In the ruins of our ancient world we often see exceptional accuracy for surfaces but also clear indications of machining work that should have been impossible back then,For quite a few of these impossibilities modern scientists, inventors and people that just like to experiment came up with plausible conclusions.So let's start with a few of them...Core drilling...It is a process were a rather large hole is not actually drilled but cut out.Imagine a piece of pipe you press into some clay - that's what you end up with.A circular, deep hole with a standing core inside, break the core off and you are good to go.Doing this with copper or brass tools as the only available metal tools seems feasable.If it is something soft like sand stone but for things like granite???Ancient texts provided some clues, like that slow spinning tubes were used or that drilling a 2m deep hole did only take a few hours.Appearently it was done in less than half a day - a day being daylight.Modern diamond drilling tools would still struggle to create such a deep hole in that time unless you pay a fortune for a custom made drill bit.One clue that was nagging these people for a long times was how it was possible to reach these high penetration speeds.The marks on core samplesand holes clearly show and almost spiral pattern, indicating the "drill" went deeper by a few mm with just a few rotations of the drill.The calculated pressure required to do this is about equal to having a tank parked on top of your drill....Impossible I know...Hammer drill differences give us another clue here.Take you homedepot drill that can drill in metal and stone - it runs fast and although it does the job the tradesmen tool does it better.Not because it is way more expensive but because it is purpose made by running slower but with a much more powerfull impact for the drill bit.How do you create a massive impact with copper or brass?Those who tried a copper drill will tell you they are no good for anything.Those who tried a copper core drill will tell you the same.Too soft, deforms too quickly, no "teeth" that last for more than a few seconds.But is that really true???These soft metals seem to have a feature that makes them special: They can be "work hardened".Like the top end of your cold chisel "peeling"...Of course the harness levels you can achieve are still very short of being even like soft steel.Every material has a resonant frequency, even hard rock like granite.A technique called sonic drilling utilises this as an advantage.The drill is subjected to an audio signal that is very close or matching a harmonic frequency of the rock in question.There is even nice Youtube videos showing how two stones are flattened against each other just with loudspeakers and some wire to hold them together.The same guy posted videos showing that core drilling is possible this way too.The science behind it is still not a 100% understood though.Several universities did their own experiments here and here are some of the more modern explanations why it works despite being impossible:The vibrations cause surface fractures on contact, a bit like when your dentist cleans your teeth with this screaming thing...The contact surface of the drill actually does not do any impact damage, it simply acts as a transducer horn for the vibrations.In their tests it was even confirmed that steel tools are no good here as the material would mean you need very long tools due to the resonant nodes forming differently in denser material.Most interesting was that these aido drills can be literally of any shape you like.Not hard to create a fancy symbol shape from copper pipe - and then to vibrate it into the surface to create writing....Several ancient cultures show clear tooling marks in their carved symbol creations while others seemed to have "melted" the symbol into the rock - audio only ;)Extreme accuracy for planar faces....Be it the walls of an ancient "coffin", box or chamber, we can find a lot of them with an accuracy that even today we would fail to achieve.A solid granit like block with a perfectly square box cut out of it.Several examples exist where the accuracy couldn't be done with modern tools at all.Less than 0.5% divergence from true parallel walls and corners with a rounded inner edge with a radius of less than 2mm....Audio machining is not feasable for this one.And with literally no surface marks scientists were baffled for decades.Due to the size it would mean that for a tiny error you would have to re-do the entire surface of the affected wall.And with a surface so highly polished that even after a few tausand years it still reflects light....Samples taken showed another conundrum - glacing...Almost as if the stone was melted, pressed flat and then repeated until the entire surface was done.The temperautres required for this however are said to be impossible in ancient times, same for any tools capable of tolerating such heat without melting.So this theory was discarded for a very long time and deemed to be interpretation error - after all they had no chance to do this thausands of years ago.Later it was discovered that you actually can use two identically hard stone surfaces to grind them perfectly flat against each other.And well, using the right, mild abbresives it is even possible to give the surface a nice shine.Yes, the theory is sound but can't explain how one would machine the corners like this....The inside of a square or rectangular box can't be produced like this.Plus the problem of actually removing all the unwanted material first.In recent years the old samples taken were subject to new studies, this time in regards to the possibility that the surface was polished using heat.Surprisingly a mix of high temps and cold water allows for quite accurated destruction of the surface.Relatively easy to remove some bumps by just heating the bump and spraying a mist of cold water over it.Still not possible to create perfect corners but a start.It failed to reproduce the shine and polished surface too.Then, as a last resort you might say, lasers were used on rocks of similar or identical composition.The classic CO2 laser is a brute force tool and although accuracy would be possible you wouldn't get a good surface as it does not melt, it just cracks like glass.Femto second lasers were great here but could not provide any glacing effect either.Problem was always that the stone could not soak up any of the laser energy.It would not heat up evenly, only very locally where the laser was hitting the surface and no depth either.Then they finally got the idea to use tiny samples in a wide laser beam.A wavelength more suited to heat rather than vaporise and energy levels per mm² much, much lower than in a focussed beam.No problem to actually fully melt the sample without create any cracks or to adjust the parameters so the core still remains solid for a true glazing effect.Funny side effect of fully molten samples were their extreme surface hardness - very similar to what we find in ancient leftovers we can't explain.On bigger samples two effects were observed.Firstly that of a flat surface with the sample being rather thick, a too fast cooling down would result in the entire surface that was heated to split off.Secondly that the resulting surface was still extremely flat and even.Sadly we can not find any real evidence that ancient cultures knew about how to use high energy lasers with adjustable focus....And so far no one was able to come up with any theory that explains ALL the features of a perfect stone box with polished surfaced, especially if the surfaced is glaced.The ancient lathe....We can see the evidence of large boulders machined on some gigantic lathe through the ancient world, especially in greece and the middle east.And so far the best archeologists could come up with was that some guy sat there for days hammering the surface until a template provided a perfect fit.What they failed to explain was how this guy did this in a true rotary fashion.But the beauty of archeology is that these guys can claim what they like without being required to provide backing of their claims - not their territory OLIn several places we found leftovers of contraptions deemed to be the remains of some grinding mechanism to make flour or maby fine powder from rocks for mortar.But every mill needs a mlling stone - they were never found anywhere.And if the "mount" that remains clearly indicates it was able to be moved in the X and Y direction it would have been a very strange flour mill indeed.In the real world you would only have to move the grinding stone up and even that is mostly optional.The real clue however is how complicated it would have been to collect the flour.No one wants to use a broom to get it off the floor in a desert environment....With the wearmarks on the bottom stone it would have been impossible to produce flour, so why would it have been used for decades more if the flour was no good anyway?Again, outsiders provided vital clues by creating small models of these ancient "flour mills".The ground around them shows wear marks identical to someone running in a circle since the dawn of time.At quite a distance to the center I might add.If horses or cows were used to go in said circle with a harness you could spin quite some weight - like a round piller stone.And the bottom "pan" could be filled with fine sand or similar to act as a rudimentary bearing.The rounded bottom and indentation on the top of ancient piller stones seems suddenly more plausible to be the result of these "flour mills" - they self centered the block for machining.Push your tool(s) against the surface and make sure they keep the tension, then sit back and watch the animals do the hard work for you.Nothing fancy about it, just a vertical lathe driven by animals instead of a big motor and gear box...Won't explain though how some cultures were able to create perfectly round pillars of 20 or more meters in length in one piece....In many places we can observe impossible fitments, like a lid on a stone box that won't even require a sealant to be perfectly air tight.Or in India and other parts of the east intricate stone figurines that are hollowed out - with carved details on the inside.So not just some holes and simple cavities, more like 3D printed.Several experts of their fields, from artists over stone masons to jewlery makers tried to re-create some of these features using modern tools - they all failed badly.You simply can't use a rotating tool if you need to get around several corners to reach the surface to be machined.So how were the ancient builders and artists able to do the impossible?Some say that ancient texts and images tell us that the stone was melted away, like bee's wax.The glacing effect on these surfaces seems to confirm this but we all know you can't melt rock, especially not in a controlled way to create artwork.Rock is not ice - or is it?High frequency ultrasonic machining allows us to work with very hard rock, like cutting through butter with a hot knife.No sharp tools required either.The only problem is that you need very hard tools with a high tensile strenght and "good acoustics" - like titanium as the prefered option in the industry for ultrasonic horns and amplifiers.They did not have titanium in the ancient world and they certainly did not have power outlet to drive some ultrasonic tools.But they did know their acoustics as the "musical temple" in India shows.Hit a pillar, some plate or even statue and they all produce a very accurate frequency, despite the entire temple being carved out of one solid mountain piece...You can not create this today even if you had a clue how to carve it out of the mountain!!No way to create delicated designs that all have individual but extreme accurate musical notes when hit...Means the ancient builder must have known about the way sound travels through solid materials and how it is reflected inside them - otherwise hitting a statue would also make other things in the temple swing....Imagine that it was known how to produce the required frequencies to basically weaken the crystal structure of a rock exactly where you want it to weaken.You would have a rock-shaver of sorts.You could not use it though as it would be a huge thing.Theory is the ancient builder worked the opposite way instead.Making the entire rock or even mountain swing at a perfectly matched resonant frequency that produces a peak right where you need to work.A bit like going a dentist that no longer uses a rotating and screaming drill on your bad tooth, instead you sit in a fast rotating chair ;)Lab experiments clearly showed it is possible on a small scale with our modern technology.Tungsten-Carbide already in the ancient world?Electron microscopy claims to have found evidence of substances embedded in the machined surface that have similar properties to our modern carbides.Of course every alien theorists jumped right on it and claimed that had help from extra terrestrials.But is it really as simple as someone coming down from the stars to give some ancient builder a more than modern tool?He wouldn't have a clue how to use it, how to power it, he would need a teacher and power source.What some of these alien nut crackers missed is the simple fact that a lot of really hard materials can be created by the most basic means.Thermite is still widely used and produces quite good steel, all you need is iron oxide and aluminium powder.With sand you can even make your own silicium metal is you like on the beach....Where the knowelde for such things and more originated might remain a mystery but we have evidence the ancient guys knew quite a bit about ores and oxides, so why is it so hard to think they accidentially or intentionally tried to melt them into tools or art pieces?And then suddenly something goes up up in flames and some shiny and really metal appears when cooled down....We also know the ancient people knew about several acids and how to make them from scratch, even how to concentrate them.Not soo hard anymore to create some waste products that are of no other use to you than to be used as grinding materials and abbresives....As said, it is unclear where the knowledge or idea come from, all we know they had the know how.Where did the ancient tools go?We can still find tools in the pyramids in tiny and no longer accessible areas - at least no human fits in there anymore.We also found clear indications of iron oxides embedded in stone surfaces, predominantly in holes and such.So they might have had iron or even steel around the same time we though they only had copper and brass, big deal...Well, it kinda is...Especially Japan showed us how metallurgy is carried on as a vital tradion into todays times.From selecting the raw material for the melting, over the entire melting process, down to discarding most of the results by just looking at them - an understanding we modern people no longer have.And the swordsmith again only takes those sample where he can see already how they work together when he heats them up and hammers them.Especially the secret knowledge how to iclude impurities, remove them and what natural and most basic additions need to be added is something even modern science fails at.A bit of leafs from this plant, some dirt from that region, some burnt wood and suddenly the resulting steel won't rust anymore, is more ductile and hard at the same time...But you would need this kind of attention when you create tools.For steel you want a certain hardness, flexibility or ability to flex without breaking quickly to avoid fatigue.In most cases these steels are anything except resistant to corrosion.Most tool steels of the older days needed to be kept well oiled or they would rust away quickly.Chrome and other hard to come by elements gave our modern steel the stainless effect.From the ancinet world we know of iron statues and pillars that produce a protective rust layer of just a few microns but no further rust damage.You wouldn't be able to create this without generations of experts refining the process and observing how well or badly it works out.Would you take your expensive tools that might taken weeks to manufacture at a job site with thausands of slaves? Certainly not, you taken them home with them and slep with them under your pillow....No surprise then that we could never find any "good" tools around ancient ruins.Once a town is build today you won't find the tools of the tradies still sitting around either...Is this evidence?Nope, the failure to find high quality tools from builders does not mean they existed.Finding evidence of modern alloys or steels just in abbrasesion or tool marks is no good either.It could be from someone at a later time simply following these marks with a more modern metal tools, like a steel needle.For every evidence here there is also evidence of where the evidence can't come from.Again science clashes with archeology and history without being able to agree or compromise to provide a conclusion that is acceptable by both sides.Only materials designed and created to last throughout history will survive thausands of years of exposure to the elements.We might find real and undeniable evidence one day in lost cities on the ocean's floors, till then though....