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1960s theory that Stonehenge was a prehistoric computer
- jvanderbot 1mo agoAt this rate, I would find it startling if ancient stonework didn't have something to do with the sun, moon, and stars. Everywhere you look some ancient society was predicting these things by tracking them.
- bazoom42 1mo agoYou dont need giant rocks to observe the sun and moon though.
- jrootabega 1mo agoWhat if you want the sun and moon to notice you?
- bazoom42 1mo agoAt least a much more plausible explanation than the “ancient observatory” theory.
- jvanderbot 1mo agoYou do if you want a durable record of your observations e.g., for the purposes of showing future generations you could align with spring solstice, or predict phases of moon, or eclipses. That's impressive and maybe even useful.
- NuclearPM 1mo agoI don’t think the italics help at all.
- marcosdumay 1mo agoTracking those things is important to grow food.
- DarmokTanagra 1mo agoit was actually a doorbell
- pennomi 1mo agoThe original ring?
- DarmokTanagra 1mo agoAlexanderthal
- stephbook 1mo agoWould be pretty stupid to spend all this energy erecting stones just for the view of it. Like, it obviously had SOME purpose.
- malfist 1mo agoYeah, why did they go through all that effort to build the Eiffel tower?
- billynomates 1mo agoIt honored the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. And it demonstrated French industrial prowess, iron craftsmanship advanced engineering capabilities..
- ralfd 1mo agoFurthermore: The Eiffel Tower was planned to be temporary, it only still stands because it was used as a radio tower.
- whythismatters 1mo ago>planned to be temporary Same for the Atomium in Brussels, Belgium.
- anon48293 1mo agoThen they probably shouldn’t have used a stable atom..
- uniq7 1mo agoI wonder if Stonehenge was only for demonstrating some tribe's engineering capabilities too
- jimnotgym 1mo agoYet if an archaeologist excavated it with no knowledge of that, like everything that is not clearly a house, it would be chalked down as a 'ritual site'
- k33n 1mo ago“The BBC, without evidence, claims that Stonehenge may have been a prehistoric computer”
- bazoom42 1mo agoThe BBC does not actually claim that.
- DarmokTanagra 1mo agolaughs in Egyptian
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1mo agoNo one knows who they were, or what they were doing
- sjclemmy 1mo agoWhen my son and I drive to London, we pass Stonehenge and always play that song. We repeat that line many, many times.
- bazoom42 1mo agoOf course the the theory is wrong: > new investigations since the 1960s have discredited Hawkins' ideas.
- mistermann 1mo ago[dead]
- ehecatl42 1mo agoIt's clearly either a giant granite birthday cake... or a prison far too easy to escape.
- captainbland 1mo agoI suppose at some point it could have had a wooden structure around it to make it harder to escape
- toast0 1mo agoYou'd best behave or you'll be sitting in Stonehenge!
- leoalho 1mo agoIs this an Ylvis reference? Never thought I'd see such a thing on Hacker News.
- teytra 1mo agoIt is, and yes, nerds hang around here ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbyzgeee2mg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbyzgeee2mg @ 2:13
- kbrannigan 1mo ago[dead]
- JoeDaDude 1mo agoIIRC (read the book ages ago when much younger) , the theory was that by using the 56 Aubrey holes to count, say, by moving a pole from one hole to another once a year, an eclipse could be predicted to occur every 18th or 19th year. I always wondered why this was never simulated, and I guess the answer is that it would not work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_holes#Archaeoastronomy_and_the_Aubrey_Holes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_holes#Archaeoastronomy_...
- dvh 1mo agoI think there is a world market for about five Stonehenges.
- 2b3a51 1mo agoOA makes no mention of Fred Hoyle's 'three hours with a calculator' to check Hawkins figures (and being generally unimpressed). Also nothing about the Thoms (Alexander and Archie) who surveyed many other stone circles, or perhaps a passing reference to John North's chunky book on Stonehenge itself. Latterly Euan MacKie was working out how exactly you could test an hypothesis about ancient observers marking a celestial alignment of some type anywhere in the latitudes of Britain. A multi-route rabbit hole if you are in need of diversion.
- vee-kay 1mo ago[dead]
- PaulRobinson 1mo agoAs the last two paragraphs of TFA point out, this idea is now widely discredited. However, there are a lot of things that don't seem widely known in popular culture about Stonehenge that might colour perceptions about this theory, and the counters to it. First, it's worth remembering the thing you look at today has been mucked about with for thousands of years. It's not "original". Depending on your definition of that word, it's either a comparatively modern fake, or the current evolution of something that's always evolving. For perspective: the stones now have concrete bases. Officials were concerned in the 1920s that the "conservation work" being done at that time was starting to head into "faking" the monument. Cranes were used to "reassemble" the famous (c.f. Spinal Tap), "Great Trilithon" in 1958. Make your own mind up. But let's just pull it back to post holes and the archaeology of what has been discovered in more recent decades, even in this century. Archaeologists now know that the site evolved even in the earliest incarnations over thousands of years. There is also now evidence it should not just be seen as a single stone circle. Within the nearby - ~5 miles radius - landscape, there is evidence of other circles, roads, burial mounds, feasting sites, all settlements slowly being understood. We also now know a lot more of nearby cremations and burials, some of high-status individuals, over the course of hundreds of years. Turns out people travelled from all over, including continental Europe, to visit Stonehenge over a very prolonged period of time. Women seem to have been particularly key to the site. All of this suggests something complex within the cultural mindset of the neolithic people who built that landscape, and the subsequent populations that moved into it and adapted it. It's not just a stone circle used to predict/measure equinoxes or eclipses - as important as those things might have been to ancient peoples. The site carried weight. Was it the ancient version of Mecca? Or the Temple on the Mount? Or was it something more trivial and akin to the modern (nearby-ish) Glastonbury festival or Burning Man? We don't know. We will probably never know for sure unless ancient contemporaneous writing is discovered and understood. But we know it wasn't just a prehistoric "computer".
- clickety_clack 1mo agoI 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.
- nullbio 1mo agoIt's the only theory that makes any sense.
- zaps 1mo agoIn its final configuration the answer is “80087355”
- jrm4 1mo agoAt the risk of being all "I am very smart..." It seems like it would be a mistake to say things like "it was for science and not religion" or vice versa. Additionally, also seems like it would be very hard to say "it was definitely not for eclipses," given the difficulty in proving the negative? Like, maybe it was and it just didn't work right.
- jimnotgym 1mo agoMy dad always said he would take us to Stonehenge, when they finally get the roof on
- jimnotgym 1mo agoI like to think that they built Stonhenge purely to frustrate future generations. Imagining them debate endlessly about its purpose.
- spacetrucker 1mo ago[flagged]