Need a virtual vacation? Go exploring in the wide expanses of the Pacific and learn about the cultures that learned how to travel thousands of miles across open water, centuries before GPS, using the stars, wind, and waves.
There are three sorts of people; those who are alive, those who are dead, and those who are at sea. – Anacharsis
Ancient Aliens is one of those infuriating shows to those who have studied ancient history. The premise of the show is that the ancients weren’t smart enough to build structures like the pyramids. So, in one of the most disconnected lines of reasoning ever, they must have had help from aliens.
The fact is, the ancients were smart. They had the same brains we have. The more we learn about them, the more we have realized this.
Because something is difficult to do, doesn’t make it impossible. We are so enamored with our electronic technology, we forget that humans used math and brain power, combined with physical strength, for many millennia.
To listen to some of the “experts” on Ancient Aliens, it’s as if they haven’t been to these sites, or if they have, they had blindfolds on. One of the funniest moments is when one is showing how perfect a block has been carved (supposedly beyond the ability of the ancients), but the camera shows his square revealing the block is far from perfect. That’s only one of many head-scratching moments revealed in this documentary, Ancient Aliens Debunked.
To be certain, there are many mysteries to be solved from ancient times. Much has been lost and every day we learn something new. The ancients left us much to learn in their structures, stories, and myths. Over the years, I have written here about those things, and integrated them into my books. Our ancestors left us history, knowledge, and warnings, to ponder.
The Navel of the World it is called. A speck on a map in the endless Pacific. Yet ancient people found it and erected some of the most iconic statues of the ancient world. Mysterious and solemn, the Moai stare, not out over the ocean, but inward. How the people of Easter Island – the Rapa Nui – built them and what happened to their culture has been debated for decades. The current issue of National Geographic details the current state of theorizing over this lost past.
In Jared Diamond’s Collapse, he championed the theory that Easter Island’s civilization collapsed largely due to their destruction of the island’s environment. Once forested, it is nearly empty of trees to this day. Other researchers, as chronicled in The Statues That Walked, lay out evidence that the environmental destruction wasn’t intentional, nor as widespread and not the final nail in their coffin.
As in the end of any culture, many factors were at work. It can be hard to pin the blame on any one as primary, as they often work in tandem.
Of course, the real question is will we learn from the past or suffer the same fate caused by the blindness of hubris?
For decades, the study of the settlement of the Americas has focused on entry through Alaska or, to a lesser extent, across the Atlantic. To look at the Pacific and its distant islands, it would seem ancient travel was “impossible.”
Yet we have known for decades that it is possible and did happen.
Most famously, the remote Easter Island is covered in hundreds of statues from a lost culture. Many other islands across the Pacific have ruins of structures, megaliths and statuary. Cultures who arrived in dugouts created all of this?
The diversity in American native cultures (especially South America) have led people to start re-examining the Pacific routes. We already know that certain foods and animals were introduced to the Americas this way. Now the attempt to discover who and how many of these people were there. Where did they come from? And how much of the legends of ancient America of travelers and light-skinned people are rooted in truth?
There are many studies of this out there, to start: Axis of the World traces peoples who crossed the Pacific, some possibly from India. The Statues that Walked zeros in on Easter Island, the possible remote last outpost of a dead civilization.
Are the Pacific ruins markers of a lost oceanic trail? Or are they remains of a destroyed Pacific civilization? Perhaps we will never know, but we do know something happened out there.
And on 
Darrick Dean 