Over the past few decades, scientists have made some discoveries that should drastically change how our textbooks are written. We have been taught that humans have gotten progressively more innovative and intelligent over time, and our current environment is the most technologically advanced we ever created. However, a growing number of anomalies have popped up over the past few decades that provide reasons to believe technological advancement over human history may not be perfectly linear. For example, about 12,000 years ago, Gobeklitepe was constructed. 

“The craftsmanship seen at Göbekli Tepe is thousands of years ahead of its time, and dates back to long before such construction should have been possible. The manpower, engineering, and project managing required for such an endeavor all seem unfeasible, given where human civilization was understood to be at the time. The very existence of Göbekli Tepe has forced archaeologists to re-think the dawn of civilization.”

Scientists recently discovered The Younger Dryas Catastrophe – when a giant comet (1.5km in diameter) hit the earth a few hundred years before Gobeklitepe was constructed (about 12,800 years ago). The sheer size of the asteroid shows a cataclysmic event powerful enough to obliterate any civilization that could have existed at the time. Coincidentally, we also know that the date Plato gave for the destruction of Atlantis (history he learned from Ancient Egypt during his travels to study there) perfectly coincides with the date of the Younger Dryas Catastrophe. 

A little over twenty years ago, not far from my home country, The Turks and Caicos Islands, geometrically precise pyramids were found off the coast of Cuba about 650 meters below the surface. According to Ancient Origins, the pyramids “are extremely peculiar structures, and they have captured our imagination,” said Iturralde, who has studied countless underwater formations. “But if I had to explain this geologically, I would have a hard time.”

Estimating that it would have taken 50,000 years for such structures to have sunken to the depth at which they were said to be found, Iturralde added, “50,000 years ago there wasn’t the architectural capacity in any of the cultures we know of to build complex buildings. “A specialist in underwater archaeology at Florida State University added, “It would be cool if they were right, but it would be real advanced for anything we would see in the New World for that time frame. The structures are out of time and out of place.”

All over the world, seemingly unconnected ancient cultures all had tales of beings visiting them from the stars, decided to build pyramids, and shared similar obsessions with gold. The monuments I described here barely scratch the tip of the iceberg – ancient civilizations accomplished a tremendous amount early on. Technology got worse as time went on in Gobeklitepe, Egypt, and Ancient India before we started making the recent progress seen over the last 2 thousand years.

According to the current narrative, humans went from hunters and gatherers to building insanely difficult stone structures – but some of the explanations we’ve been given about the most impressive ones don’t add up. Evidence points to humans receiving outside help with constructing these megalithic monuments or humans being more advanced than we realized before the Younger Dryas Catastrophe. Or possibly both.

In Turks and Caicos, we have a celebration called ‘Junkanoo’, where a parade of performers create elaborate costumes and dance to locally made ripsaw music. Though the history behind the tradition remains unclear, the costumes we wear in Junkanoo bear a considerable resemblance to costumes used by the Dogon Tribe (a West African tribe found in modern-day Mali). According to the tribe, they hold a celebration with similar costumes to those used in Junkanoo as they dance in honor and remembrance of extra-terrestrial visitors that visited them long ago, and they coincidentally happen to have overlapping practices with Ancient Egypt.

However, the Dogon are particularly noteworthy because they have had intricate knowledge of the layout of Sirius (a galaxy far aware from here), including a dead star not visible to the naked eye, for thousands of years. Historians and scientists do not have a satisfactory answer on how that’s possible without the high-powered telescope technology we have today. Many of our ancestors in the Caribbean originated in West Africa, so for all we know, the origins of dances we have in Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas, and many other Caribbean Islands may have extraterrestrial beginnings.

I do not know if humanity used to be more advanced than we realized or if aliens have visited us – if I had to guess, I would pick both. As far-fetched as either scenario might sound, many people forget Galileo was mocked and ridiculed when he first suggested the earth was not flat. The church’s entrenched interest in remaining the unquestionable authority on the world, combined with stubborn professors resistant to change, along with cognitive dissonance, fuse to create a phenomenon called scientific inertia.

Scientific inertia is when old systems and theories resist updates and change despite mountains of evidence suggesting they need to. The entrenched interests influencing the media and scientific community have expanded. The massive wave of coronavirus vaccine mandates, despite considerable dissent in the scientific community (see the Great Barrington Declaration) and mountains of contradictory evidence, shows how they, along with academic institutions, fall victim to groupthink and collectively combine to serve as another example of as scientific inertia.