Mystery History
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2018–2024
6:27 · 26M views · Sep 26, 2016
A short video of a man moving a 20 ton stone block by himself using wood and levers. It is part of a pyramid-mysteries channel.
HN cites it as a hands-on demonstration that one person with simple tools can move huge stones, undercutting arguments that ancient construction needed lost technology.
4 comments from Hacker News
Unrelated, but I really enjoyed this guy's hands on approach to moving 20 ton blocks by himself, this video It goes to show that wood, levers and clever engineering could have achieved amazing construction feats.
Ngl, I saw the title and thought it was going to be about the overheard of the JVM. The common view of how hard it is to move large stones doesn't match reality. There are many examples (eg [1][2]) of what one man can do without any heavy machinery. People have been moving large stones around for thousands of years. And the "how" is simply using leverage and the power of many people and beasts of burden. Still, it's interesting that they would. I suspect many of them didn't have a choice. [1]: this video [2]: [LINK]
It's a bit of wild speculation but you don't need industry to save you time. Solar concentrator (lens, mirror) can harvest large amount of energy. Proper use of levers and gears can make you move tons with your fingers (although you need experience), see this video and the likes You don't need to reproduce horse plow with an oil based engine.
Moving large stones with primitive tools is much easier than you might have thought [1]. We also know obelisks were built on their side because we have an unfinished one that was abandoned when it was revealed to have a large crack [2]. [1]: this video [2]: [LINK]