Post by Infinity Blade on Oct 25, 2022 2:34:38 GMT 5
Ancient Aliens: Aliens and Dinosaurs – A Retrospective Review
Ahh, Ancient Aliens. One of History Channel’s most infamous programs. A prime piece of evidence that History Channel really is not about genuine history anymore. A show that, bafflingly, IS STILL AIRING TO THIS DAY!!! As of me writing this review, there are currently 220 episodes spanning 12 years, with the most recent episode literally airing last month (September 16, 2022). Don’t ask me how they’re able to keep churning out all these ideas for new episodes; you’d think they’d have ran out of ideas by now and ended the show years ago.
Anyway, as a wannabe paleontologist (I hesitate to even call myself an “amateur”, as much as I’d like to), there is one particular episode of Ancient Aliens that I wanted to review with you all. A decade ago these guys made an episode about, you guessed it, dinosaurs. While this is a rather unconventional thing for me to do, I am going to review this particular episode of this pseudoscientific program. And by “review” I really mean rip it a new one.
Now, let’s begin.
Verdict:
I started this review thinking it would be a fun little debunk. Nothing too special, this is a decade-old episode of a stupid pseudoscience show. But after having rewatched the episode, I’m reminded of just how intellectually dishonest and ignorant the non-paleontologist talking heads and presenters of this show really are. I mean, come on “carbon dating results aren’t published in peer-reviewed journals”? The Ica stones? The Loch Ness monster?
And the thing is, if you don’t know any better – if you don’t have reviews like this one (or much earlier ones, like Riley Black’s) shooting down all the bullshit in it – you could easily be fooled by these pseudointellectual charlatans. Sure, my review isn’t really going to have any impact; I’m posting it on a forum with few people posting regularly who already know how nonsensical Ancient Aliens actually is. But what I’ve seen of this episode solidifies the need to combat pseudoscientific garbage like this. Maybe the mind-numbingly stupid horseshit is obvious to you or me, but it’s not obvious to everyone.
Well, anyway, that’s why Ancient Aliens is dumb. I hope Netflix doesn’t start recommending more pseudoscience to me.
Ahh, Ancient Aliens. One of History Channel’s most infamous programs. A prime piece of evidence that History Channel really is not about genuine history anymore. A show that, bafflingly, IS STILL AIRING TO THIS DAY!!! As of me writing this review, there are currently 220 episodes spanning 12 years, with the most recent episode literally airing last month (September 16, 2022). Don’t ask me how they’re able to keep churning out all these ideas for new episodes; you’d think they’d have ran out of ideas by now and ended the show years ago.
Anyway, as a wannabe paleontologist (I hesitate to even call myself an “amateur”, as much as I’d like to), there is one particular episode of Ancient Aliens that I wanted to review with you all. A decade ago these guys made an episode about, you guessed it, dinosaurs. While this is a rather unconventional thing for me to do, I am going to review this particular episode of this pseudoscientific program. And by “review” I really mean rip it a new one.
Now, let’s begin.
- This episode has Luis Chiappe as a talking head. I wonder how he felt seeing himself on this program. Must have been mortifying to even have any association with Ancient Aliens.
- There’s also some familiar animation here. AA recycles footage from Jurassic Fight Club. As loony as that program was, this one episode of Ancient Aliens is on even more crack than all of JFC combined.
- As Chiappe mentions dinosaurs living by the seashore, AA shows a mosasaur. I think this implies that whoever was in charge of editing footage and dialogue together thought mosasaurs were dinosaurs. Yikes.
(Mosasaurs are later correctly, if implicitly, identified as just marine reptiles) - As Luis Chiappe mentions all the non-dinosaurian animals living during the Mesozoic, some animation of Arthropleura and Dunkleosteus is shown. These are both Paleozoic animals that went extinct long before the dinosaurs ever evolved.
- Feathered T. rex is discussed. The modern understanding (in contrast to 2012) is that it’s still within the realm of possibility that T. rex had some degree of feather covering on its skin. To what extent is unknown, although a full, thick plumage is now generally considered unlikely (AA shows us this piece of a T. rex with a massive feather mane).
- AA recycles footage from Clash of the Dinosaurs (a Discovery Channel program) too. Huh.
- ”ancient astronaut theorists”
- ”…we don’t really know what happened to them. More importantly, where do they come from?”
Umm…these had well established answers even all the way back in 2012. - Giorgio A. Tsoukalos (the crazy-haired guy you see in the “I don’t know so…aliens” meme) surmises that dinosaurs may have been an early experiment by aliens for life on Earth. When you actually look at the history of life on Earth, which spans no later than 3 billion years ago, to as early as 4.1 billion years ago, you’ll realize that dinosaurs were actually pretty late in the game. If aliens were the ones fiddling with the natural history of Earth, dinosaurs were actually a late “experiment” for them.
- This is where things veer into the crackpot territory you’ve been waiting for. They have Luis Chiappe mention the mass extinction of the dinosaurs…and then have their own “ancient astronaut theorists” tell us that the extinction of the dinosaurs is still a mystery. Except even at the time this episode aired, we had already gathered ample evidence that the Chicxulub impact was what did them in. It may have been an open question back in the ‘80s and before, but not by the 2000s.
- Tsoukalos entertains the idea that aliens exterminated the dinosaurs to trade them out for a more intelligent species in their likeness (humans). Later I’m going to fully dissect this idea.
- They have this stupid yet funny bit of animation where they literally just took a sequence of the baby saltasaurs from Dinosaur Planet waddling out of their nests and slapped on an alien spaceship flying around shooting them with lasers. The lasers don’t even do anything to the baby saltasaurs here. It’s so god damn ridiculous.
- What bit of evidence does AA look at to provide credence to the hypothesis that aliens exterminated the dinosaurs? Supposed artwork of dinosaurs and humans coexisting.
No seriously, putting aside the fact that this “evidence” is obviously bullshit (which we’ll get into later), how does this even follow? If you found evidence of non-avian dinosaurs and humans coexisting, that wouldn’t prove anything related to aliens at all. It would just mean that non-avian dinosaurs survived longer than thought. If anything, it would just show that these “aliens” did a shitty job of what they were supposed to do. - The narrator rhetorically asks if it’s possible that some dinosaurs survived long after the extinction event. This runs counter to their entire narrative that aliens wiped out the dinosaurs to make room for humans.
- ”Wow, Chichén-Itzá is in the Yucatan, which is where the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs hit!”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coincidence - No seriously, who ****ing cares? Humanity had long since settled in every continent of the globe (with the exception of Antarctica) at that point. Of course some people were bound to end up settling in the rough area where the Chicxulub asteroid hit 66 million years earlier.
- ”…found in the very area where they supposedly died off”
Umm, dinosaurs died off everywhere on the globe. The Yucatán Peninsula was just where the asteroid hit. That doesn’t mean anything. - We’re shown some supposed Mayan art of people interacting with dinosaurs. They’re obviously just lizards or snakes, if exaggerated ones.
- Angkor Wat has a stone carving of what appears to be, at first glance, a Stegosaurus. Now, I’m not sure if anyone at this point has actually figured out what the carving is actually meant to depict (if it’s even genuine, and not a recently-carved hoax), but if you take a closer look at it, you can see some not-so Stegosaurus-like features. The head is large and the neck short, the complete opposite of a real Stegosaurus. You can see long horn or ear-like structures on its head that point backwards. Likewise, the supposed “plates” on its back have also been interpreted as the leaves of a tree, with what could be interpreted as a tree trunk between and slightly behind the animal’s legs. It’s been suggested that maybe it is a boar or rhinoceros instead (albeit still only vaguely resembling one). I’m not sure anyone knows for sure, but it sure as hell is not proof that Stegosaurus survived until historical times.
- Keep in mind too that not only did Stegosaurus never live in Cambodia, but all evidence indicates it also went extinct long before the K-Pg extinction. For Stegosaurus to have survived until historical times, you’d have to believe that this genus survived for 155 million years (which in itself stretches credulity for any large-bodied, specialized vertebrate), despite leaving no evidence of its existence after 145 Ma.
- AA also tries to pass off this big carving at Tsodilo Hills as a possible carving of a dinosaur (especially a sauropod). To paraphrase them “Some say it’s a python, but could it be that the large size of the carving is meant to represent a dinosaur?”
This carving is found in what is called Rhino Cave. And at least from what I can find, the carving they show doesn’t even seem to represent any sort of animal, let alone a dinosaur. It’s simply a carved wall (Coulson et al., 2011) with a vague but unintentional resemblance to a serpent. It’s no different from finding a cloud shaped like a dog.
And yet they pass this off as archaeological evidence that non-avian dinosaurs and humans coexisted. They even show glowing lines over the carved wall to make it look more like some kind of serpent-like creature, but they’re clearly just reaching. The intellectual dishonesty is astounding. - And now we get to supposed human footprints with dinosaur footprints. They briefly show a picture of that one fake human footprint (with an oddly deep and circular big toe) trodden on by a dinosaur. They also show the supposed human footprints with dinosaur footprints in Glen Rose, Texas.
You know what’s really going on here. Hell, Greg Paul called this out all the way back in 1988. These are just abnormal dinosaur footprints. The traditional explanation was that, for some reason, the theropod adopted a plantigrade foot posture, only for the toe prints to collapse in and not be preserved. This would lead to only the metatarsal print being preserved, leaving the impression of a “human” track (Paul, 1988). This isn’t unprecedented, as emus will occasionally adopt a plantigrade foot posture (Milàn, 2006). A more recent explanation, however, has an arguably even simpler explanation. Instead of being plantigrade tracks, they were simply deep penetrations of the foot in soft sediment (Lallensack et al., 2021). - ”It is simply impossible to say that every single dinosaur of planet Earth completely disappeared. And the likelihood is that at least some definitely survived for at least several more million years.”
A well a don’t you know about the bird?
Well, everybody knows that the bird is the word!
(You guys get the joke, right?) - Mfw people pretend that carbon dating is the only dating method we have. Carbon dating is most definitely NOT used for non-avian dinosaur remains. You guys fully understand they’re way too old for carbon dating to be viable.
- ”Carbon dating results don’t get published in peer-reviewed journals”
You’re ****ing stupid, yes they are. They’re just not used for things as old as non-avian dinosaurs. - It’s the god damn Ica stones.
The Ica stones are hoaxes. You can read more about the debacle here.
web.archive.org/web/20080827173630/http://forteantimes.com/features/articles/259/jurassic_library_the_ica_stones.html - ”bUt ThErE ArE ThOUSaNdS oF tHeM”
He didn’t carve all of them. He literally admitted that himself.
From the link I posted right above.Uschuya stated that Cabrera had about 5000 ‘genuine’ stones – ie. stones that Uschuya himself had not made – and that he had not fabricated all of the others, contrary to what he had previously stated. We have no clues as to who else might be making these stones. - Oh god, 15 minutes left. I can’t take much more of this pain!!!
- The show literally believes that aliens nuked the dinosaurs. That’s their explanation for the iridium in the K-Pg boundary. Why? WHY does it have to be ****ing aliens???
- I don’t know where they pulled this “T. rex bones on display were painted because they were radioactive” stuff, but yes, genuine fossils can be radioactive. It’s not because aliens nuked them, that’s just a possible byproduct of being a fossil. Matt Wedel says the same of Saurophaganax fossils. Saurophaganax is much, much older than T. rex, so you can’t pull any “aliens nuked it” bullshit here.How dangerous was Saurophaganax? Let me put it this way: it’s still dangerous. Thanks to the high concentration of heavy elements in Morrison dinosaur bones, you’re supposed to air out the specimen cabinets before you start working so the radon can escape. Otherwise you might breathe in freakin’ radioactive gas and get cancer (in contrast to some “facts” in the previous paragraph, this is actually true). That’s right, Saurophaganax can kill you, just by lying around in a drawer. After 145 million years, it’s still reaping souls for Hades. By god, that’s giving them what for!
svpow.com/2013/04/19/friday-phalanges-megaraptor-vs-saurophaganax/ - ”The Mahabharata talks about giant lizards being mass exterminated by angry gods, which is potential evidence that the dinosaurs were wiped out by aliens using nuclear weapons.”
Holy mother of Christ’s stockings, this is more of an acid trip than I remember. - ”…is it possible that some of them have, in fact, survived to this day?”
Yes. They’re called birds, they’re the only dinosaurs that survived. - Okay, they’re bringing up Archaeopteryx. They look like they’re headed in the right direction.
- Luis Chiappe, an actual paleontologist, gets it right. Birds are dinosaurs. Okay, we’re done, right?
- ”Archaeopteryx is the only dinosaur paleontologists believe to be capable of flight”
Umm…no. Plenty of other feathered dinosaurs, like the enantiornithes, are believed to have been capable of some measure of flight as well. It’s debatable how this flight compares to that of modern birds (as is also the case with Archaeopteryx), but flight nonetheless. - ”But if this was the only flying dinosaur, how could it be that all birds could have stemmed from this one creature?”
It’s called “diversification” you cement-eating jesters. - ”certain reptiles with dinosaur genes”
Wat - Erich von Däniken asks if an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, why only the dinosaurs died. By doing so he ignores the existence of Mesozoic marine reptiles (the mosasaurs & plesiosaurs living at the end of the Cretaceous), pterosaurs, ammonites, belemnites, inoceramid bivalves, and many others living at the end of the Cretaceous that didn’t make it into the Paleogene.
- Oh my ****ing god, Loch Ness Monster. Really? You bring up that classic old-ass photo that was literally admitted to be faked?
- ”I see your argument and raise you the coelacanth”
HOW THE **** DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH THE DINOSAURS’ EXTINCTION???!!!
I’m losing my mind… - ”Is it possible that the so-called evolutionary offspring of dinosaurs are a result of extraterrestrial intervention?”
No, no, no. Dinosaurs have only one group of “evolutionary offspring” (birds, which are still literally just dinosaurs). Stop showing a ****ing crocodilian or some other modern non-avian reptile. - ”Her [Mary Schweitzer’s] research apparently shows that there could be DNA samples inside dinosaur fossils”
No, she found what MIGHT be a proteome, which is NOT DNA. - Did I mention I’m losing my ****ing mind?!?!
- Crazy hairdo guy thinks coelacanths, crocodilians, turtles, etc. might have survived due to genetic intervention by aliens and them reintroducing them into the wild.
- Poor Luis Chiappe. I genuinely mean that. Literally everything he’s saying is being taken out of context to somehow provide support for this crackhead narrative.
- ”…if the dinosaurs had survived, they would have overtaken the planet Earth, and that was not in their plan. It was in their plan to create something like themselves, or human-like beings, so the dinosaurs were not helpful in this game.”
The dinosaurs already DID overtake the planet you dingus. The aliens let them have it for 135 million years at that point, and after all that time they decide to scrap this long-standing experiment completely just to create something that looked like themselves? Sure. - Okay, time to deal with the elephant in the room. So, why is aliens wiping out dinosaurs to make room for humans problematic? Here are a few holes I’ve poked into the idea.
1) The dinosaurs are claimed by these “ancient astronaut theorists” to be an early (well, not really early) experiment by aliens in the history of life on Earth. By the end of the Cretaceous, dinosaurs had been living on Earth for 167 million years. You’re telling me that these aliens, supposedly technologically advanced and societally stable enough to maintain a literal otherworldly evolutionary experiment for that long, just suddenly decide, after – let me repeat myself – 167 million years, to axe the experiment? Just to wait ANOTHER ****ING 63 MILLION YEARS to get something that kinda looks like them???
2) The aliens’ goal was to wipe out the dinosaurs to allow for the existence of humans. If so, their methods were hideously inefficient. Think: after a species goes extinct, what happens? That’s right: another species evolves to take its vacant niche. When all the big Mesozoic reptiles went extinct as a result of the K-Pg extinction event, what happened? They were replaced by mammals (and some large birds and non-avian reptiles). And you know what the mammals did? That’s right: they evolved big, terrifying forms. Just like the dinosaurs.
Remember, it took some 63 million years for the first members of the genus Homo to evolve after the K-Pg extinction event. That is way, way, WAAAAYYYY more than enough time for other large, deadly animals to evolve after a mass extinction. Large predatory mammals didn’t take too terribly long to evolve after the K-Pg event. Ankalagon saurognathus, a predatory mammal with a skull as big as a brown bear’s, first appeared ~63 Ma, only 3 million years after the non-avian dinosaurs bought the farm. During the ~63 million years between the K-Pg extinction event and the first appearance of Homo in the fossil record, a whole slew of potentially dangerous creatures came and went.
What all this means is that by the time humans (or their immediate australopithecine ancestors) evolved, Earth had long since been repopulated by ferocious beasts. True, there were no dromaeosaurids or tyrannosaurs hunting early humans down. Instead, there were big cats (of both the conical-toothed and saber-toothed variety), hyenas, constrictors, crocodilians (which the aliens failed to wipe out this entire time lol), even giant otters, bears, and raptors (*gasp* predatory dinosaurs preying on human ancestors! Which is the literal opposite of what these aliens supposedly wanted). Early humans had no chance of pissing off a giant ceratopsian, hadrosaur, or sauropod, but they could certainly have ended up on the bad side of a rhinoceros, hippopotamus, or a proboscidean (be it a true elephantid or a deinothere).
One thing to keep in mind here is that the relative sizes of these animals compared to the dinosaurs doesn’t really factor in. Apart from the fact that terrestrial Cenozoic mammals still show considerable overlap with Mesozoic dinosaurs in size, the point is that these animals were all still more than powerful and deadly enough to be serious threats to humans and their immediate ancestors. True, a Megantereon didn’t have anywhere near the size and firepower of a T. rex, but it was definitely still within the rough size range of more medium-sized predatory theropods (e.g. dromaeosaurids), and would have been every bit as deadly to early humans as such a theropod. Similarly, an angry Deinotherium giganteum is still within the size range of certain sauropods, like Diplodocus carnegii, more than enough to be a threat to our ancestors.
The point being, aliens wiped out the big bad dinosaurs to pave the way for humans, only to let big bad mammals, crocodiles, and birds evolve and be a threat to their speshul snowflakes.
3) How did we actually cope with “big bad beasts”? We dealt with them ourselves. Even as early as the Pliocene, increases in hominin brain size is correlated with carnivore extinctions, and not to other factors such as climate change. First giant omnivores (a bear, a giant wolverine relative, and three giant civet species) go. Next, giant otters. Then, saber-toothed cats (Faurby et al., 2020 Supplementary Info). Homo sapiens proper likely also had a role in the extinction of Pleistocene megafauna, though to what exact extent is still a matter of debate. Even back then, let alone now, humans and their immediate ancestors didn’t need extraterrestrial intervention to cope with “big bad dangerous beasts”.
Verdict:
I started this review thinking it would be a fun little debunk. Nothing too special, this is a decade-old episode of a stupid pseudoscience show. But after having rewatched the episode, I’m reminded of just how intellectually dishonest and ignorant the non-paleontologist talking heads and presenters of this show really are. I mean, come on “carbon dating results aren’t published in peer-reviewed journals”? The Ica stones? The Loch Ness monster?
And the thing is, if you don’t know any better – if you don’t have reviews like this one (or much earlier ones, like Riley Black’s) shooting down all the bullshit in it – you could easily be fooled by these pseudointellectual charlatans. Sure, my review isn’t really going to have any impact; I’m posting it on a forum with few people posting regularly who already know how nonsensical Ancient Aliens actually is. But what I’ve seen of this episode solidifies the need to combat pseudoscientific garbage like this. Maybe the mind-numbingly stupid horseshit is obvious to you or me, but it’s not obvious to everyone.
Well, anyway, that’s why Ancient Aliens is dumb. I hope Netflix doesn’t start recommending more pseudoscience to me.