The Mystery of Stonehenge

The mysterious nature of this circular stone formation in Southern England starts about 5,000 years ago around the year 3,000 BCE. People from surrounding civilizations came together to erect one of the largest stone monuments of the time and it has been puzzling archeologists ever since. 

The process started when settlers began digging a large circular trench around where the stones were yet to be placed. This trench was about 360 feet in diameter and held deer antlers, aurox skulls, and some flint tools that could have been used to dig it. After this was accomplished over a span of about 200 years, they began to dig post holes, which suggest a timberlike structure surrounding the monument. Later, when this was complete, they then decided to switch back to stone and began erecting what we now can only see a fraction of today. 

This is the part that seems to raise questions of the archeologists, but they can’t help themselves on trying to figure out how they managed to create such a feat without any tools of their own. They even did it without the wheel, which was invented then, but was only making its appearance in the fertile crescent. The largest of these stones, amounting to 40 tons and 24 feet tall, didn’t travel too far from the actual structure, while others came from hundreds of miles away.

How did these people manage to lug these 4 ton stones across so many miles? Or did they even have to? There is one theory that suggests they did, and another that suggests they didn’t. The first is they placed many logs under the stones and ran them across for these 200 miles until each one got to their destination. This would explain the 1500 years it took for stonehenge to come to completion. However, it sounds like a hell of a commitment for 100 generations to carry on continuously. The other theory is that a glacier took stones from Wales, where the blue stone originated, and deposited them on the Salisbury plain. This seems to be the more likely story to the mystery of the traveling stones. Although, archeologists do find one problem with this explanation. How did nature deposit the exact amount of stones needed to complete the circle? Clearly, they didn’t think that the humans back then could count the stones first and then dig the correct amount of holes around in a circle to make them all fit. C’mon, we would have to imagine they were smarter than your average human judging by the fact they built something we still can’t explain. 

Nevertheless, why build this in the first place? What was the motivation behind these 1500 years it took to raise 100 stones in this particular formation? If a group of people laid out a 1500 year plan to build a stone structure of this magnitude by hand today, how long do you think the commitment would last? What would it take for people to continue building? Who knows, but hopefully an archeologist will find something tomorrow at Stonehenge that will give us all the answers.