We either need to stop underestimating ancient cultures or it's time we
rule out primitive tools and hop on the alien bandwagon. These five
ancient structures were not built by loincloth-wearing savages...
Derinkuyu's Massive, Ancient Underground City
Derinkuyu's underground city was discovered in the 1960s in Turkey,
when a modern house above ground was being renovated. Much to the relief
of everyone present, the
18-story underground city was abandoned and not swarming with mole people.
Hidden for centuries right under everyone's noses, Derinkuyu is just
the largest of hundreds of underground complexes built by
we're-not-sure-who-exactly around the eighth century B.C. To understand
just what's so phenomenal about this feat of engineering, imagine
someone handing you a hammer and chisel and telling you to go dig out a
system of underground chambers
capable of sustaining 20,000 people.
And not one of those fancy modern chisels, either -- we're talking
about something dug with whatever excavating tools they had 2,800 years
ago.
The city was probably used as a giant bunker to protect its inhabitants
from either war or natural disaster, but its architects were clearly
determined to make it the most comfortable doomsday bunker ever. It had
access to fresh flowing water -- the wells were not connected with the
surface to prevent poisoning by crafty land dwellers. It also has
individual quarters, shops, communal rooms, tombs, arsenals, livestock,
and escape routes. There's even a
school, complete with a study room.
Hypogeum of Hal-Saflieni: Unexplainable Acoustics
On the island of Malta is a prehistoric underground megalithic
structure known awesomely as the Hypogeum of Hal-Saflieni. It was
discovered by accident in 1902 when some workers were digging a hole and
broke through the ceiling. Oh, and they also found about
7,000 skeletons all clustered near the entrance.
The three-level underground structure is made entirely out of
megalithic stones, and was built who knows when. What surprised people
even more was when they found out that
male voices could reverberate throughout the entire complex if
the person was standing in a certain spot. But here's the kicker -- the
effect only worked if the speaking voice was in the 95 to 120 Hz range,
so women's voices don't usually generate the same effect.
It gets weirder: If you're a man chanting at roughly the 110 Hz
frequency, the entire temple complex turns into this bizarre
trance-inducing room that seems
able to stimulate the creative center of the human brain.
Simply put, by merely standing inside that temple complex while someone was chanting in the proper location, you actually
enhanced your religious experience.
And that's all we really know about this place. We have no idea who
built it or how they pulled it off. All we know for certain is that they
had a knowledge of acoustics that is still baffling scientists to this
very day.
The Ancient Marib Dam: Worked For Thousands Of Years
Yemen is a country rich in dust and poor in water, which is why in ancient times the empire that controlled it, the Sabaens,
built a great dam in 750 B.C.
The dam, which was cheated out of being one of the "official" Seven
Wonders of the World, was nevertheless regarded one of the greatest
feats of engineering of the pre-industrial age. After all, building a
dam isn't like putting a bunch of stone monoliths in a big circle. You
have to have canals, gates, sluices, and spillways, and the whole thing
has to be waterproof.
The Sabaens managed all this before the existence of concrete, and
their dam stood for over 1,000 years. In comparison, modern dams built
with our advanced technology
last for around 50 years, or 100 if they're really something.
The Great Dam of Marib was about 2,000 feet long (almost twice as long
as the puny Hoover Dam), and while it stood, it converted ancient Yemen
into a fertile oasis, what was then known as the kingdom of Sheba (of
"Queen of Sheba" fame). Because everything has to fall down
eventually, the dam finally burst around 600 A.D., bringing down much of
the agriculture system and converting the area into the sandy fun park
it is today.
Pumapunku: Complex Interlocking Stones
Pumapunku is
a city built by the Tiwanaku people of ancient Bolivia. What sets it
apart from just any old ancient city is the almost weird precision of
the stonework that would make modern builders envious.
Using crude technology, they pioneered a kind of construction that used
hundreds of large, identical building blocks to make buildings like you
and I would make a house out of LEGO. To make cuts as straight and
precise today, we'd reach for some kind of laser cutter. They used
chisels and rulers.
To keep the buildings structurally sound, they even used a form of
metal I-cramps similar to what we would use today to keep the giant
blocks in place in case of an earthquake.
These aren't just little cinder blocks, either. The largest of the stones is
25 feet long and 17 feet wide,
and has been estimated to weigh around 130 tons (for comparison, that's
only around 20 or so standard semi trailers). Yet somehow, with no
technologies like wheels, cranes, or even a writing system, the Tiwanaku
people moved these giant rocks to the Pumapunku site and shaped them
into perfect, complex forms.
Like all good mystery civilizations, the Tiwanaku eventually vanished,
but their work was so impressive that the next empire to come along, the
Inca,
thought they were gods and that Pumapunku was the center of the world.
Gobekli Tepe: Built Before Humans Grew Food
Back in the 1960s, surveyors in Turkey found an ancient buried complex
composed of huge stone pillars arranged in a circle like Stonehenge,
some of them 30 feet tall. What really knocked the monocles out of their
eyes, however, was that this was much older than Stonehenge ... 6,000
years older!
So those massive, ornate limestone pillars were carefully carved from a
nearby quarry using hunks of flint rock and their bare hands. Having
been dated to around 9000 B.C., Gobekli Tepe is thought to be the
oldest human construction.
That's further back than any of the ancient sites you learned about in
history class. In fact, it's in the Stone Age, where the only things we
knew how to build were likely to fall over in a stiff breeze.
In fact, the site even predates agriculture, which means that the
people who built it were still chasing mammoths rather than planting
crops. Discovering that this complex of massive stone pillars was
actually built by Encino Man, as
National Geographic puts it, "
was like finding that someone had built a 747 in a basement with an X-Acto knife."
And this doesn't make much sense, because conventional knowledge has
always been that humans didn't start building things until after we
learned how to farm.
Given that excavations turned up a whole lot of bones at the site,
probably from animal sacrifices, archaeologists are pretty sure that it
was a religious site, which seems to indicate that it was religion, not
agriculture, that first inspired people to build giant structures.
Today is - Quacker Day 
The winter storm that hit the American South has been particularly bad in Birmingham, Alabama. The city simply doesn't 
