On whether or not it is a thought experiment, or an actual investigation of physical evidence, it seems to me (And the solar Ai), that there is no feasible way the ancient egyptians could have built the pyramids without a signficant energy source, and machines, not people, to actually do the work of constructing it. A person can process about 150 Watts of power for the normal 24 hr state of a human, but we can move to processing maybe 600 Watts for a period of about 20 minutes max (ie olympic athletes in competition), barely moving the barometer of our average rate of energy processing. So if we divide out the gigaJoules of enegy that were required to just move the stones etc, by the time historical "Records" claim it took to create the pyramids, the number of humans required exceeds even the population of Earth, even now, if all hands were on that task, with no machinery, we still would not achieve the pyramids, so something is very wrong with what we think about that.