I think people underestimate how similar to us people were a few thousand years ago. We build places like Glastonbury and Burning Man all the time and it doesn’t really mean much beyond looking kind of cool. Stonehenge might just be something like that.
I have always thought they were likely seasonal camps. Many peoples living off of the land are seasonally nomadic. Having the stones arranged to also be season change indicators based on the sun would be helpful.
In Alaska we still head out to fish camp. Places along the river where people gather for a few months because that is where the food is. Building a permanent structure at such places for seasonal use just seems logical.
And you would make a circle of little rocks at the centre. Next year you would put bigger rocks there, then you needed bigger rocks than the place up the road, or you were not as cool.
Yep. Reading some of the earliest written stories really shows how little we have changed socially since then, and I imagine that goes back a lot further.
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I think people underestimate how similar to us people were a few thousand years ago. We build places like Glastonbury and Burning Man all the time and it doesn’t really mean much beyond looking kind of cool. Stonehenge might just be something like that.
Which is not surprising since our DNA barely evolved during that "short" time span.
We still like to think we are far superior, which all the people before us probably also thought about the people before them
I have always thought they were likely seasonal camps. Many peoples living off of the land are seasonally nomadic. Having the stones arranged to also be season change indicators based on the sun would be helpful.
In Alaska we still head out to fish camp. Places along the river where people gather for a few months because that is where the food is. Building a permanent structure at such places for seasonal use just seems logical.
And you would make a circle of little rocks at the centre. Next year you would put bigger rocks there, then you needed bigger rocks than the place up the road, or you were not as cool.
1000 years of this oneupmanship = stonehenge?
Yep. Reading some of the earliest written stories really shows how little we have changed socially since then, and I imagine that goes back a lot further.
Stonehenge is more like stacking rocks next to a stream than what their contemporaries were doing in other parts of the world.