You have farkers with PHDs trying to figure out how the ancients built The Great Wonders of the World and this guy uses "sticks and stones" plus some gravity.

I wonder how the lintels were placed, though. The see-saw jack approach seems like it would be both difficult and dangerous to execute up to a height like that.

It also appears that the movement technique requires a hard base on which to work. Not a lot of concrete pads around Stone Henge.

This is interesting. However, I think at Stonehenge, they used inclines, since it's fairly easy to shovel dirt (when you have enough slave labor). That would also allow the use of the the see-saw. Or a continuous carpet of well-rounded logs.

What people tend to forget is that the folks who built the pyramids and stonehenge and all that were JUST AS SMART as us; just as much brainpower, just not as much engineering history to draw from.

Most people seem to think something along the lines of "so easy a CAVEMAN could do it." Implying that paleolithic folks were the mental equivalent of monkeys or perhaps chimpanzees.

In fact, in terms of ingenuity, I'll bet the average caveman had to exercise his or her mental abilities a great deal more than modern humans do. So perhaps they were actually SMARTER, in a way.

Yes, the lack of wide hard surfaces in those days were few so it would be a challenge to figure out how to move those blocks in a similar fashion on grasslands.

You're spot on Leber.

@LeberMac: Well, that is a given, obviously (although our brain wiring has in fact change to reflect the increased amount of information we tend to be exposed to). I'm not sure about whether they were smarter or not, but probably more adapted to a life in constant danger (starvation, violent death, sickness), whereas we are more adapted to solve problems not directly related to our survival.

Engineering history leads to sufficient nutrients, the presence of which leads to increased brain power.