The Puzzle of Ancient Man: Advanced Technology in Past Civilizations? By Donald E. Chittick

I have read two books this year that have opened my eyes to a different reality of ancient man. The first book is 1491: New Revelations about the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann and The Puzzle of Ancient Man by Donald E. Chittick. Both books overlap in their factual analysis, but 1491 clearly is presented from a secular world view while Puzzle connects with the ancient records of Genesis and a Christian world view. In essence both men bring forth archaeological evidence that points towards mans devolution from an advanced technological society to a primitive one in ancient times. Just a few examples are the building of stone cities in the mountains of Peru where the rocks that were cut and put into place have weights that exceed the capacity of any modern cranes and are high enough that workers today would need to be on supplemental oxygen just to be able to exert themselves. Another example is that worldwide phenomena of pyramid building with them lining up with astronomical observations. Navigation computers and even small models of what look like airplanes have been discovered. What does it mean and how should it be interpreted? Certainly one idea that would be supported by uniformitarian naturalism would be the advancement and recession of civilization through local ecological disasters or wars. Mass displacement of people, chaos, and epidemics certainly do their share of slowing the development of a society down. So does mass migration although people typically bring their know-how and technology with them if at all possible. Another direction this may go is a worldwide disaster such as the flood described in Genesis where all but a few were saved while most of the world and their knowledge were wiped out at once. In this scenario, the world does rebuild and then in scattered by God from Mesopotamia to all points of the compass through the scrambling of languages. This would explain in part both a great loss of previous knowledge and a scattering of the same knowledge over the globe by migrating peoples. In either case, it seems that the facts lead to the idea that man’s great technological advancement of today is not totally new ground, but ground that has been plowed at least once before.