Which is what I was trying to say, to the question at the beginning of the topic "Does Star Trek support ancient astronaut theory?". It is my example where Star Trek does not support AAT. Most examples are where humans left Earth before the 20th century space program, either by Alien Abduction (ENT North Star, VOY The 37's), or Alien intervention (Paradise Syndrome), and in the case of non-humans from Earth in Voyager's episode Distant Origin. I never saw 1970's Star Trek Animated Series, so if an episode promoted the idea that ancient astronauts built the early wonders of the world, I wouldn't know about it, but IIRC the rest of the series that I saw didn't support it.
"Support" isn't even a meaningful word to use here.
Evidence supports theories/hypotheses. Stories are just make-believe. No story "supports" any theory, it just uses its ideas to support the telling of the story.
Gene Roddenberry needed to make
Star Trek affordable enough to convince a network that it could be profitable to produce. So he built in the idea that the crew would often encounter Earth-parallel cultures so that the show could use existing backlots and historical set pieces, costumes, and props from earlier productions to represent alien worlds. Often this was presented without any explanation, as in "Miri" or "Bread and Circuses" or "The Omega Glory," but sometimes they tried to handwave it as alien intervention ("The Paradise Syndrome") or human intervention ("Patterns of Force"). None of it was about "supporting" anything except the show's ability to come in under budget.
In the later shows, they had the holodeck to give them an excuse to use historical or present-day sets and materials, so when they wrote a story about the crew encountering something Earth-related out in space, it was more about tying into things that would matter to the characters or be of interest to the audience. For instance, "The 37's" was done because the producers liked the idea of paralleling Janeway, the franchise's first female lead, with Amelia Earhart, a pioneering female aviator. It certainly was not about saying alien abductions were real; it just used the idea of alien abductions to generate the story. And "North Star" was simply the franchise paying homage to its own past tropes, since long-running franchises have a tendency to become increasingly self-referential as they get older.
In the case of "How Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth," I suppose it happened because it was made in the 1970s when all that ancient-astronaut BS was at its peak in pop culture. The writers wanted to acknowledge and celebrate indigenous cultures, but unfortunately the 1970s mass-media dialogue about indigenous cultures was heavily polluted by ancient-astronaut rhetoric that had originated among racists seeking to deny the intelligence of nonwhite cultures, but had the racism sufficiently encrypted behind a surface of woo-woo space-alien sensationalism that most people (my preadolescent self included) didn't recognize it for what it was. The writers probably just saw it as a natural way to do a story about indigenous cultures within the context of a show about starships and aliens, without realizing how condescending it actually was to indigenous cultures.
Although
Voyager did pretty much the same thing with Chakotay, since they relied on a "Native American consultant" who turned out to be a white guy perpetuating a fraud. So in trying to be respectful to indigenous Americans, they ended up being disrespectful due to insufficient knowledge.
