Stonehenge

[Ecurb Noselrub]

Recent discoveries indicate the Stonehenge site may have been a place of ancient sun worship before the current megaliths were placed.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/11/30/strange-pits-at-stonehenge-reveals-new-clues-to-ancient-worship/?test=latestnews

[Asmodean]

Interesting to see Fox News being used as reference for other than mocking purposes twice on the same day...

That said, I suppose this could be quite fascinating to a historian, but me, I think Stonehenge is cool and beyond that, I give no flying duck at all about why it was built or who built it.

[OldGit]

Nobody seems to have considered the possibility that it was a pitch for some ancient ball-game; perhaps a version of multi-team football.

[Recusant]

Interesting to see Fox News being used as reference for other than mocking purposes twice on the same day...

This isn't actually a Fox News story though. It's Fox picking up something off the wire from DiscoveryNews and putting it on their own site for the benefit of their readers.

I myself do watch Fox News, but I watch it to learn what the conservative spin on current events is, rather than to be informed about the news. Their "mistakes" and "inaccuracies" (read: lies) are much too abundant for me to consider them useful as anything but a gauge of the mood of conservatives.

That said, it's an interesting story, and I thank Ecurb Noselrub for posting it. 

[Too Few Lions]

Great post, I've long suspected that the original gods were the Sun, Moon, planets and stars. It's a shame that we'll never really know what prehistoric people believed.

[xSilverPhinx]

Great post, I've long suspected that the original gods were the Sun, Moon, planets and stars. It's a shame that we'll never really know what prehistoric people believed.

My guess is that practically anything could've been a god, which narrows it down, of course

[The Magic Pudding]

Great post, I've long suspected that the original gods were the Sun, Moon, planets and stars. It's a shame that we'll never really know what prehistoric people believed.

You could ask some, humans living their prehistoric lifestyle may be rare, but those only a few generations removed aren't uncommon.

[Recusant]

Here's a thread that works for this story.  (Thanks to Lark for the tip.)

"Stonehenge: Sarsen stones origin mystery solved" | BBC

The origin of the giant sarsen stones at Stonehenge has finally been discovered with the help of a missing piece of the site which was returned after 60 years.

A test of the metre-long core was matched with a geochemical study of the standing megaliths.

Archaeologists pinpointed the source of the stones to an area 15 miles (25km) north of the site near Marlborough.

English Heritage's Susan Greaney said the discovery was "a real thrill".

[. . .]

The return of the core, which was removed during archaeological excavations in 1958, enabled archaeologists to analyse its chemical composition.

No-one knew where it was until Robert Phillips, 89, who was involved in those works, decided to return part of it last year.

Researchers first carried out x-ray fluorescence testing of all the remaining sarsens at Stonehenge which revealed most shared a similar chemistry and came from the same area.

They then analysed sarsen outcrops from Norfolk to Devon and compared their chemical composition with the chemistry of a piece of the returned core.

English Heritage said the opportunity to do a destructive test on the core proved "decisive", as it showed its composition matched the chemistry of sarsens at West Woods, just south of Marlborough.

[Continues . . .]

[Randy]

I had always had a fascination with Stonehenge at least from my teen years forward. I heard of all sorts of stories most of which I've forgotten and were most likely fiction. Ah, but it kept my interest. It still does today for what it actually is.

[Tank]

This has been getting quite a bit of airplay on the BBC news.

[billy rubin]

fascinating place. i rode my bicycle th here once. i think it was day two on my way to bath.

one of the sarcens had a chiselled out outline of an axe on it, i remember. ancient vandalism

[Ecurb Noselrub]

I saw it in 2018 on my way to Wales from London.  We hired an English driver and he took us there.  I paid for his entrance since he had never been there!!  An Englishman who has never seen Stonehenge is like an American who has never seen the Grand Canyon.  Get out an explore your world!

[billy rubin]

yo, Tex

have you been to palo duro canyon?

what a hole in the ground that is.

[Dark Lightning]

I saw it in 2018 on my way to Wales from London.  We hired an English driver and he took us there.  I paid for his entrance since he had never been there!!  An Englishman who has never seen Stonehenge is like an American who has never seen the Grand Canyon.  Get out an explore your world!

I finally visited the Grand Canyon last year, at age 67. I expect that when a thing is just part of the landscape, it's not all that novel or worth visiting? There are sites in California that I haven't visited, and I've lived here since the '50s, with time away for the US Navy and Florida at Cape Canaveral.

[No one]

The Grand Canyon is a hoax, perpetrated by the inventor of the grand piano and the subsequent generations. "THINK FOR YOURSELF"