5. Woolly Mammoths and Pyramids
There are pyramids in South America, built for the purpose of religious worship according to the archaeologists who discovered them, which date to at least three millennia before the Common Era, making them older than the earliest of the pyramids discovered in Egypt. Before dissolving into the ruins they present today, they exceeded their Egyptian counterparts in volume, and were nearly as tall, in some cases up to 160 feet in height. During the twentieth century, unaware of what the piles of rocks which by then were overcome with jungle growth were, contractors and road builders scavenged them to provide rubble for the building of roads. The location and dispersal of the surviving sites led scientists and archaeologists to estimate that there were once more than one thousand such structures of varying sizes in what is now Brazil, most of them older than those in Egypt.
The Egyptian pyramids, which were built over centuries of elapsed time, were in most cases ancient when they were encountered by the Romans, who regarded them in a manner similar to that which is directed toward Roman ruins today. How ancient are the Egyptian pyramids? Some of the earliest were constructed by the Egyptians at a time when the Woolly Mammoth still roamed the earth. There is no link to the Brazilian pyramids and those of the Egyptians, at least no known link as of this writing, but the South American examples are in some cases centuries older, meaning they too were erected through means unknown at a time when the early great mammals were still alive, though near the extinction they eventually met. Woolly mammoths did not habituate the regions of South America and the Mediterranean where the structures contemporaneous with them were built, so it is likely the pyramid builders were unaware of their existence.