Hidden Italy: The Forbidden Cyclopean Ruins (2013)

Anyone who lived in or visited a third world country and watched people produce works of astounding precision and perfect finish with their bare hands will understand that in the 1st world we are just not very capable with our hands since the industrial revolution.

We do not learn how to make physical stuff any more as part of our curriculum growing up. And everything we use daily is produced by machines.

But the conclusion that thusly anything that you can't imagine creating with your two hands couldn't have been created by someone else's is a fallacy.

I really like e.g. this youtube channel[1] since the creator uses mostly techniques that where available since hundreds of years and you see the results looking often like they came out of a CNC.

Stones that fit together perfectly, so that no even a knife's blade fits in-between them, do not require modern tech to make.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOWfatOJHl8

This sentence, for instance:

> "Today’s archaeologists and anthropologists don’t express nearly as much interest as you would think in these 18th, 19th and even 20th century descriptions of giant skeletal finds, in part because there is no evidence left to examine. Amazingly, all evidence of these giant bones somehow disappeared..."

Hysterical!

How fun! There are people who genuinely believe Atlantean giants actually existed and wandered around looking inward with a third eye!

This is too true. I realised this in the last few years after getting into wood carving and deciding to learn how to sharpen a blade properly. You don't need some fancy contraption or machine to put a good edge on a knife or other cutting tool, using just my hands and eyes with a few small stones I can put a consistent razor edge on just about anything. It's shocking to me how common it is for people to have dull or completely blunt chefs knives in their kitchen, freehand sharpening is a basic skill that I think 90% have the dexterity and capability to learn, but proper hand skills just aren't a priority anymore.

A lot of still quite relevant traditional building methods are being overlooked or forgotten too, a relative who does slate roofing and various other work for housing in the UK often expresses dismay at the state of building education and common practices.

I have a hope that eventually hand skills for maniplation of objects in 3D space might once again become something of a priority, with some kind of future haptic technology. See Bret Victor's excellent Humane Representation of Thought talk - http://worrydream.com/cdg/ResearchAgenda-v0.19-poster.pdf He doesn't know exactly how such technology could be made exactly, just that it probably will one day and we should think about designing software and interfaces to build towards that.