Egyptians OBVIOUSLY worked granite [REDUX]

Context for anyone who missed the first video: I basically released this same video a week earlier where I asked the same questions but they were phrased differently because I was questioning the idea that Egyptians couldn't work granite at all. Some in the comments thought that I was taking the weakest interpretation of the idea that Egyptians inherited some monuments. So I went away, thought about and reworded the questions.

Milo couldn’t have possibly made this video, he simply inherited it

I'm a blacksmith and tool historian. Working any rock is easy, but especially granite since it's a igneous rock with varying grain sizes. If the statues were made of chalcedony, that would be a head scratcher.....but it's just granite and granite cuts granite, so does any harder rock, including sand.

As a mason it really ticks me off too when I hear people talk about aliens building great pyramids or the stonework in Peru. It’s really good stonework but it’s not impossible stonework

That father/son funerary monument was breathtaking not only in detail but also the context. One of the most literal examples of a snapshot in time I've seen from any pre-photography society.

I took a class where we made a metabasalt Celt using only stone tools and sand as an abrasive. I finished in under two days. I made a nephrite pendant with a bow drill and feldspar as an abrasive. Nephrite is one of the hardest toughest stones worked by our ancestors all over the world. The kind of person who says it had to be aliens greatly underestimates the fact that for ninety-five percent of our history we made and used stone tools. In that time humans became expert in the properties of stone and how to work it. If the armchair experts would get out of their chairs and do a little physical labor and experimental archeology they would see that with the patience of those who didn't have diamond drills and electricity to make things easily and fast made those beautiful things without alien help. It's that simple.

It would be a better YouTube if every content provider was as diligent yet humble as you, Stefan. No need to say more. Thanks for what you produce.

Not only could the Egyptians move the obelisk, but obviously the Romans were able to as well given how they relocated it to Rome, thus the ability to move very large objects around in antiquity cannot be disputed.

Great video Stefan, I feel your frustration. I was lucky enough to do a lot of travelling over 2016/17 and unfortunately even with the evidence staring people in the face, they refuse to believe people are and were capable of such construction. At Ollantaytambo in Peru, there are the famous stone walls that you cannot fit a piece of paper between. Tourists were ignoring the guides saying "look around you" at all of the walls they had built leading up to this one - you could see clear progression of skill. Instead tourists were talking very loudly about how no one really knows the truth and its quite clearly impossible for humans to create this. It's a massive disservice to the ability and ingenuity of human beings who would have dedicated years to their craft and used thousands of people for these mega constructions.

The nonsense argument "even today we can't reproduce this work" neglects the fact that we have no one alive today who comes from an uninterrupted tradition of stonework, nor do we have anyone willing to devote their entire lives to the work.

The over arcing theme if this video is Stefan was trying to get his 10,000 steps in. Great video as always.

I didn't even realize that this was an issue people insisted on fixing. We've been working stone for hundreds of thousands of years. Surely it's believable that we got really good at it eventually.

I feel like as educational science youtubers, we have an obligation to debunk certain topics every few months.

In case you do a sequel for this video, here's another question you can throw in: Where is all the Atlanteans' regular stuff? Where are their graves, their non-monumental ordinary settlements, their pottery, trash middens, tools, weapons, and so on? We can find all these things for other cultures (including the Egyptians)--and even for sparse camps of Neanderthal hunter-gatherers. Why would the Younger Dryas cataclysm be sooooo selective that it would wipe out every single trace of the Atlanteans (aside from Cool Stuff made from stone), but leave tools and campsites of Homo erectus intact? Small tribes of hominids left more evidence than a global advanced civilization, really?

This would be tangential to your normal topics, but a video in the evolution of stone-working techniques over time would be super cool

Judging by how many people can be engaged in moving an object, and recent experiences in North Korea of a friend of mine who installed a Gondola with no heavy equipment, he says the following, "Humans have absolutely no trouble moving anything under 50-tons, no matter where it is going. Once it gets over 1,000 tons, things get difficult, but not impossible."

When someone says: "I don't understand how did they make that?", I say "You don't know how your computer works, but you use it and you don't praise aliens for that!"

the biggest problem I have with the reasoning about the Egyptians not working granite is a lack of imagination and cost of labor. it is weird to think that a preexisting culture could do something that a latter one would then be completely unable to figure out. really these people don't understand hand work and that a large amount of labor hours being spent on making objects was normal. it didn't matter how slow the process was as long as progress could be made. the ancients worked long days every day pretty much. not 40 hour work weeks.

Sometimes, this kind of thorough work is really taken for granite.

Technology moved slowly in those times. So imagine generations and generations of human beings today, all using basically the same tools and medium. Imagine how deep the knowledge of sculping the same material over and over and over again for generations. Their minds and dexterity were just as great as ours. They are the same humans.