comment: >
  
  
  Is my take naive?
  
  A little bit. It's not so much that people who are openly racist will claim aliens because natives are so primitive and backwards and unrefined out loud so explicitly. It's from a historic, implicit bias that has carried on. 
  A similar thing is called "orientalism" in anthropology - it's this notion that "Eastern" things are exotic and different and alluringly mysterious, and then that plays out in a variety of ways, from how Asian ethnicities are portrayed in media to how "Westerners" interact with Chinese food from immigrant communities to intersectional issues like how East Asian women get fetishized so frequently. Lots of overlap with old fashioned racism, and lots of accidental stereotyping from a society that has absorbed those ideas for several hundred+ years. 
  It isn't on purpose, but it does come from racist/Western-supremacist/colonial thought patterns and stereotypes of indigenous peoples of the places they wanted to colonize.
context: Wonder how they could’ve missed them all these years: they’re outlined and even labeled right in the hillside! >
  
  Searches found them decades ago. Researchers only found them again recently. >
  
  Newer researchers discovered those earlier researchers up on the hills, lost. >
  
  The joke is good, but also an analogy on how poor documentation can lead to no difference between knowing nothing about a subject and having a thousand page paper on the subject. 
  Stuff gets filed away and the relevant people can't find it 20 years later all the time. >
  
  Didn’t the US have that problem with the space program? Stuff didn’t get documented well, and they had to pull the engineers out of retirement? >
  
  I wouldn't doubt it given my experience in the field. 
  There was a project for a sensor that I've lead through validation and the documentation for field failures from the previous iteration were fairly poor. 
  As a result, it's highly susceptible to temperature and if it gets hot, there's a chance for some epoxy to crack and let water in. 
  This gap of knowledge was as small as 8 years. The more egregious matter is the project engineer falsified the test reports. They reported out pass rather than failures. Tests can't be replicated. 
  Whoever goes into engineering, don't take it as a free pass to stop learning english, ethics, and how to communicate. >
  
  They may not have falsified the reports, something outside of their, and your, control may have changed. >
  
  True but that's what makes documentation all the more important. If the original engineer had measured and recorded as many known relevant variables as possible, it would be all the more clear the validity of their results, and less likely their ethics could be called into question. >
  
  The photos should have side by side option with and without outline. >
  
  This is so cool. Some of the designs make me wonder if they were just having fun! >
  
  Ancient graffiti >
  
  Look at my hooves! >
  
  chalking this up to aliens is irritating and underestimates human power and creativity, especially of the ancient indigenous people of peru. it helped harvesting season! >
  
  The ancient aliens "theory" is at its heart just garden variety racism. "Such stupid uneducated primitive brown savages couldn't have made something so incredible, therefore it must have been literal aliens from deep space who came and made it for them! Especially because my white ancestors at the time were living in warring tribes in mud huts." It's racism. >
  
  I made a joke about ancient aliens on r/artefactporn the other day, and a guy basically called me racist. Id never heard this take on it before.
  I gave it some thought. There is probably overlap in terms of racist people and ancient aliens conspiracists. Maybe its a similar thought process in the sense that racism is basically a conspiracy theory in itself.
  However I doubt people who believe that sort of thing are typically motivated (consciously or unconsciously) by racism. It seems more like a Dunning Kruger, idiots wanting to be right sort of thing. 
  To be clear I love all people and believe that humans very much accomplished society on their own, with the help of some animals.
  The guy who called me racist, unsurprisingly, didnt want to have a discussion. Maybe you do.
  Is my take naive? I admittedly dont know many openly racist people. To me, you could have brown people believing in ancient aliens just as much as any other colour of person. They just need to be insecure enough to reject science.