Halo fans, let’s talk about this:

The Society of the Ancients (SOTA) featured in Halo 3’s IRIS marketing believed Antikythera, Stonehenge, and even crop circles were influenced and/or created by the Forerunners.

Fortunately SOTA and their ilk could be rightfully assumed to be silly conspiracy theorists. Nothing would totally substantiate the belief that Forerunners influenced these human creators in canon to this day.

IRIS itself barely had any lasting presence beyond Halo 3 terminals.

Delta Halo features architecture in its highlands that is distinctly not Forerunner, at least not that we’ve seen previously. Why did so many traditional designs flourish through millennia as other creations build from unrefined stone and mortar were left to rot?

Beneath the lake featured on the Halo 2 levels Delta Halo and Regret is a forgotten underwater city. What we walked through in-game were the surburbs. This looked to be a thriving metropolis. But what Forerunners would live here? Late in the Ecumene they loved their modernity.

Certainly this Atlantis in the stars didn’t just slip beneath the waves overnight. Delta Halo’s monitor was too busy dealing with a Flood outbreak and suffering Rampancy. Can’t imagine they’d care about some carefully placed stone and mortar.

But this civilization absolutely withered and was lost to time. Surely they were occupied by one or multiple species brought to the ring’s surface by the Librarian during the Conservation Measure. It’s got Forerunner tech but I don’t think you’d find many of their bones.

Such architecture would’ve been abandoned not long after the Halo Array was activated during the reseeding of the galaxy. It’s inhabitants would spread out amongst the stars, returning to their species’ cradle worlds and ancestral home worlds.

Others may have stayed...

“Though its original purpose has been lost to the march of aeons this structure is now a cemetery to countless brave warriors.”

Sanctuary is peak ancient aesthectic. But why would such alien transplant have to fight? Wouldn’t that be the responsibility of Delta Halo’s Sentinels?

I imagine many of these residents on Delta Halo made the ring their home. They wouldn’t have wanted to leave and abandon everything they had worked so hard for. Nothing awaited them on a cradle/home world but a truly alien hardship.

Again, why would they have brave warriors? Was there infighting? Did 2401 Penitent Tangent not care for their squabbling?

Perhaps “Sanctuary” was the gravesite for an army who volunteered to help 2401 fight the Flood. That could explain why the civilization died off so quickly.

We’d learn in the Forerunner Saga that Zeta Halo was once host to a thriving civilization of ancient humans—the Tudejsa, or “People from Here.” These folks were part of a society encompassing over a hundred species/races of humans without much connection to their cradle world.

Halo Infinite will hopefully bring the history of the long-lost Tudejsa people of Zeta Halo into the spotlight. These were a people united, living amongst an astoundingly diverse and integrated society.

Chakas, human boy who would become 343 Guilty Spark remarked that the Tudejsa didn’t have the “interspecies unity” largely present on Erde-Tyrene (Earth). The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Across the cosmos, Helljumpers dropped feet first onto an alien planet to assassinate a Covenant prophet. There, these young humans encountered the remains of an ancient civilization in deep space well beyond enemy lines. Yet they were ripped right out of their own school books.

This is the planet Heian. When we first saw this in Halo Legends film “The Babysitter,” I surely speak for all fans when I say we were flabbergasted. This was nothing like Forerunner architecture we’ve seen before. Their civilization predates us by many millennia? Why imitate us?

On Heian included everything from pagodas to pillars. Common sights we’d see in everything from reconstructed ruins to existing today, down the street. These remnants weren’t Forerunner. They were from our own ancestors.

How did those on ancient Heian, and presumably ancient Earth, come to create a spitting image of the sort of architecture we’d only introduce a handful of millennia ago is anyone’s guess. But they ain’t alien, that’s for sure.

Halo has fortunately excused itself from the awful trope, both fictional and real at present, that much of humanity’s past intellect is due in large part to an alien, deep space influence. It’s pathetic.

Pyramids across Egypt were built by slaves for the pharoahs. They were not landing pads for ancient alien spaceships.

Antikythera was made by some forward thinking engineer(s) living in Greece.

Stonehenge was likely built by the ancestors of people who say Tuesday weird.