Give our ancestors more credit

I was listening to an episode of Jim Harold's Paranormal Podcast titled Ancient Aliens Debunked, and it got me thinking about the whole ancient astronaut theory again.  In the podcast, Jim interviews Chris White about his documentary titled Ancient Aliens Debunked.  I didn't feel the need to watch the whole documentary because I don't put a lot of stock in the ancient astronaut theory in the first place.  I'm not completely closed minded to the possibility of ancient aliens visiting earth, but a lot of theories put forward on the TV show Ancient Aliens are just silly to me.  My main interest in the show is the ancient anomalies they present, not their analysis of them.

So what is an alternative theory to explain the mysteries presented in Ancient Aliens?  You can simply replace the aliens with our ancestors.  I don't think we give our ancestors enough credit.

And I think part of the reason we don't give our ancestors enough credit is due to failure on the part of our academic establishment to properly interpret our early ancient and prehistoric history.  The modern academic establishment is controlled by an atheistic paradigm that believes evolution explains the history of the world and because of that, the idea that advanced civilizations existed in prehistoric times just doesn't fit into their interpretation of history.  So they end up ignoring things that don't fit with their worldview or attempting to explain them away in someway that does fit it.  And what happens when that happens?  The ancient mysteries don't get explained, so theories like the ancient astronaut theory develop to fill the void.

But it need not be so overly complex.  We don't need aliens to explain the mysteries, we just need to realize our prehistoric history isn't a cut and dry story of progression from primitive hunter gatherers to the jet flying, car driving, computer using people we are today.  You can see the history of civilization in the world today...not everyone is like us.  There are still people living in small, simple farming communities as well as people who live in tribal communities.  If you were writing a book about modern society, you wouldn't base your whole book on people living in the Congo or Amazon jungle.  And I don't think our history books should be solely based around the idea that all prehistoric people lived in primitive tribal communities.  I think the world before the flood (or before the last ice age, for any of you who don't want to believe the hundreds of flood stories from around the world) may have been a very different place than what we have been taught in school.  I think that some of those prehistoric civilizations may be underwater now (I've written about that in more detail here).  There is a lot of evidence of prehistoric sophistication, and none of the ancient anomalies presented in Ancient Aliens is all that mysterious if you consider that some people in the prehistoric past were actually very advanced.  We didn't need aliens to teach us how to develop our modern technologies (although some people may think that is debatable), so maybe prehistoric people didn't need aliens either.

The so-called 'gods' of the ancients were probably just humans.  It's possible the mythologies were just fiction, but I think it is more likely that they were based on real people (I've written about that here).  The 'gods' were probably just a prehistoric nobility, or an ancient class of the "1%".  Maybe they had advanced technologies that they used to their advantage to set themselves up over everyone else.  Their technology may have seemed magical to those that didn't understand it.  If the people of the cargo cults of World War II thought that they could gain the material wealth of the advanced people (the Allies) by creating religious rituals, who's to say an advanced prehistoric culture couldn't have had the same effect on a primitive prehistoric culture?  The Allies, who were dropping off supplies on Pacific islands, were not even trying to portray themselves as gods....imagine if they had actually tried to convince the islanders they were some kind of gods!

Eventually these prehistoric aristocrats gave way to ancient priesthoods who claimed to have a connection with the prehistoric aristocrats, or 'gods'.  If I am correct in that the 'gods' were actually real people, then the original 'gods' probably just died and later people created a priesthood that claimed to have a continued connection with the 'gods' and maintained their power through charisma, fear, parlor tricks, or any combination of the three.  From that point on, we have written accounts of history that we can track fairly accurately.

Napoleon Bonaparte said "history is a set of lies people have agreed upon."  I think Napoleon was being overly cynical in that statement, but it is true that history is a matter of perspective.  It's often been said that history is told by the winners.  That I can agree with.  Today we have the cliche that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."  And in the political world, various subjects are debated every day.  It's all a matter of perspective.  If we can't even agree on our current events today, then why should we act as though history is all agreed upon?  The history we are taught is just someone's perspective of it.  Even with contemporary historical accounts, you are only getting the perspective of the writer.  Modern writers of history are merely basing their version of events on whatever evidence they can find about a period of time that they themselves didn't even live through.  We shouldn't assume they know the whole story.

So am I right about this?  I don't know, I'm only speculating.  I'm not completely closed minded to the possibility of ancient astronauts, but I do think it's unlikely.  I also think it's possible the 'gods' were purely fictitious creations by ancient priesthoods.  But I do think when you consider all the ancient anomalies out there, the mysteries are better explained when you consider the possibility that they were built or designed by people of an advanced prehistoric civilization.   It was all a very long time ago though, and I really don't know the answer, but I am free to speculate.  And I suppose that's probably why I am a blogger instead of a professor.  I like to consider the possibilities and don't want to feel as though I have to mold my view of history to fit into someone else's established curriculum.  I'd like to know all the answers, but I'm fairly content just keeping an open mind to the possibilities.

King Solomon said there is nothing new under the sun.  Perhaps that was more true than even he imagined.  And maybe it is more true than even we have imagined.