Stonehenge: Neolithic monument found near sacred site

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-wiltshire-53132567

by diodorus • 6 years ago

38 48 6 years ago

apaz037• 6 years ago

I'm of the firm belief at this point that we are a species with severe amnesia.

I find it significantly more plausible that cataclysmic events we no longer remember occured in our past and wiped away a rich history in which we may have feasibly been far more advanced technologically than we currently are.

AlotOfReading3• 6 years ago

This is a pretty old idea that was recently rebranded as the "Silurian Hypothesis". If you put in a bit of thought, it'll be obvious that it essentially boils down to one of two things:

Either every paleoanthropologist, archaeologist, and geologist out there is in a massive conspiracy to hide the truth, or all of the people in those disciplines are complete idiots. An event like that would leave strong genetic, palynological, and archaeological evidence, yet nothing of that sort exists. Any explanation purporting to wipe out the evidence and replace it with the consensus story we do would be better called magic than science.

stareatgoats2• 6 years ago

You could be right. It is certainly a compelling argument; "either scientists are in a conspiracy or complete idiots" (paraphrased). The answer is however unequivocally: we don't know. And it behooves to be a bit more humble when it comes to these things, and investigate each claim individually instead of making blanket statements about everything such.

There are several aspects one can take into account that can inspire a more nuanced approach: one is that these kind of theories is an "entry-drug" for interest in archaeology and related sciences. To get on a high horse and nip such interest in its bud is counterproductive from a scientific perspective and is reminiscent of the defensive position that many professions are taking in the open data age that has opened for masses of amateur researchers doing much better work than a tiny cadre of elite professionals could do on their own.

Another aspect of this dismissive attitude is that the notion a petrified and fact-resistant "establishment" is opening the field for all sorts of nut case Youtube channels that exploit this types of interests instead. Including the age-old nazis with their Atlantis and similar theories.

So no, let's assume that we don't know, that anything is possible. But let's also inspect the evidence for each fantastical claim with best of our knowledge.

drran• 6 years ago

The answer is simple: concrete is very simple technology, which was discovered and forgotten multiple times, but archeologists are not specialists in concrete making technology, so they label kilns as temples.

If somebody will sponsor two sits from Ukraine to Peru, I will just demonstrate that using ancient temple, which is already filled with stones, waiting for fire.

partyboat15862• 6 years ago

You know Graham Hancock?

"Archeologists hate him, this one weird trick to discover ancient civilizations".

He recently said in an interview that younger archeologists have read his work and are subversively challenging the orthodoxy. Also Randall Carlson mentioned that mainstream Geology has already come round to the idea of a catalysmic event around the time of The Younger Dryas.

Now I don't know how much of what either of these men claim to be true is true but it seems to me that it's not only stupidity or conspiracy that holds a field back. The real problem is when a fundamental mistake is made and then built on, ego gets involved and confirmation bias is abound. For example Geologists at some point all decided that everything happens gradually, the earth is stable and there are no catalysmic events. In the last 20 years that has been reversed, yet cataclysmic theories of The Younger Dryas have existed since the early 20th century.

It is certainly true that people like Graham Hancock and other fringe theorists play up the story of how much they oppressed by the mainstream as if it is evidence to support their claims. This is to be ignored as evidence and their arguments looked at on their own merit. We should however admit that mistakes are made in all fields, they gain momentum over time and require huge amounts of evidence to overturn.

m463• 6 years ago

we may have feasibly been far more advanced technologically

When I saw a video recently that mentioned the Antikythera mechanism, we definitely have had high points and low points that we've forgotten.

https://youtu.be/IT0gXa1ZrnA

PaulKeeble• 6 years ago

There are a few ancient techniques that got lost along the way as we moved to differing mathematics and languages but there is nothing significant high technology found so far.It is a bunch of trenches, hardly high technology.

If you talk to a doctor about diagnosis 100 years ago they would tell you about touch and listening to the body in various ways to do a diagnosis that a modern Doctor doesn't know because they just order an Xray. Listening to the heart is a bit old fashioned already as cardiograms have become part of the kit in your average ambulance. So the techniques will be lost in time.

sixothree• 6 years ago

So maybe the simulation was reset?

fit2rule2• 6 years ago

Mass Corona Ejection is the one theory that I find sticks in my mind most, when the question "what could possibly have reset things so drastically that none of the survivors would remember ancient civilisation?" is asked.

Its like the Degauss'ing of our planet. I can imagine even we wouldn't survive such an event unscathed.

jedberg5• 6 years ago

I don't know about being far advanced in the past, but we've certainly lost knowledge along the way.

- Scientists still debate exactly how the pyramids were built. They have a pretty good idea, but don't know exactly.

- More recently, we're not sure we could even recreate the engines that powered Apollo and took us to the moon. It appears that some of the critical knowledge was institutional, passed from one to the next, and all the engineers are gone.

And look at any tech company now. Sometimes when one person leaves, stuff has to be rewritten because no one knows how it works. My favorite example of this, which I experienced personally, was that no one knew how the "send money" code at PayPal worked for the longest time. It was written in a language that the lead engineer made up (and then he subsequently left). Everyone knew it worked, but no one knew how. They had to eventually rewrite the whole thing from scratch, but not after creating a fleet of emulators to keep it running.

crispyporkbites2• 6 years ago

That’s a silly argument, we could build pyramids 100 times bigger than the Egyptian ones if we wanted to today, and we can build engines that are far more efficient and powerful than the Apollo ones.

Just because the specific methodology became obsolete doesn’t mean we lost anything along the way

thaumaturgy4• 6 years ago

This is a tantalizing idea ripe for nerd sniping, but there are practical limits to how advanced previous civilizations could have become. If all of humanity were catastrophically wiped out right now, and 50 million years from now, another species was investigating the planet, they'd find microplastics in rock and ice strata around the world, all at approximately the same age. There's no natural explanation for this material, so it would be strong evidence for a global species capable of extracting and processing hydrocarbons.

Although many people don't believe it, the fact also remains that there would be similar evidence of atmospheric changes due to our activities.

There might be no written record of our passing, all of our steel structures would be long gone, even Mount Rushmore long erased, and our efforts at interplanetary exploration could all be lost, but our plastics would remain.

Some further reading: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-e...

FWIW, I do think some prehistorical civilizations were more advanced than we give them credit for, and ongoing discoveries seem to support this. But we're almost certainly the most technologically advanced civilization the Earth has fostered to date.

dragonwriter2• 6 years ago

You don't present an argument for an upper limit on how advanced past civilizations can have been without detection but for an excluded middle, because, sure, a civilization at our level would be easily detectable, but one that developed to where it could operate without environmental pollution and which could clean up the pollution that it made on the way to it's advanced state would not be so detectable.

wolfi1• 6 years ago

the report doesn't mention Prof. Wolfgang Neubauer's team from vienna who developed the technology: https://archpro.lbg.ac.at/press-releases/stonehenge_durringt...

TheOtherHobbes2• 6 years ago

There's a lot of speculation here about cultural amnesia, but I think that's partly missing the point - which is the sheer scale of the project.

These structures are absolutely massive. I used to live in the area and it took me a long time to see Durrington Walls, partly because it's hard to imagine an earthwork on that scale. I literally did a double take when I realised that some earth banks were part of this huge construction.

The Walls are a small enclosure inside this much bigger complex, and they still cover an area bigger than Wembley stadium, which can seat up to 90,000 people.

This new ring of shafts - presumably with objects inside them - is slightly smaller than the entire town of Salisbury a few miles to the south. It makes the Old Sarum earthwork, which used to be Salisbury in medieval times, look like a footnote.

For a neolithic culture, it must have taken an absolutely insane amount of planning and physical effort - and this at a time when the total population of the British Isles was less than 200,000 people.

FerretFred• 6 years ago

It'll be a shame when the Government starts building the road tunnels underneath Stonehenge to allegedly ease traffic. Sacred doesn't seem to be in their vocabulary.

ta17711771• 6 years ago

Sacred = supersedes my authority = destroy

Stonehenge: Neolithic monument found near sacred site

Related Stories