A new bestselling book claims that ancient Egyptians exploited birds and anti-gravity devices to lift the stones of the pyramids....

Question

A new bestselling book claims that ancient Egyptians exploited birds and anti-gravity devices to lift the stones of the pyramids. The evidence consists of several hieroglyphs, as below, that purport to show this technique. As well, the author claims that ancient Egyptians could not have lifted the stones on their own, since no person can pick up one of the stones today, so it must have been with bird help. You suspect pseudo-science. As a skeptical scientist, what should you look for to help you decide whether to reject this idea as pseudo-archaeology, or whether it represents a valid scientific theory that should be tested with further data collection?

Answer 1

The Egyptians were great scientists, that is true, however I can not see this theory of the use of birds and antigravity devices to lift stones. It is fun to come up with pseudo science theories like this, and the Egyptian civilations makes it easy to create them. Pseudo science, however, is not hard to write as it rarely acknowledges the historical and scientific facts that already exist. These would need to be disproved before attempting to prove its own thesis. Therefore, in order to disprove this weird bird theory all you have to do is point to known historic and scientific facts that cant be disproved by any new pseudo science. 3 big ones come to mind.

First, The majority of birds in Egypt that would be big enough to carry stones, are either birds of prey, or large water birds. Birds of prey, like hawks arent known for being able to do what this author explains. The larger and more domestic water birds, that might be able to lift something with their size, is unfortunately hampered by the fact that they have flat feet, like ducks, that cant pick up items. Also the stones on the pyrmids are about as tall as a man in some areas. No bird on earth could carry a stone that large.

Second, if we are to believe a anti gravity device has some power to make something leave the ground, we must also conclude this is one step towards flight. Now the egyptians were scholars, and a civilaization that took pride in wrtiing and documentation. They had scrfibes with the osle purpose of documenting their scientific and engineering marvels. The fact these devices were only used here and not carried on throughout EGyotian and human history with the help of scribes and future engineers puts an end to this story.

Third, and most important, we already know how people got those stones from the mine to the pyramids. People have actually reenacted the event too in order to show it could work. The pyramid was only partialy built by slave labor; the percentage of slave workforce shrinks every year now due to new research. Therefore, these men were educated and knew what they were doing. The people in charge were also the brightest minds in the world. We now know they used specialy made sleds to slide he rocks from the mine to site, where they would be made to fit the pyramid and them pulled up into place. It took time, but they were definitely to do it without birds.

So all we needed to do in order to prove this pseudo science wrong was to show scientific facts (birds abilities) and historic facts (how they moved the stones) and state that their existance disallows that radical theory to stand.