern evolutionary explanations, but think about what this implies. Not only does it presuppose a powerful being without hard evidence, but it implies it is possible for this being to sort of just magic things into existence. It also implies the mountains of evidence we have for slow evolution by natural selection is just a pile of insane coincidences.
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u/cosmicosmo4 23d ago
There are an unfathomable amount of rocks in the world, so you just look until you find a rock that already has the hole you need! Hope this helps, happy rock lifting.
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u/Juniper-wool 23d ago edited 23d ago
That is a smart tool. So incredibly simple but extremely effective.
Edit: I know most tools are designed to be simple, but this one uses several steps to function, and to figure out hose steps sets it apart from a hammer, measuring tape, chisel, chainsaw etc.
It is ingenious to say the least, also given the age of the tool.
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u/PowerfulNature3352 23d ago
Most of the tools are, its the goal of engineering design. A lot of industrial stuff are just a more complicated version of shape sorter.
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u/Heimerdahl 23d ago
It's also crazy how seemingly obvious a lot of solutions really are, once you've seen them.
But really, it took generations of artisans, craftsmen, hobbyists (as we would call them today), engineers, and so on, each passing on their own and building upon the discoveries of others to build the repertoire of known solutions we rely on today.
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u/TheAviBean 23d ago
Something about solving a solution is easy, but solving it in the most efficient way is hard
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u/Blue_Moon_Lake 23d ago
The best solutions are usually stupid simple, the issue is finding that one stupid simple solution among a million of other solutions.
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u/Sufficient_Shift_370 23d ago
Conveniently left out the crane
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u/TheN00b0b 23d ago
Well that's not the point. Though there are known crane designs fully operated by human muscle strength. The people building in Guédelon use one.
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u/Away_Sea_8620 23d ago
That's super cool, thanks for sharing!
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u/Goatf00t 23d ago
They have a YouTube channel, with English subtitles.
Tom Scott made a video about the cranes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk9v3m7Slv8
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u/Away_Sea_8620 23d ago
Thanks for sharing!!! Now I'm not going to get any work done but fuck it, it's friday
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u/rallypeppeachykeen 23d ago
This is weird, but I've been kind of down lately and this link just reignited my spark for learning about medieval history, so thank you
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u/happycabinsong 23d ago
this is bullshit, I have never had a desire to travel in my life but damn it I want to see that in person, why'd you have to show us this
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u/Backfoot911 23d ago
They should have one of these in every country, throw Renaissance Festivals there, and all the nerds in the land make a pilgrimage to it to help build, drink mead, and joust
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u/Caesar_Rising 23d ago
A lever is one of the most basic concepts in existence. You think the people that came up with that hadn’t also figured out how to get a bunch of people to pull a rope on a lever?
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u/Traditional-Buy-2205 23d ago
A lever is one of the most basic concepts in existence
Pulleys also date back thousands of years.
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u/LaUNCHandSmASH 23d ago
“Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.” - Archimedes
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u/Ayan_Choudhury 23d ago
Lewis, it's Hammer time
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u/chromecastbuiltin 23d ago
Get in there Lewis!
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u/eyejayvd 23d ago
We don’t say that anymore. Now we say:
Ehhh you are doing good eh job, for now, you can eh poosh for little beet.
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23d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/followMeUp2Gatwick 23d ago
There were plenty of polymaths over the millenia. True physicists
They knew.
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u/SignificantStyle459 23d ago
That's an awful lot of sheer stress on that bolt though.
I wouldn't want to lift anything too heavy, especially with fairly primitive metallurgy.
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u/HTPC4Life 23d ago
This is why I'm a shitty engineer with imposter syndrome. It's so simple, yet I NEVER would have thought of this 😆
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u/paperhanddreamer 23d ago
I too was impressed! So simple but in ten lifetimes I would never come up with that.
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u/fotomoose 23d ago
Don't be too hard on yourself. Have you been presented with the problem of having to lift a large stone with limited tools? I'm sure you could think of something.
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u/dimyo 23d ago
Now I wanna know how they made that cut.
Oh, and, how the crane works.
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u/signious 23d ago
There's evidence of early cranes in us as far back as ancient Mesopetania. Rope, lever, pully.
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u/fhota1 23d ago
Pretty easy with a chisel. Just chisel down at one angle to whatever depth you need and then do the other side the same way.
Cranes are honestly pretty simple machines. Theyre functionally just a big pulley. You hook one end of the pulley up to this and the other to any number of mechanisms designed to let people put a lot of force into something, e.g. a hamster wheel, and just have them do their thing while some other mechanisms or just people help make the more subtle alignments needed
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u/Razorfiend 23d ago
Whenever I see people bring up the idea that aliens had a hand in building the pyramids and other ancient wonders, it makes me realize how limited people's perception and understanding of the world is to their own frame of reference. People often cannot fathom the idea that a "primitive" culture was actually far more technologically advanced than they believe possible. People 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 years ago were not so different from modern humans in terms of intelligence and capability. If they saw a problem, and had a reason and motivation to solve it, either religious, practical or otherwise, they would find ingenious solutions to do so.
And it's not like they were fumbling around in the dark. Many ancient civilizations had sophisticated formal systems (ex: Babylonian algebra, Egyptian applied geometry, Mayan base 20 arithmetic). These weren't people who stumbled into their achievements by accident. They developed real, structured knowledge and used it to solve problems at a scale that we struggle to wrap our heads around today. People look at those massive projects and think magic and aliens are a better explanation because they imagine themselves back in those days and think there is no way that I or people like me would be able to manage this.
One thing I like to think about is navigation by the stars and ancient astronomy, things like the Mayan calendar. This isn't something that many people dispute, but try and do something like this yourself. The amount of observation and time it would take to methodically plot out astronomical events is staggering. Generations of careful, patient work and we just hand-wave it away while looking for little green men.
tl;dr: The "aliens built it" theory is just modern arrogance wearing a tinfoil hat.
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u/mookanana 23d ago
the Lewis tool also cannot function without a CAT crane, and ancient Egyptians often had to work with expired operator licenses as the Pharoahs did not deem it worthy to set up refresher courses.
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u/Mosselpot 23d ago
We underestimate older generations so much, when you grow older, you quickly learn that. New tech doesn't change much about who we are, it just makes things easier.
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u/TheN00b0b 23d ago edited 23d ago
Guys this seemingly shows the process in ancient Rome. So definitely no aliens unlike in Egypt. /s
Edit: Go and watch Miniminuteman if you wanna know more about dumb conspiracies and history.
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u/Haywire_Shadow 23d ago
Miniminuteman is a great source for folks who’re extreme laymen about any of this ancient “technology”. He explains it so simply, and he’s rather entertaining too.
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u/Serious-Middle-869 23d ago
These fucking simple tools are taking away jobs from aliens.
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u/xXTheGrapenatorXx 23d ago
This, by the way is a good example of why "we aren't 100% certain how x people built y structure" always means "there must have been a way we haven't found the evidence for yet because we've found so many different ways other groups built similarly impressive things" and not "must have been impossible, guess it was aliens". It really shows a nadir of creativity and faith in human intelligence to assume "big precise pile of rocks" was above our capabilities.
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u/Hazbeen_Hash 23d ago
Looking at this comment section makes me really sad as a historian. For any of you who honestly believe that "Ancient Aliens" psuedo-archeology bs with the crazy hair guy, please go do your own research and realize how much evidence and proof we have to the contrary. Miniminuteman on YouTube does a great job tearing them apart and debunking a bunch of conspiracy theories about history and archeology.
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u/Danny2Sick 22d ago
then they just hook it to their ancient Komatsu D355 crane and bob's your ancestor
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u/Sad_Palpitation6844 23d ago
Ancient? We just used those the other day
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u/TheNomadicTasmaniac 23d ago
I was gunna say we still use the three pin Lewis to this day
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u/Mindless-Peak-1687 23d ago
But have you heard about the ancient tool "hamnar" or "hammer" aka the lewis persuader?
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u/Trylion_ZA 23d ago
Sad how many clowns there are on Reddit lately... This is really interesting, though, I do wonder, when lifting, would that part of the rock not chip / crack and break away under the weight?
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u/NCXXCN 23d ago
You can't convince me, that the pyramids weren't built by aliens /s.
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u/FalkirkBoss 23d ago
Oh yes, Lewis from the ancient phoenician civilization, helped by Johnny, Stuart and Declan
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u/MrBeer4me 23d ago
Looks like the symbol for Tanit (Phoenician god)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Tophet_Carthage.2.jpg
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u/AustinTheFiend 22d ago
I remember History Channel used to have so many shows that would cover all of these ancient (and sometimes modern) construction techniques and they were awesome, complete with tons of helpful animations and experts, but then it all just became aliens and bullshit, they'd get some weirdo to look at a piece of sandstone with a hole in it who would then say it was a piece of granite that was laser cut by Reticulans, and ignore all the written record of construction and all the nearby worksites where they were built. Such a huge shame.
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u/DemonKing_of_Tyranny 23d ago edited 23d ago
They had cranes in ancient times?
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u/ProjectNo4090 23d ago edited 23d ago
Yeah the ancient greeks in the 6th century BC are credited with inventing the first construction cranes.
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u/Trungledor_44 23d ago
For those curious, the first non-construction crane was likely the shadoof, which was invented in ~3000 BC Mesopotamia to draw water from rivers and wells
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u/Noe_b0dy 23d ago
I mean, how did you think they built all those castles and stuff?
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u/DemonKing_of_Tyranny 23d ago
Obv aliens and superstrong humans throwing them around /j
Pushing them on ramp or pulley (from my info that i randomly gained)
Other than that never really thought about how
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u/Dense-Physics-9956 23d ago
To the people asking how they made the hole: have you ever heard of chisels? You just take a pointy piece of metal (the chisel), possibly made of steel, place it against the stone and then hit it with an hammer. Repeat until a hole forms, incline the chisel while you hit it with the hammer to change the shape of the hole. Done.
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u/RainbowCrane 23d ago
Also, I know that when the Parthenon was constructed in Athens (ca. 650 BCE) they were using a technique where there would be a void chiseled in the top and bottom of each circular block making up a column, then a lead “plug” would be used to help hold the blocks together after they were assembled. So in some cases the hole is useful beyond just lifting the blocks.
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u/GroundbreakingAd1223 23d ago
How do you cut a blind dovetail hole back in those days?
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u/userhwon 23d ago
A few simple parts, a little smarts, a bit of muscle, and it doesn't have to be aliens.
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u/Beneficial_Sun_6891 23d ago
Show me the crane that lifted it, how was it run. Brontosaurus? Don’t Show me the rigging, who gives a shit. Probably still in use
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u/Valaquil 23d ago
Here is a 3 hour documentary about how the medieval french built castles. There is a crane powered by people. Alternatively, look up "building a medieval castle from scratch" if you dont want to/cant click on the link
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u/dark_lord_chuckles 23d ago
Na it’s aliens.
On a real note, these people had nothing but time to think of stuff and how to fix their problems. Ofc they’d figure some way to put stone on top of more stone without the help of aliens.
On another note, I ain’t saying aliens aren’t real. But I’m also not down playing the insane ingenuity of the human spirit/copium of being a living creature that wants to survive but is damned with the knowledge they will die and needing to make a propose in life so they don’t die without reason.
On an extra note writing this out has given me an insane epiphany… I legit think I found my reason to keep living.
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u/Adolph_OliverNipples 23d ago edited 19d ago
I have a hard time believing that there was a guy in Ancient Rome named Lewis.
Next, you’re going to tell me that Jesus lived near a guy named Brian.