> The thing that sells me, besides the erosion, is the absolutely astonishing artifacts that were left behind. There is no way I could be convinced that hand-dr

> The thing that sells me, besides the erosion, is the absolutely astonishing artifacts that were left behind. There is no way I could be convinced that hand-driven bronze tooling was cutting diorite to a precision we would struggle to meet today, carving schists so thin you can see light pass through, absolutely perfect symmetry, and creation of granite stoneware with multivariate surface geometry that we'd be unable to do without a precision-destroying tool change. The explanation is pretty simple: with sufficient effort and skill, it's possible to produce extraordinary works of precision. You cannot underestimate what people can do with sufficient patience and expertise. However, each artifact is going to be different, because they're hand-made. If you found half a dozen objects that matched each other to extreme precision, you'd have a more serious case- that's the sort of thing you expect to need machine tools for. One very good way to debunk this stuff is to look at the best stuff that came out of the Renaissance: we know, for certain, that they weren't carving that stuff with power tools.