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Ancient aliens literally has Nazi origins. They didn’t just have race-science, but race-history. I guess you could call their thinking ancient-Aryans because they believed that impressive structures built by brown people must have been led by a Northern European diaspora who eventually vanished because of race-mixing.

You can watch the History channel all you want, but nobody is going to question the Parthenon or the Colosseum. Stonehenge is the only one I can think of where Aliens had to help white people.

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CaptnNMorgan@reddthat.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The two things you named were built thousands of years after the pyramids are believed to have been built though. You said it yourself, people think aliens helped with Stonehenge. That’s because it’s much older and there is no written history from when it was built.

I don’t doubt racism is factor in all sorts of aspects in life but this seems like a massive fucking stretch. Maybe come up with better examples.

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- fossilesque@mander.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  hyperallergic.com/…/pseudoarchaeology-and-the-rac…
  
  Pseudoarchaeology has a pretty bad background due to the profession’s colonial roots with treasure hunters, adventurers, and the like, especially in antiquarian circles.
  
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_archaeology
  
  In the late 18th to 19th century archaeology became a national endeavor as personal cabinets of curios turned into national museums. People were now being hired to go out and collect artifacts to make a nation’s collection more grand and to show how far a nation’s reach extends. For example, Giovanni Battista Belzoni was hired by Henry Salt, the British consul to Egypt, to gather antiquities for Britain. In nineteenth-century Mexico, the expansion of the National Museum of Anthropology and the excavation of major archaeological ruins by Leopoldo Batres were part of the liberal regime of Porfirio Díaz to create a glorious image of Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past.[22]
  
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  - CaptnNMorgan@reddthat.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    So that’s great evidence for racism being in archeology in general but I still don’t see the connection between that and people crediting aliens for things we don’t completely understand.
    
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fossilesque@mander.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Yeah, and it is hard for many people to see the direct correlation because it isn’t hitting them in the face. I try to show people that people were smart back then, too, instead of punishing these icky mindsets because they tend to be a bit reactionary anyway. Some people just don’t know any better.

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