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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.
Oh, I see where he went wrong - “funny post”.
honk honk
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?
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.
Because the polity that survived to form medieval England, and from there the British Empire and modern United Kingdom, considered itself Saxon.
Wessex, Alfred the Great. ‘The Last Kingdom’ - the only Christian kingdom in England that was not conquered by the invading Danes. Future rulers would emphasize their historical ties here as a means to gain legitimacy.
The french president called the british ‘anglo-saxons’ but that period of british history ended with the Norman and French invasion of the isles.
Relevant Tom Scott video: https://nebula.tv/videos/tomscott-why-you-cant-touch-stonehenge
(Youtube version coming out in a couple hours)
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
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 idk):
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, so it seems less of a ‘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.
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.
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.
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.
Removed by mod
Can you post the funny post, now?
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.
London has much larger modern structures.
Try to build the Gherkin today. You can’t.
Must’ve been built by aliens then.
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.
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.
