Correct me if I'm wrong, but he seems to have just four lines of evidence:
The less sophisticated stuff is on top, so it must be older and from the "less advanced" Incas.
Something about earthquakes????
Bits of Macchu Picchu look like they were part of something else.
The Inca could not have done such works with the tools they were supposed to have had.
Somehow he spends 10 minutes on this. Let's break it down.
His beginning filler doesn't really make sense. He harps on #3, that certain stone elements are leftovers, when those silly academics think that they had some religious purpose:
Or take the mortar stones, which mainstream will tell you had some sort of religious significance... I don't know, when I look at this, it just, the orientation of them, I can't help but think that this is just what's left over from something else.
First of all, what orientation??? There's two of them, there's only one orientation and that's "next to each other." Secondly, how exactly does his point contradict the mainstream point? "Part of something bigger" and "a shrine or something" are hardly exclusive.
More importantly, the evidence for the mainstream is literally "The Inca told us." Spanish chroniclers such as Garcilasco de la Vega, and native authors like Guaman Poma, gives us first hand accounts of Inca rituals. We know how the Inca used solar alignments in their religious architecture from several other sites, such as those in Cuzco, so when we see another structure, like the "sun dial" at Macchu Picchu, that shares those characteristics, it's no leap to say it's another instance of the same thing.
Meanwhile, Bright Insight says nothing more than "It looks like it was part of something else." Well, where is the rest of it? Apparently it would require a 9.0 earthquake to make a single wall Macchu Picchu sink a bit- what enormous calamity removed any trace of the rest of these structures?
He continues on to point #1, and makes a great opening impression:
Archaeologists say that these blocks are newer because they were better made.
No, they don't. No one has thought that since the '20s. We say they were newer/Inca because whenever we find that architectural style, we find Inca artifacts. We say it because we have several examples of where the Inca got the stone, recorded, again, when the Spanish came and thankfully wrote it down.
Most relevantly, we say it's newest because, stratigraphically, it is. Stratigraphy, that is, the study of layers of stuff, has been the basis of archaeology for years, and works on a handful of basic principles. One, Bright Insight points out, is "If it's on top it's newer." Now, a better way to it is "If it's below, it's not newer," because as with things like walls, "on top" can definitely mean "at the same time as."
This is the first of many examples of the video exploiting its stance as the viewers only source of information. If it was honestly interested in educating, it would give you the name of a single archaeologist, which it doesn't, or a single book, which it doesn't, or a single webpage that doesn't share its own perspective, which it doesn't. In fact, this guy doesn't want you think we know things about the Inca:
We have so little evidence of any of this...
It's a true mystery, how could they done this?
Note that he doesn't say who built it or how, but instead peppers these little phrases here and there to reinforce that, because we know nothing, it's foolish to to do the mainstream thing and make statements.
This is the typical psuedo-archaeology trick of "second opinion bias." History education, particularly about Latin America at any point in time, is atrocious. The author takes a gamble and assumes that you don't know anything else about the Inca, so he can call what you learned in public school "mainstream academia." You should question what you learned there, and the video takes advantage of that by questioning everything. Our brains like to latch onto this "second opinion:" when we question something, we take to the next thing that provides an answer.
Why bring this up? If the video referenced any other Inca site and any actual academic (or, heck, any pop history) source on it, you could easily find that Inca masonry appears on top of every other pre-Columbian architecture. Except, that is, where it's the only occupation of the site, such as at Macchu Picchu. If the Inca weren't the first, we'd expect to find some sign other than the architecture- but we don't. There's only Inca artifacts, and nothing from this prior culture.
After this, he makes some comments about the sinking side of the Principal Temple. If you look in the background of this picture, you can see the steep drop off of the elevation behind it. The first Google result shows you the context: unlike much of the site, this structure's side walls are built on any bedrock. It only takes some severe rainstorms (common in the Andes eastern slops) or some seismic activity (common in the Andes) to do some serious erosion damage.
This brings us to #4, a point which has been belabored for years because it's exciting, but is based on a surprisingly simple contradiction:
The Inca couldn't have built the walls, they didn't have the tools.
Someone else built the walls with "advanced" tools. We have yet to find the tools.
Somehow replacing a lack of evidence with something that would have left behind an exponentially greater amound of evidence, but still didn't makes sense. Anyways...
Again, someone please demonstrate cutting stones and stacking them, of this magnitude...
Here you go, courtesy of /u/Mictlantecuhtli. The important part here is that Inca weren't making jigsaw pieces then putting them together. They were assembled on site, cut specifically to match the neighboring stones. The entire process, from quarry to temple, as I've written about here for the site I study. To quote that:
like discovering ground beef, dough, mashed tomatoes, and potato peelings in a kitchen and insisting that the home-cooked burger, fries, and ketchup on the table was from the McDonald's drive through.
We have Inca telling us the purpose of their structures, stratigraphy across the Andes showing the Inca style as most recent, and remnants of the entire production process. This guy has "it doesn't look right."
For what it's worth that video sources Brien Foerster, who has no qualifications in history, archaeology or anthropology but was a frequent guest on Ancient Aliens and has claimed more than once to have discovered proof of alien remains before being widely debunked.
