Episode Three: Ancient Aviators

Bike summary: 2.1 miles, also forgot to note calories. 

Episode summary: could ancient people fly?

This was an odd one. As they said in the podcast, it was like they were trying to do an ancient astronauts episode without talking about ancient astronauts. It was still odd considering one of the specials that preceeded the series (and which was hosted by Rod Serling) was all about that stuff. I guess they had the footage?

The episode has a lot of footage of the Nazca Lines, which they say can only be seen from the air. They don't spend a lot of time delving into the history or archeology of the lines, in favor of hopping around to different locations in Central America and even India. They make a lot of weird assumptions and the Indian observatory they visit is the seen of one of them: Nimoy says that it shows an "understanding of space and time" neccesarry for flight, as though the Wright Brothers were cosmologists. Another weird assumption is when they show an experiment in Death Valley speculating that Native Americans could have had hot air balloons, which they would use to direct the drawing of pictographs like the Nazca Lines.

(It's easy! You kill a deer, you tan the hide, you make an annodized aluminum frame and you learn how to extrude and weld, all in about five minutes.)

Of course, needing to be able to see a whole site from above in order to draw something on the surface like that is like saying that maps were impossible to make before the airplane. Since I'm on the topic, I've seen loads of these sorts of shows that do state the premise: that the Nazca Lines were part of a runway for ancient spaceships. However, if you look at Nazca on Google Maps, it turns out they're really hard to see from space, so I think we can discount the space ship idea. Also, nobody ever seems to talk about the chalk figures of England in these discussions -- some of them, like the White Horse of Uffington, are certainly old enough.

There's a funny moment where Nimoy suggests that Inca roads could have been runways, while they show a shot of a road curving over and around a hill, because you don't want a runway to be smooth and straight. 

They also show some Maya ruins and suggest that the Maya, whom they imply ceased to exist, used aircraft to get from city to city. Or maybe their roads have been swallowed by the jungle. Also, the Maya last rebelled against European rule in the 1920s.

Also, in a show that mostly talks about ancient things, without really dating anything, Leonardo Da Vinci shows up (fresh from Quest of the Delta Knights, I guess) with his helicopter. For this I must invoke SF Debris and award this episode of In Search Of an "Ancient Chinese secret, huh".

We also get some images of Cape Canaveral, which Nimoy describes as "forlorn and abandoned" and another Mesoamerican site, comparing the two. If you squint they kind of look similar, but only just. They are also apparently filming both from highly specific angles. 

Podcast summary:

It turns out Jeb Card specializes in Mayan archeology and so we get a very informative discussion of their history, the fact that of course they built roads and, in fact, road metaphors are very common in Mayan speech. 

We also got to learn more about the people of the Nazca Desert. Basically, it's in the rain shadow of the Andes, like the Atacama in Chile, and it gets next to no rain at all. But there are snow-fed rivers that come down from the mountains and in the river valleys people settled and formed civilizations. They buried their dead with grave goods in the desert and it's so dry the burials are often very well preserved and we know that textiles were very important, including cotton (which I thought cotton was an old world plant). I wonder if cotton's high water demand played a roll in its value. 

They also brought up the Ica stones, which I had never heard of. These are fakes, made by a farmer in a different valley, that purported to be ancient depictions of humans coexisting with dinosaurs. They also showed dinosaurs with udders, which maybe should have been a clue they were fakes. 

So, Professor, you made this entirely out of bamboo?