It's Official: Stonehenge Stones Were Moved 160 Miles

[AnOhioan]

"Some of the volcanic bluestones in the inner ring of Stonehenge officially match an outcrop in Wales that's 160 miles (257 kilometers) from the world-famous site, geologists announced this week.

The discovery leaves two big ideas standing about how the massive pieces of the monument arrived at Salisbury Plain: entirely by human hand, or partly by glacier.

As it looks today, 5,000-year-old Stonehenge has an outer ring of 20- to 30-ton sandstone blocks and an inner ring and horseshoe of 3- to 5-ton volcanic bluestone blocks.

The monument's larger outer blocks, called the Sarsen stones, were likely quarried some 20 to 30 miles (32 to 48 kilometers) away in what's now England, where sandstone is a common material."


More at:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/12/111222-stonehenge-bluestones-wales-match-glacier-ixer-ancient-science/?source=link_fb20111222news-stonehengestones

[laconicsax]

1. Therefore: Aliens!

[jberryhill]

2. I know, right...

Can you imagine if you were part of a culture that had not much more than sticks and stones to work with for hundreds of years, and all the time in the world to figure out how to do stuff.

I imagine in that situation, that one would come up with all sorts of brilliant ideas for doing things with only the materials on hand.

This business of "it can only be done with modern machinery" is simply a reflection of the fact that we wouldn't approach the problem with anything other than the machinery we have. Our thinking is, in that regarded, limited by the fact that we haven't spent lifetimes trying to figure out how to do pretty much everything with wood, stone, bone, etc.

It's hard now to imagine how we got to the moon with slide rules, pencils, and less computing power than we carry around in our pockets now.

We tend to lose obsolete knowledge because it is just that - obsolete.

People are clever, and the builders of Stonehenge were no less clever than we are.

[krispos42]

4. Cradles

http://www.theforgottentechnology.com/newpage3

Check out the short video there. By using a series of wooden cradles, they could just roll the blocks along them. Have teams of people constantly picking up cradles and moving them in front of the rock they are moving.

I bet they pieces they moved were square on the sides, and long, and once they got it at Stonehenge they just split it in half to form the rectangular sides. Then they just levered them upright.


Here's the guy moving a 9½-ton slab upright.

[Soylent Brice]

3. lol

[Boston_Chemist]

5. Stonehenge is crude. I never got why people think it is such a big deal.

Saqsawayman, on the other hand, that is truly stone work at its finest: