Least Plausible Hypothesis
What is a fallacy? According to dictionary.com, a fallacy is, ‘a deceptive, misleading, or false notion, belief, etc.’ or ‘any of various types of erroneous reasoning that render arguments logically unsound.’ Basically, a fallacy is a thinking error, a line of reasoning that leads to an illogical conclusion. A fallacy is, above all things, a hallmark of the human condition in that we cannot help but fall victim to these thinking errors because they are a result of the natural flaws found within our perceptual processes.
The particular fallacy I wish to focus on here today is referred to as the Least Plausible Hypothesis fallacy which is very similar to the far-fetched hypothesis fallacy – which we will discuss upon a later date - in that it involves a lack of understanding of just what probability implies, leading the victim to accepting an unreasonable explanation for an event or phenomenon. The difference between the two being that the far-fetched one usually entails a believable even if highly unlikely explanation while the least plausible hypothesis usually involves an unrealistic explanation, often involving elements of the supernatural. In the realm of science there is a principle known as Occam’s Razor which goes something like this, “The simplest explanation for an event which uses the fewest assumptions is the preferred explanation up until which point that it can be disproven.”
Perhaps the best example of this fallacy is the disturbingly popular television series produced – ironically enough – by the History Channel, Ancient Aliens. Naturally, I’m not going to go through the entire series which I was surprised to discover has succeeded enough to warrant several seasons. Instead, I will be concentrating on one of the claims central to the Ancient Aliens hypothesis, the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza. According to the proponents of the hypothesis, the ancient Egyptians cannot have built the Great Pyramid themselves so that means…aliens must have been responsible.
Near the beginning of the show you see several urban construction sites in which modern technology in the form of sky cranes are being implemented, the narrator states, “In today’s largest construction sites and quarries, huge mega-machines are used to dig, cut, and lift stone. These man-made creatures dwarf their creators, and perform the work of thousands of men using modern hydraulic technologies. Without such equipment, builders could never construct modern skyscrapers. Yet, thousands of years ago, ancient civilizations were accomplishing the same work while accomplishing their monuments and temples using massive stones. These enormous blocks, many weighing in excess of 100 tons, would be a challenge even for today’s engineers. Yet thousands of years ago, people cut them out of solid rock, transported them for miles, and then lifted them precisely into place. But how?”
Time and time again the same implication is made, that the carving and moving of the stones used in construction of the Great Pyramid is impossible with the simple tools the Egyptians are known to have used, while the use of advanced technologies for which there is no evidence is either blatantly stated or, in the least, suggested as the only viable explanation for this nonexistent mystery.
Chris Dunn, author of Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt, is introduced while the narrator explains, “While searching several miles north of Giza at Abu Rawash, Dunn stumbled onto a clue when he spotted a granite block containing a deep cut.” Dunn goes into deeper detail concerning the event, “When I first saw it I just didn’t know what to make of it. And it was only after puzzling over it for days and sometimes waking up at 3 o’clock in the morning scratching my head and thinking ‘well, how did they make this cut?’. And finally, to realize that the only way they could actually have cut that thing was with a saw that was thirty-five feet in diameter.” The narrator continues, “The idea that ancient Egyptians used giant saws provoked much resistance from mainstream Archeologists. Dunn, however, was convinced.”
The narration is a bit misleading, here. Mainstream archeologists aren’t resistant to the idea that ancient Egyptians used saws, or even large saws. We know that they did because we have several of these in the artifact libraries, many of which were found in the quarries where the stones used to build the Great Pyramid were cut and carved. What they’re resistant to is Dunn’s wholly unfounded claim that the only way the marks could have been made was with a rotary saw thirty-five feet in diameter. There are several ways they could have pulled it off, including using the saws that we know they had. Dunn’s problem isn’t that he’s a rogue thinking outside the box of mainstream archeology, as the narration tries to suggest, but the fact that he suffers from the willed ignorance fallacy. This thinking error involves the refusal to change one’s mind, refusing to take into account any countering evidence, or ignoring the massive lack of supporting evidence, simply in order to maintain one’s original beliefs. Dunn wants to believe that the construction of the pyramids required advance technology and so he will maintain that belief at any cost, thankfully most mainstream archeologists don’t suffer from this fallacy.
The narrator continues later on, “Did they cut these massive stone blocks with hammers, chisels, and copper wire, as mainstream archeology suggests? Or did ancient civilizations possess advanced technologies that have since been lost to science?” This is reinforced with statements by television personality Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, “The reason why I am convinced that sophisticated technology was utilized in these ancient rocks is because if we go to a stone quarry today, and look at the scope of machinery required to accomplish similar things, those machines are huge.” But the narrator already explained earlier on that such machines ‘do the work of thousands of men’. True, the Egyptians did not have modern machinery but they did have thousands of men. Basically, Tsoukalos can’t imagine our ancestors pulling this off with their simpler tools and so assumes that means that they couldn’t.
Further into the episode, lecturer and author of The Egyptian Code, Robert Bauval declares, “We’re supposed to accept that the people who built the pyramids did not have the wheel, did not have the pulley, did not have iron, in fact they had nothing but brutal manpower and pieces of strings. The context does not fit the evidence.” The catch here being, they didn’t just have string, they had ropes, they also had sledges, ramps and levers, all of which are alternatives to the wheel and pulley.
The finale of the opening bit ends with the narrator asking, “But how?” as if the answer were somehow a mystery when it’s not. It can be difficult to wrap one’s head around the enormous effort required to achieve the construction of such monuments, but that is not proof that it was impossible as this question insinuates.
So, what is it that mainstream archeology believes and why? To answer that we’ll first have to go to the ancient rock quarries near Aswan where we’ll find several artifacts used in the production of the carved stones used in the construction of the Great Pyramid. Scattered throughout the quarries are large orbs carved out of the exceptionally strong stone diorite. Many simple tools have been discovered here including copper chisels and three basic styles of copper saw: a smaller handheld single man saw, a larger two man saw similar to those used by early 20th century lumberjacks, and a tube-like saw used for making holes. Something that is also found in abundance are the marks left by these simple tools. Here and there you can still see the ochre marks indicating the lines the workers were to cut along.
What you don’t find is any evidence of advanced alien technology, much less any thirty foot rotary saws, hence, why any suggestion of such devices provokes “much resistance from mainstream archeologists”. Dunn states that the giant saw is ‘the only way’ they could have pulled this off but mainstream archeology knows after inspecting the many stone quarries of ancient Egypt and the countless projects in various stages of development found therein – including the famous unfinished obelisk – that our ancestors were perfectly capable of pulling all of it off with the tools and utensils we know they had.
First, the workers would drill a line of holes into the relatively soft sandstone using the tube-like copper saws. Next, they placed wooden poles into the holes before pouring water in, causing the wood to become saturated and begin expanding, eventually the stone formed a crack along the line of the wooden posts. With the crack in place, and the line of holes used as starting points, one need only begin expanding it by use of copper chisels and saws. With all sides cracked and expanded. Finally, all that is left is the final side which is chiseled away as deep as possible before levers were used to bust it free from the bedrock.
This newly freed stone would barely resemble the finished product at this stage, being little more than a massive chunk of rock. The newly freed block of stone could be transported through the quarries, which were conveniently located on the shores of the Nile where transportation boats awaited, by rolling it on top of the diorite orbs. After being transported to a carving station, the block would first be carved into the basic desired shape and finally sanded down into smooth faces and the product was finished, at which point it was loaded onto the awaiting boat and shipped along the Nile to the construction site at the Giza plateau.

In the above diagram, you see a rendering of the Giza plateau as it likely looked around the time the pyramids were built. The plateau was divided into two major zones, the pyramid zone and the production complex, one of these zones is mentioned in the Ancient Aliens episode and one is not. The Pyramid zone consists of Menkaure's pyramid (17), Khufu’s pyramid or the Great pyramid (18), Khafre’s pyramid and, of course, you also have the Sphinx (23), then there are the various temples such as the pyramid’s mortuary temples (21), the valley temples (22), and the Sphinx temple (24), finally there are the causeways leading up to the temples, all of these are mentioned at some point in the Ancient Aliens series, usually repeating how large the stones are and how there’s no way our ancestors could have built these structures alone. The section that isn’t mentioned in the series is the production zone, which is strange since it is so central to the construction of the pyramid zone.
Separating the two zones is the Wall of the Crow (1) with its massive 33-foot-high gate (2) as well as the smaller enclosure wall (3) which bends around to run parallel with streets, broken only by its west gate (4). Within the complex, you find several different buildings including the manor house which likely housed the construction foreman, gatehouses (6), the hypostyle hall (7) with its column supported roof believed to have served as a dining hall, the as of yet unexcavated buttressed building (8), the western compound (13), more than a dozen bakeries (14) where huge loaves of bread were baked in bell shaped jars in order to feed the workers, a copper works (15), with coal and ash still in its clay hearth, where copper tools could be produced or repaired. All of these buildings were separated by several streets and corridors including North street (9), Main street (10), South street (11), and Wall street (12). Scattered throughout are countless galleries consisting of living spaces with small workrooms attached where many of the workers were housed. Perhaps most important is the man-made harbor (16) where the boats carrying the carved stones from the quarries would dock. All in all, the production complex is believed to have housed upwards of 20,000 workers.
One of the points often neglected by the Ancient Aliens series is that among the countless inventions accredited to the Egyptians – from some of the first forms of toothpaste, toothbrushes, and breath mints to lighthouses, paved roads, and prosthetic limbs – the one invention central to this matter is that of organized labor. Counter to the popular belief, these laborers were not slaves. According to Mark Lehner, the man currently in charge of the excavation of the production zone, “I think we think slaves because of our inherited biblical and classical traditions. It is hard for us— used to such individual liberty and wage — to conceive of life in a more traditional society. We cannot assume they reacted, acted, thought, and felt the way we do about obligations to the greater community.” This is inspired by the graffiti found throughout the production zone, not on public display but in areas not meant to be seen by passersby, reading ‘Friends of Khufu’ and ‘Drunkards of Menkaure’ – not what is expected to be written by master loathing slaves.
Lehner tries to imagine how these people lived, “From tomb scenes, we infer they wore wool or linen kilts for most of the year. They used copper and stone tools. They ate emmer-wheat bread, lentils, honey, fish, sheep, pig, and goat, and drank beer.” Zahi Hawass, Director of the Pyramids, has discovered the graves of over 600 laborers and the tombs of artisans and supervisors, the bones inside of which reveal still more about these hard-working people who generally died in their thirties. They show signs of mended breaks, fractures, and even healed amputations suggestive of the kind of medical care not generally afforded to mere slaves. In the tombs of the supervisors are perhaps the most interesting inscriptions which actually describes the organization of the labor workforce: all in all there were two crews consisting of about 2,000 workers, each divided into ‘gangs’ of 1,000 which were themselves separated into five ‘clans’ of 200 which were divided still into groups of around 20 workers employed according to their skill setting and directed by a project leader.
Back to the point, the boats carrying the carved stones from the quarries would dock at the harbor where the stones would be rolled onto wooden sledges – no, they didn’t have wheels but a sledge works even better than a cart – which made travelling the distance across the sand from the harbor to the construction site much easier. True they didn’t have any kind of pulley system but they did have ramps and levers and rope, not just string. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, “This pyramid was made like stairs, which some call steps and others, tiers. When this, its first form, was completed, the workmen used short wooden logs as levers to raise the rest of the stones; they heaved up the blocks from the ground onto the first tier of steps; when the stone had been raised, it was set on another lever that stood on the first tier, and the lever again used to lift it from this tier to the next. It may be that there was a new lever on each tier of steps, or perhaps there was only one lever, quite portable, which they carried up to each tier in turn.” By starting with the capstone at the top and making their way down, the workers were able to lift those enormous stones bit by bit up the sides of the pyramids using simple ramps and levers.
Aside from the various sites unearthed over the years, filled with the evidence and artifacts already mentioned, and accounts of ancient historians, we also have pictures painted on papyrus and engraved on tomb walls by the Egyptians where we find depictions of the pyramid construction process using all of the simple tools that have been found. We see nothing even remotely resembling aliens or the use of advanced technology. Contrary to what Robert Bauval claims, the context does fit the evidence, better yet it also coincides with the known facts.
Even at this point the Ancient Aliens hypothesis is crumbling apart but why stop here?
Later on in the episode, the narrator explains, “Subscribers to the Ancient Aliens [hypothesis] do not believe that extraterrestrials built these amazing monuments but instead provided some type of technological know-how or tools to our ancestors.” Once again, this neglects a great deal of available evidence. We actually have several monuments scattered throughout Egypt which reveal process of development beginning with the mastaba and ending with the true pyramid design, a developmental period running between the Early Dynastic Period and the Old Kingdom (about 3150 BC to 2589 BC).
At this point in time the wealthier of individuals, not just royalty, would construct what Egyptologists refer to as a mastaba – the Egyptians themselves referred to them as pr-djt meaning ‘eternal house’ – for their final resting place. Originally these were built out of bricks made of sundried mud but later on carved stone began to replace the brick work. These were usually fairly simple structures, the exterior being rectangular in shape with sloping sides similar to pyramids, while the interior involved two chambers sunk down into the bedrock, one for the deceased themselves and the other stocked with furniture, clothing, food, and jewelry, anything the individual required to live the afterlife in comfort. Even after the Pharoes began constructing pyramids, the social elite continued building mastabas for themselves until the New Kingdom (1550 BC) when their construction became more and more rare before ceasing altogether.
Next, we have the step pyramid of Djoser constructed during the 3rd dynasty of the Old Kingdom (2667 BC – 2648 BC). Essentially this looks like several mastabas of varying size stacked one atop the other. Unlike later pyramids with square foundations, this pyramid retained the rectangular shape of the mastaba. The design of this new form of tomb is accredited to a man named Imhotep, one of the only Egyptian commoners who, upon death, became deified – meaning he joined the pantheon of gods as a lesser god of medicine. This structure was also one of the first large scale buildings constructed of carved stone, originally clad in polished white limestone as the later pyramids would be. This pyramid was only a part of a much larger complex whose size rivaled that of most small towns, including several courts, a temple, and the burial chamber itself.
Then there’s the three pyramids of Pharaoh Sneferu, founder of the 4th dynasty of the Old Kingdom, reigning between 2613 BC to 2589 BC. We see some major architectural changes made across these three pyramids due to issues in structural integrity resulting at last in the design of the true pyramid. The Meidum Pyramid was designed by one of Imhotep’s successors and construction started under Huni, the last of the 3rd Dynasty Pharoas, before being taken over by Sneferu. During the second stage of construction, the steps were filled in with carved limestone to create smooth sides. Consequently, the limestone casing was built on sand instead of bedrock like the original step pyramid beneath it, this is likely why the pyramid began to collapse during construction, ending the project. The mortuary temple discovered beneath the rubble had walls that were only partially polished, steles which usually carry the name of the deceased were found blank, and the wooden supports in the unfinished burial chamber were left in place. This event is believed to have taken place while Sneferu was constructing his second pyramid. The Bent Pyramid gets its name from the fact that the sides of the bottom half rise at a 54 degree angle like the Meidum Pyramid whose collapse seems to have inspired a change in the architecture midway through, going from a 54 degree angle to a 43 degree angle giving the sides a ‘bent’ look. Having learned from his original mistakes, Sneferu’s third pyramid, known as the Red Pyramid, is the first successful attempt at constructing a ‘true’ smooth sided pyramid with its sides built at a 43 degree angle. It is also the third largest pyramid in Egypt, surpassed only by the pyramid of Khafra – Sneferu’s grandson – and the Great Pyramid itself, built by Khufu – Sneferu’s son.
So, by inspecting the various tomb structures around Egypt we see an historical progression from mastabas, to step pyramids which were essentially several mastabas stacked atop each other, to smooth sided pyramids whose sides were too steep to retain their structural integrity, and finally the design of the true pyramid which was replicated in all other pyramids from that point on, including the Great Pyramid. If aliens had truly “provided some type of technological know-how or tools to our ancestors” what would likely have occurred would have been a sudden jump from mastabas to true pyramids, instead we have transitional designs like the Step pyramid and Bent pyramid. Even more, if they truly did exist and intervened in the projects of our ancestors, why didn’t these aliens of allegedly superior intelligence point out the design flaws in the Meidum and Bent Pyramids before construction even began?
Lehner likes to point out how we've known for generations who built the pyramids. "The Egyptians built them— the pharaohs— Khufu, Khafre, Menkaure, real people with real names and real lives. Why are people looking for an alternative, for some advanced civilization? It doesn't get any better than this. This is an advanced civilization."
Recall at the beginning of the Conspiracy Theory Fallacy, I explained that a valid scientific theory entails a proposition which coincides with proven facts and is backed up by empirical evidence, which the Ancient Alien concept fails miserably. It also fails the test of Occam’s Razor: the primary assumption is not only the very foundation of the entire concept, it is also its fatal flaw, the belief that our ancestors were incapable of such building projects without the use of advanced technology comparable to or even superior to modern machinery. The second assumption being that life exists elsewhere in the universe – this is not only very possible, it is also highly probable, however, without any supporting evidence it remains an assumption. The third assumption being that this life is advanced enough not only to travel between the stars but to survive the trip as well. The fourth assumption being that, out of all the planets in all the galaxies they happened by Earth 4,000 – 5,000 years ago and managed to leave not a trace of their presence.
“I haven’t been convinced that there is evidence to support an ancient visitation,” claims lecturer and author Robert Bauval. “But there is no reason why not.” I disagree, there is a perfect reason why not, it is literally the least plausible hypothesis.