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Comment by Suppafly | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure why people think it's impossible just because they were large and heavy, we see all sorts of other prehistoric things requiring similar effort and modern scientists have replicated the steps necessary. You can move a lot of weight if you have thousands of people involved doing the work.

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That reminds me of the various tug-of-war contests around the world where the contestants manage to snap impossibly thick ropes. E.g.

> The 1,600 participants exerted over 180,000 pounds of force on a 2-inch thick nylon rope designed to withstand only 57,000 pounds. Amidst cheers, the rope violently snapped; the sheer rebounding force tore off the left arm of the first man on each side. [1]

https://priceonomics.com/a-history-of-tug-of-war-fatalities/

Idk, because people are unbelievably not bright. Like humans have hardly evolved in last 200k years, yet, we have made most of the time we had only in the last 500 years. Wheel was "only" invented 6000 years ago. We are only slightly above natural selection in selecting what works. Newton was the first guy to use averages in experimental results - and look at all the brilliant people before him! Socrates, and I am fan, thought writing things down makes people lazy, democracy is a stupid etc - he is arguably one of our finest, and had awesome arguments to back his assertions, yet, he didn't know what works. People only learn through practice, mistakes and improvement. The rest is bogus 99.9% of time. This is why I think we are only slightly above natural selection.

Don't forget that the world population has been exploding. We have a lot more "bogus" in the world now.

People in general aren't that bright, but we're essentially the same build now as they were back then, there is no reason to assume they didn't have any geniuses.

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