Many thanks for the kind comments -- on and off the record -- about the pictures I have posted which purport to show how bluestones were transported across land and sea. The two pages are here:
http://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2011/11/danger-engineers-at-work.html
http://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2011/11/even-more-danger-marine-engineers-at.html
I have already added a few pics since the original posts were made -- and if anybody knows of any I have missed, please let me know. I will be happy to incorporate them.
Ok Brian I'll put you and the rock collecting club out your misery and tell you how they moved the Bluestones!
ReplyDeleteLike everything in life the solution is far simpler than you (and especially the academic world) would believe.
They carried them on a five poles in a trellis like stretcher - one of the aspects you failed to list on you previous post was manpower (sorry ladies!).
50kg girls on the end of levers accompanied by some long haired couch potato male students who's perception of work is getting out of bed in the morning would do little to replicate a Mesolithic Man entrusted with this task.
For he was 6' 3" - 6' 8" tall and weighing 160kg to 190kg - three times the size of the average female student. The size of his bones show that he could easily lift 2 - 3 times his own body weight and very 'hard' with great endurance.
The maths - 4 tonne stone weighs - 4000KG one Mesolithic man could lift 600KG to waist height, therefore you need just 7 men to lift the stone. With a 5 pole stretcher/trellis construction you can have 10, with longer poles you can get 20 - the more the people the longer they can carry the stone without rest.
In theory they could have walked it from Preseli - but down to the boat is fine for me. This would neutralise the environment as it is still the preferred method of removing bodies out the jungle.
Yes I know what your thinking, but your wrong as these people are well known and the Victorian's who appreciated their unique size and statue and therefore saw them as a separate branch of the homo sapiens tree and called them Cro-Magnon Man.
Recently, as DNA show that they have the same genes as a majority of us, so they have been re-branded as 'modern man' in anthropology, to be politically correct and stop the public asking too many obvious questions.
So where do they find them in Britain? In your old rock collecting location Brian of the Cheddar Gorge, dated at 9000BC - which is just 500 years before they brought the Bluestones to Stonehenge (according to my last book), what a coincidence!
RJL
My God! I can hardly keep pace with all these scientific developments. A race of giants humping mighty rocks around during the Younger Dryas...?
ReplyDeleteThe Cro-Magnon Conspiracy. Does Dan Brown know about this?
Whatever next?
I have a simple one word explanation for how the stones were transported.
ReplyDelete: snow.
Timmy -- nice idea, since sledges slide easily on compacted snow, and you can build snow ramps which then melt away..... but remember that in sub-zero temperatures the physical tasks associated with bluestone transport all become more difficult, and the reduced friction means that towing a sledge also becomes more difficult. Maybe they used spiked sandals? On balance, I suspect the heroic Neolithic engineers might have preferred a summers day after all.....
ReplyDeleteSnow, Cro-Magnon Man,......nahh!!!
ReplyDeleteThe Truth is obvious, self-evident. Dolphins have been mentioned in previous comments. Others have scoffed. Now I have the solution...........BLUE-nosed Dolphins. Highly intelligent, loved in our own times by the New Age Aquarians and hippies amongst us. The answer was, if not in front of our noses, in front of THEIR noses all along! They guided the ships, and allowed themselves to be harnessed to the Reed boats beloved of RJL's Ancestors back in the good old days. Q.E.D., Eureka, Bon Voyage, etc.
Maybe a this idea can should be added to your ongoing discussion.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.megalithic.co.uk/modules.php?op=modload&name=Forum&file=viewtopic&topic=4583&forum=1
Thanks Anon -- yes, a nice idea, and worthy of a mention. Thanks for reminding me -- I think I had seen that post before....... I'll add it to the list!
ReplyDelete