Oldest Structure at Puma Punku- Bolivia

brokenpower

brokenpower

Registered Senior Member
Pseduo-archaeology Alert: The following is a set of assertions regarding a real archaeological site, however the OP has chosen to rely on significance-junkies and mystery-mongers for his/her fantastic assertions. It is irrational to suggest that the culture of the site during the period it was occupied could not have fashioned it with the technology they possessed and this has been demonstrated vis-a-vis experimental archaeological techniques. I'll post more on it at a later time. -SkinWalker (an actual archaeologist and moderator)

I recently found some information on this very important structure and would like everyone opinion on it... i find it intriguing that such a structure has not come into the main stream since it seems near impossible that humans made it...

please only serious replies, and DO NOT send this to pseudoscience, because it is real and i have sources at the end of this post
the info is as follows:



Puma Punku is now understood to be at least 14,000 years old...which would make it the oldest essentially, right out of the stone age. "Cave men" were able to build the most sophisticated stone work the world has ever seen. 200-450 ton stones, made from Diorit, which is a material that can only be cut with diamonds. Even more impressive is the exact cuts they made in the stones, 1 cm deep, not one millimeter off from edge to edge. They also cut stone in such a perfect way so that they would be assembled like Legos, interlocking for premium strength. There are no trees around, so the crap they feed us about stones being rolled does not fit here. Some now speculate if they used some kind of metal to hold the stones together when in place. Not that the interlocking system wouldn't be enough...:shrug:

sources:


http://weeklyworldnews.com/alien-alert/6766/puma-punku/

http://www.world-mysteries.com/mpl_6.htm

http://www.goldenageproject.org.uk/42pumapunku.html
 
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Ummm, you are using the Weekly World News as a source? Their mascot is a half-man, half-bat hybrid child and they just published an apology from god Poseidon for all the recent pirate attacks.

http://weeklyworldnews.com/opinion/7707/poseidon-i-did-not-see-the-pirates-for-the-high-seas/

(Notice "bat-boy" in their masthead *and* in the corner of their picture of Poseidon.)

The other "sources" are no less flawed, but not as obviously the work of satirists in the way Weekly World News is.
 
The history channel also has a show called UFO hunters and they investigated this place.

the history channel is credible, they couldn't air it if it was complete bullshit.

Plus the pictures and footage do not lie.
 
The History Channel also has a show called Monster Hunters and used to run episodes of "In Search of" with Leonard Nimoy, and those, along with UFO Hunters are complete BS. The History Channel is actually not as credible source in and of itself.
 
It's not beyond the scope of what a civilization can do. There is a technique for fitting such stones that is still used today. You do a trial fit with chalk on the interface. When you remove the stone, the spot where it rested on the chalk represents the high points, which you chisel down. When the whole surface fits, it will be covered with chalk evenly. It certainly is alot of work, but free time is what agriculture and living in a civilization gives you.
 
but that doesn't explain how they would have NEEDED diamond tipped tools to cut the type of rock they used.
 
The wikipedia site cites that hammer and chisels could have been used. Diamond is hard, but hard materials are also brittle. I could smash a diamond with a regular hammer.
 
brokenpower said:
an abundance of different sources cannot be false.

but if you want more

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumapunku - the sources for this page also come from a published work.

http://www.archaeology.org/interactive/tiwanaku/project/pumapunku1.html
Click to expand...

I don't deny that the site exists, but take a look at your two new citatations, and you will see that they do assert that the buildings could have been made using traditional, non-mysterious techniques. The latter website describes the archeologists testing ways of moving large stone blocks using reed ships, ramps and levels:

http://www.archaeology.org/interactive/tiwanaku/project/experiment.html

Reading further from that source they indicate that the ruins were occupied from 500 to 950 A.D., not 14,000 B.C., and they note specifically that there were many crackpot theories that have been dispelled (including an "exaggerated age for the site (10,000 B.C.)"). Also your estimate of the size of the stones is apparently high, with the largest stones being 130 tons, rather than 200-450. Impressive in any event, but the inflation makes one wonder what other details are being exaggerated for effect.

http://www.archaeology.org/interactive/tiwanaku/history.html

Far from being "near[ly] impossible" that humans made it, you and your initial sources simply do not give enough credit to people and their ingenuity. The truth is that your first three sources are filled with far-fetched claims, and no one would rely on the Weekly World News as a source of anything save humor. That was my point. If you want to discuss something about the archeological site, the last source you gave seems to be based more on standard archeological evidence.
 
I think it was Archimedes who said that if you give me a long enough lever, I can move the Earth. You can certainly move large rocks around with levers if you want to, there's no mystery to that--besides, they were slave-owning societies, so there was no shortage of either slaves or POW's to do the heavy labour.
 
Thank you, Pandaemoni, for posting some actual information on this site. I'll try to post more on it later. In the meantime, I've edited the OP to include a pseudo-archaeology alert. I only added to the post and deleted nothing. My comment is in dark red and such a comment on a science board is the responsible thing to do since we are frequently visited by Googlers and the OP included misinformation.

Please contact me via PM if you have questions/concerns.
 
Even if this was built in 12000BCE, I don't quite understand the point of the OP. Civilization was, after all, founded in the Stone Age. The first cities were built of wood and stone. Duh?

But unless this structure is a permanent dwelling, then it does not represent an early transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic Era. We keep discovering human artifacts that were built by people in regions where agriculture had not yet been invented and who, therefore, were still nomadic hunter-gatherers. They may have been temples or mausoleums or simply fun places to come back to on their travels, but they don't elevate their builders beyond the Mesolithic. Only permanent settlements can do that, which are the precursors to cities.

I don't quite see this thread as belonging in Pseudoscience, but it hardly offers any paradigm-challenging discoveries. Another old structure built by people who didn't have houses. Like Stonehenge only older. Very interesting. But not a revolution in archeology, and no reason to rewrite history.
 
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im new here. the only reason i joined this site is to respond to this post. no, we'll never know what really happened. but all you naysayers havent provided any more evidence than the original guy who posted. skepticism in itself isnt science.

what is science is the moh hardness scale. yes, diamonds are not strong, they are brittle. but they are the hardest natural substance we know of right? and diamonds are the only thing hard enough to cut diorite with such precision. yes, obviously they could bang away with a soft metal chisel. they would have come up with something that looked like stonehenge. not perfectly machined 6mm grooves. and no, obviously the tools were not made completely of diamonds. did somebody actually write that? jesus. the fact stands that puma punku and teohuanaco are not only the oldest sites of their kind, theyre also the most technologically advanced. how does a stone age indian tribe with no writing do that? it doesnt have to be aliens but there is a mystery there to be solved. puma punku was not built with reed boats and log rollers. theres an 800,000 lb block there guys. come on. what puma punku proves is that there has been highly advanced technology on earth for much, much longer than is currently accepted. thats the real cover-up. exactly how long does your lever have to be to move an 800,000 lb block. ridiculous. dont let your skepticism put blinders on you.

the link that challenged the age of the site doesnt offer any scientific data. and just because a site was occupied by people at a later date, doesnt mean it was built at a later date. obviously, people are going to take advantage of an abandoned stone city. also, we're pretty darn good at being able to tell if there were ever trees in a place or not at this point
 
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the fact stands that puma punku and teohuanaco are not only the oldest sites of their kind, theyre also the most technologically advanced. how does a stone age indian tribe with no writing do that? it doesnt have to be aliens but there is a mystery there to be solved. puma punku was not built with reed boats and log rollers. theres an 800,000 lb block there guys. come on
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Technologically advanced societies don't use huge stone blocks just to put up a building.

Underestimating what people can do with leverage and smarts and a few simple tools is not an argument.

There isn't a stone on the planet that comes in 800k masses and can only be cut with diamond. One thing they could cut it with is itself, for example.
 
look guys, i understand. and im not discounting ancient peoples ingenuity. there are pyramids everywhere. why is this type of precision stone work only seen at puma punku if its so simple? just look at the pictures of the stonework. its unlike anything else. i have to rely on pics cuz ive never been there, but i dont think anybody else posting here has either.

no, we dont build with huge stones. it poses too many logistical problems compared to other materials. but mt. rushmore is the only thing americas made that will last. the rest of our highly "technological" infrastructure will crumble one day. our dams and bridges are already falling apart. the roman aqueducts still stand. teohuanaco and the pyramids arent goin anywhere any time soon. so who really builds the better buildings?

i dont discount ancient peoples ingenuity. i discount our own. science cant tell us what foods are good for us. they cant even tell us how long human have been here in modern form. its constantly getting pushed farther back. the moderator says im a real archaeologist. if anything, history has shown that scientists are wrong just as much as they are right. our understanding of the universe is finite and constantly changing. to just denounce a theory because it challenges current accepted beliefs isnt science. its decay and stagnation. we dont even know how many planets are in our solar system, yet the mayans created one of the most accurate calenders a couple thousand years ago. the flaw is blindly assuming that they did use simple stone tools and levers because thats all our minds can conceptualize. you place your own limitations on people who lived thousands of years ago without any concept of how they really lived. the blocks at puma punku were not cut with simple stone tools and blunt force. just look at them. theres nothing like it anywhere else in the world, yet everyone is convinced they used the same techniques as other peoples when other people have come up with nothing even close to that precision. theyre not working in marble here. once again, it doesnt have to be aliens, but just allow the possibility that more advanced techniques were used than hammer and chisel
 
eck said:
the flaw is blindly assuming that they did use simple stone tools and levers because thats all our minds can conceptualize.
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That's not at all why we assume they used stone tools and related technology. We assume they used such technology because that's all they had as far as we have any evidence of at all.

Our failure to be clever enough to figure out how they did this or that - and how many suitably experienced modern people have even tried to recreate their techniques? What you need is a guy like that retired civil engineer who can build Stonehenges by himself in his backyard with hand tools and a few months of clever labor, not a university trained archaeologist with a life experience of handling spreadsheets and pumping his own gas - is no basis for fantastic speculation with no other support.
 
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