“The First Stonehenge” National Geographic:
Word has been out for some time, but now it has hit NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, complete with nice pictures. (Roff Smith The First Stonehenge National Geographic vol. 226 no. 2 August 2014 page 27) They’ve found that a stone circle in the Orkney Islands of Scotland is older than Stonehenge, and the whole construction complex is bigger than the Parthenon. It dates to about 3,000 BC, which is old for sure. Of course it is not as old as Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, which was started around 9,000 BC, and which has impressive artistic refinement, a formal finish and such engineering details as having the stone sunk into the bedrock. Avebury, my own favorite which is about the age of Stonehenge also has the stones sunk into the chalk beneath. It’s kind of ironic to see the stones looking wild and free and to know that the foundations have been cut clean and square.
Personally I think it’s all one tradition. There are just too many similarities between certain ancient sites arranged more or less along a great circle and following, at least from Sudan to Norway, a change in blood type. But that’s idle speculation. Today I’m about serious speculation. Why did those ancients build so well and why did they disappear?
Build well, they did, with thousands of tons of stone quarried and moved and art that you would call Art Deco if the dates weren’t a tad off. And they used the building complex for a thousand years. Whoa, Nellie. That’s impossible, isn’t it? I mean even England has yet to survive that long under without a total regime change. Then one day the people of the Orkney’s had a huge feast and then destroyed the complex quite deliberately.
So here’s my speculation. They didn’t live there around the complex. It was a place for occasional gatherings, but it wasn’t an urban complex. The islands are an archipelago, and if each little island maintained its social distance from the others and even subdivided, then their fertility would have persisted long after an urban social arrangement would have destroyed it.
Then in the end there was probably a social change. They started mixing it up. After that it was just a matter of a few generations, five I would guess, before it became obvious that there would be no more babies. They had herds they would never need. They had an architectural triumph that mocked them from the past. So they had a big blowout. That’s not unique. The Mayans at one point went out and buried their amazing monuments and then vanished. They also knew they were on the way out, probably for the same reason.
It’s a testable hypothesis. There are large numbers of human bones to be studied there. Modern techniques should be adequate for establishing first that the populations remained distinct for eight or nine centuries, then that toward the end they began to mix it up and finally that past a certain date no more babies were born.
Master builders they may have been, but with a thousand years of cultural ascendancy, buildings aligned to the solstice and so forth, they never tumbled to the fact that you just can’t mix up your gene pool. This of course has nothing to do with “race.” It’s all family. You know (or can find out very easily by looking around this site) what could have saved them. Anybody interested in saving yourselves?
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