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The Stonehenge was built by the great-ancestor of the British Museum, who stole it from Wales.
Someone having generally the right spirit but being so deeply & utterly uninformed on the subject they are passionately fighting for that they undercut their entire position? On the internet??? On TUMBLR???
No.
I do not believe it.
The British isles are just a series of new people showing up and saying “mmm don’t mind if I do” Like, I can think of at least 9 separate groups that invaded, integrating and displacing the already extant groups to different degrees. The saxons were like, at least 5 invasions after stone henge. Hell, the earliest versions of King Arthur are about a dude fighting off the Saxon invasions.
Isn’t that the case nearly everywhere?
Not true in the great rift valley of Africa. IIRC, that’s where we evolved.
Oh, I see where he went wrong - “funny post”.
honk honk
I’ve always wondered about the complete adoration British people have for Saxons out of all the many different succesful invading peoples in their history.
The french president called the british ‘anglo-saxons’ but that period of british history ended with the Norman and French invasion of the isles.
Not only could it be built today, it was rebuilt by a retired contruction worker named Wally Wallington in the 2000s. Here’s his official site documenting it that’s linked on his youtube channel.
Turns out, probably just took beams and small stones used respectively as levers and fulcrums to do it. Various aspects of his setup is likely not period-perfect, but I think he demonstrates pretty clearly that this isn’t a forgotten ability, it’s just been made obsolete by more modern methods.
Here’s Wally’s final creation as far as I can tell.
It was also rebuilt perfectly in Esperance Australia as it would have looked when it was new
That are is also very cool to see, though it looks like modern techniques were used for both quarrying the rock and erecting the structure. Still, there’s a strong draw to being able to see how the stones were potentially stacked pre-history.
Isn’t the big mystery that the stones originate from across the country?
There’s no professor under this clown mask so please fact checkFrom this site (
I only inspected briefly so it might be a conspiracy site idk1):The massive outer stones came from about 15 miles north, the smaller inner stones traveled roughly 150 miles from Wales, and the central Altar Stone journeyed at least 750 kilometers from northeast Scotland
Quite impressive, though I think we’ve compiled a wide variety of ways that could have been done, and have been recreated, for moving massive stones like Stonehenge’s. it seems less of ‘how’ and more of ‘which method’ that’s the mystery at this point. Here’s an article that articulates that sentiment, and a video of experimental historians replicating my favorite version of this.
Edit:
- 1 after giving it a more thorough look I feel safe saying this source is respectable.
and a video of experimental historians replicating my favorite version of this
Interesting how they keep it docile by blindfolding it. You don’t want one of those things to get spooked and run around stomping on people.
You also have a (largely) farming population, who have work from the spring into the early Autumn. Then months on end of not much to do. Be drunk, eat into food reserves, stay warm and somehow stay strong enough to be useful farmers next spring. You have a bored population of young, drunk, possibly abusive, probably male.
If you want some semblance of control over that population, you create religion, you tax the religion, you convince people that their gods want them to move that stone. The stone gets moved by those people. The taxes feed and intoxicates them, the work keeps them warm. At different times in history you send them to join the army, build a pyramid, go on a crusade.
Dunno, I could be completely wrong. But it doesn’t feel entirely wrong to me that we have a common problem that’s been solved in a variety of ways in history and this could fit that pattern.
Pretty similar to the people showcasing that you can just use rope to walk the mo’ai statues in to place.
“traditional Saxon culture” is pretty funny too given it’s more like a bunch of German mercenaries turned up wearing Adidas and the Britons started wearing Adidas too because they thought it was cool.
Low on the IQ bell curve: “Modern British people couldn’t make Stonehenge.” (Conspiracy theory)
Middle of the IQ bell curve: “Nooo! Stonehenge was made using advanced but historically plausible techniques.”
High on the IQ bell curve: “Modern British people couldn’t make Stonehenge.” (They are just bad at everything)
I grew up not far from stone henge, although Avebury is the better stone circle. It has a pub in the middle of it and I could cycle there from home. Been on a night hike around it too.
“My henge is better than your henge”.
Well Stonehenge is tiny and they won’t let you go up to the stones
It’s only tiny because they used " instead of ’ on the measurements.
Can we stop and get some henge?!
We have henge at home!
Henge at home:
I think technologically we probably could, but realistically we wouldn’t because it doesn’t benefit private corporations.
It would be a joke to build Stonehenge today if there was any incentive. Quarrying stone is easy, you just have to use a crane, pop it on a flatbed and drive it to the location.
It might cost millions but more than the equivalent amount of man power was used to build it back in the day
Datahenge has received full council approval with zero tax liability through 2099.
Nah the modern ones would build half of it. Run it overbudget 3x and the abandon the project at about 65% completion due to increased costs and complications. It would take them 5 years to do it.
The London underground would never be constructed today. It would cost like 40 bajillion dollarydoos
Then they’d renegotiate the contract so they have to pay even more.
Based on real events.
Not quite modern british but it took about 3 years in Esperence - including the first guy going bust).
They are good at inading privacy
Pretty good at invading in general historically
Visit a Mediterranean beach during the summer and you’ll realize they’re still invading
“The beauty of British women and the taste of British food led Britain to become some of the greatest sailors in history.”
Stonehenge could be built very quickly with today’s machines and technology. But just like cathedrals, the problem isn’t the means but the will: nobody wants to waste time and money on religious nonsense anymore.
You are completly right. If you have the will and the money, you could call a quarry today and order yourself some big stones. They will fit on an oversized load-truck. Call somebody with one or two of those big cranes. Perhaps also consult an architect or engineer who can calculate the structural integrity. We can totally do that.
Building Stonehenge today would end up in an ill advised contract structure between public and private stakeholders which would be partially responsible for a cost overrun of ~175% and it would ultimately get cancelled after a decade and a half or so when only ~30% was finished.
It would take a competent construction crew like 4 days
Yeah this was a joke about HS2
I don’t know about the budget back then, but the real Stonehenge took like a millennia to complete so if anything that’s actually finishing early.
Original plans were for a tower but it never got past the ground floor
Whoa, whoa, whoa. I have to stop you right there buster. Stonehenge is not “religious nonsense” it is literally a way to keep track of celestial movement and track the solstices. This allowed for ancient peoples to track the change of seasons and properly plan their agricultural activities. It was entirely practical, and very good at its job as it still works today to an extent.
It was entirely practical,
You can track the seasons using far fewer rocks at a much smaller size. So no, it really isn’t.
oh and who are you the Rock Wrangler? The Time Tempter? The Henge Handler?
Fun fact, henges are a type of earthworks, doesn’t have to have a circle, stone or otherwise.
Most henges are round though, because that’s the most area for the circumference. And when you’ve been shoveling dirt for weeks, that matters.
Someone built a modern one in SW washington state, although I think it’s just cast concrete. Certainly doesn’t look as nice in person
That’s extremely not true though. It’s what most people waste most time on of anything
Power tools disturb the spirits living inside the stone which causes them to depart and find different rocks to live in.
A structure like Stonehenge must therefore necessarily be made exclusively by hand tools.
Just prop up some big rocks in a really big circle and call it a day, then go to the pub.
It’s that easy!
No joke though there’s a spiritual sanctuary in rural Pennsylvania where they’re making their own stone circle. Every year they have a festival where they use ropes to prop up a new giant stone, and then they bury it so that it stays put.
It’s a really cool place, I think it’s called Four Quarters. You should check it out if you ever get the chance. They also host raves, medieval cosplay festivals, all sorts of cool stuff.
And they built their own suspension bridge across a ravine! One of their members is an engineer by trade. The thing is legit!
Sounds cool but I’m already pretty near the original stone henge, grew up in Wiltshire.
Ah, that’s pretty neat! I’ve always wanted to explore the area around Bristol/Glastonbury/etc
Look up Avebury if you want a stone circle you can actually go around. Much larger and there is a pub in the middle of it. If you like hill walking there are also the white horses
That sounds awesome. Does the pub serve fairie potions? I wanna wake up in isekai
mormons
Stonehenge wasn’t religious, it was for a stone age equivalent of destruction derby
It was most recently adjusted in 1963. Arguably it’s still a work in progress.
Surely they have to adjust it twice a year for daylight savings?
Gotta account for all those leap seconds
Aren’t we all
okay grandperson, let’s get you back to the care staff.
Cool video I found of a guy named Wally Wallington building some Stonehenge-style monoliths in his backyard - single-handedly with no modern tools.
I love these videos. I watch them every couple years just to re-amaze myself at how very possible it was for like 2 people that simply understand how levers work to get 50 other people to do an amazing amount of stuff.
Now, if you want to accidentally turn yourself into a “conspiracy theorist,” you can also learn about geopolymers, and make the extremely reasonable jump to ancient people in places with the right combination of salts could make water glass and both dissolve and form granite. Granite is an aggregate, so if you just take sand from places where people mined monolithic granite objects, you can use water glass to chemically melt the quartz, turn the sand into a soft polymer that takes a week to fully cure back into what looks like granite from the same quarry.
Works for limestone as well. So when you consider the likelihood that pyramid blocks were likely simply cast in place with readily available materials, it sort of makes you angry at the traditionalists that say everything was carved, and the ancient aliens people.
While casting was possible, it has already been considered and dismissed. The reason in Egypt is that the quarry still exists with unfinished blocks, and they documented with pictures how they cut the blocks and the blocks show the cutting marks that are described in the pictures the Egyptians left. For all the pic of cutting and moving the blocks, there are no pic of casting.
In the case of Stonehenge, core samples have been taken that show it wasn’t cast. A few of the stones weren’t moved but were already naturally there.
https://blog.education.nationalgeographic.org/2018/04/12/parts-of-stonehenge-may-have-been-in-place-long-before-humans/I’m aware - the unfinished obelisk is a prime example.
However, large copper chisels and blades don’t account for fine detail carvings or many of the thin bowls and vases made from granite. There are pooling marks and dripping marks on the top of the Serapeum which clearly indicate that some chemical process was involved. Why carve pooling marks into one slab on purpose? Why spend time carving intricate shapes when you can carve the obelisk, then cast the carvings in wax and geopolymer.
I’m saying that a combination of both methods were used. When you know how easy it is to cast something, then quarrying a solid slab stone would have been a huge flex.
This is fascinating. I love that they’re wearing costumes.
Right? Leave it to the French to think “We’re doing this 100% authentic!” and mean how they dress for it.
For what it’s worth, I’ve made some natron bricks from dirt in the yard (natron you can make by cooking baking soda) just to see what I would get. Seemed like regular dirt at first, then after a week, they were shockingly solid. I expect with limestone gravel, it would work even better.
Relevant Tom Scott video: https://nebula.tv/videos/tomscott-why-you-cant-touch-stonehenge
(Youtube version coming out in a couple hours)
Some time ago, in Brittany, a store was built on a site where menhirs once stood. Nearly forty menhirs were destroyed, a true scandal.
A fascist politician, Éric Zemmour, who fancies himself a historian (having written books on the history of France), seized the opportunity to decry the destruction of France’s Celtic history. The problem? The menhirs were erected two millennia before the Celts even arrived in Brittany… The guy read Asterix and Obelix and thought to himself, “What a great documentary!”. If this is the caliber of fascist intellectuals, I shudder to think what their henchmen must be like!
The dude fell into a vat of stupid as a child.
Stonehenge is crazy, it’s so old that it preceded both the Celts and the bell beaker culture which might have been proto-Celtic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge#Stonehenge_III_(megalithic_structure)
The bell beakers weren’t proto-Celts, they were displaced by the Celts, and given the bell beakers “completely replaced the Y-chromosome population” we’ve got a pretty obvious idea what they did to the people who started Stonehenge.
https://www.jamesrossjr.com/blog/bell-beaker-conquest-ireland-britain
The bell beakers weren’t proto-Celts, they were displaced by the Celts
Do you have a source for that? Your link doesn’t mention it.
Among other things the Celtic culture became distinct in mainland Europe 1500 years after the Bell Beaker migration and scholarship still hasn’t clarified from what part of Europe besides definitely not Britain. A link as a related tongue to proto-Celtic is hypothetical, as it is to Italo-Celtic, but the point being it’s like calling Proto-Indo-European speakers “proto-Celts.”
Like, potentially, for some of them, but even if that ends up being the case but you’re skipping some ancestral steps, and because the Celtic proper migration was genetically distinct we can at least say they were different groups.
And this is all just basic facts on the bell beakers…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Beaker_culture
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04287-4
tl;dr
Bell Beakers displaced/genocided by modern terms the Neolithic Britons in ~2500 BC, Celtic migration occured around ~1000-800 BC, which also coincides with the recognition of Celts as a distinct group so that migration itself is probably a better target for the label proto-Celt. It was certainly the introduction of an actual Celtic language to the isles.
tl;dr;dr calling the Bell Beakers proto-Celts is like calling an early 5th Century Roman soldier stationed in Londinium a proto-Chav.
Like, maybe, but mostly by accident and there’s just so many important steps in between, first and foremost being that Roman soldier starting the tradition of leaving his pregnant British wife behind to go fuck around on the mainland and never coming back, which is just as well because the kid was actually a Saxon’s.
You know, I appreciate the info, but it’s weird how you sound like I personally offended you by writing an incorrect half sentence on a prehistoric topic.
Maybe next time get your 5000 year old facts straight before making a silly internet comment buster
And ground penetrating radar has shown that the original structure actually spans a far wider area than just the stone ring in the center.
