The myth of our superhuman ancestors

Sums are not my strong point, but my friend Pete has just reminded me of an interesting figure trotted out by MPP in his latest article: 88,000 person / hours for the transport of 80 bluestones from Pembrokeshire to Stonehenge. (That is, along the A40 land route.......)  That works out at a bit more than 1,000 person hours per stone.  Assuming that around 20 people were required to carry or pull each stone (a very conservative estimate), that gives them just 50 hours to shift a stone from Preseli to Stonehenge -- a distance of c 300 km.  So without any breaks at all they would have to trot along at about 6 km per hour......... assuming that there were no jungles, bogs, impassable rivers, high tides and so forth encountered along the way.  Let's be generous, says Pete, and assume that MPP's calculator was faulty, or that he just forgot a few zeroes ......

Of course, this all has relevance nowadays because of the realisation by MPP that Stonehenge was not a great "central place" at all, but a PERIPHERAL place with no hinterland or tribal /cultural catchment.  It was also a place apparently built as a folly, with no great purpose, and used, after its construction or partial construction for a variety of different purposes.

In the light of all of this, it makes the human transport hypothesis even more preposterous than it was before.  If Stonehenge was not after all THE great cultural centre of the British Isles, it cannot possibly have had the "pulling" power to encourage tribesmen from the far west of Great Britain to carry 80 monoliths across hostile and difficult terrain in an act of ancestor worship, political unification or homage. Even if said tribesmen were somewhat crazy, why didn't they cart the petrified remains of their ancestors to other interesting "special places" as well?  And if their behaviour was deemed by others to be perfectly normal and acceptable, why is there no evidence of other tribes making similar grand gestures in other parts of the country?  None of this makes any sense at all.

The diggers and the camp followers at Rhosyfelin, Carn Goedog and Waun Mawn would still have us believe that bluestone monoliths were quarried and arranged in stone circles because the places that they came from were "special places" or because the "act of quarrying" was deemed in itself to be worthy or noble.  But nothing in West Wales supports this version of events.  The evidence of quarrying is so flimsy that it can -- according to Hitchens's Razor, be dismissed. Spotted dolerite and foliated rhyolite were not used preferentially in megalithic settings in West Wales.   There are around 46 different rock types in the bluestone assemblage at Stonehenge -- were they all special and were they all quarried?  The Waun Mawn "lost circle" did not exist, and if there was a small stone setting there it had nothing to do with Stonehenge.  

The more we examine the thesis of long-distance megalith transport in the British Isles, the more we realise that it is not supported by the evidence.  And if long-distance stone haulage was an activity that characterised a certain episode in Neolithic history, why were no stones delivered to Stonehenge from the tribes who lived to the north, the east and the south?  And why is there no evidence of the development of this form of worship or tribute earlier, and a decline in activity afterwards?  Or did the rules of cultural evolution or dissemination simply not apply to Stonehenge and those who visited it?  And finally, why, if quarrying was a desirable activity, are the great majority of bluestone monoliths at Stonehenge weathered and abraded boulders and slabs which have clearly not been quarried from anywhere, and which look like glacial erratics?

These are all crucial issues that have simply been ignored by MPP, Mike Pitts and scores of other authors of learned papers and books about Stonehenge.  Journal editors and reviewers, EH and the archaeological establishment are all involved in the cover-up of the realities listed above -- and they are all complicit in the perpetration of an increasingly outrageous mythology dressed up as the truth.