It seems sometimes that all of these "alternate explanations" must spring from the hope that in ancient times there may have been people and/or cultures with superior intelligence.

Perhaps it is partly because there is so little evidence of any intelligence around today?

Unfortunately, the continuing ability of today's "leaders" to harness the ignorance of large cultural groups for grandiose and mostly senseless purposes suggests that perhaps we have always been little more intelligent than now.

This makes it much more credible to believe that the grand monuments from the past were constructed by ignorant sots, most likely for some grand - probably religious(?) - purpose that turned out to be a great mistake. The builders of these things are not around to explain them to us because ultimately the stupid die out or are destroyed and replaced by a new social order that's equally, but claiming to be differently, stupid. We can't learn much from history, because the "new stupid" always, it seems, obliterate the history of the "old stupid" lest people realize that there's no real difference.

John