Somebody Built These Things. But Who?
The stone circle builders of ancient Europe remain a modern mystery.
One bright and breezy autumn afternoon many years ago, I was driving aimlessly around on the narrow roads of Cornwall, in southwest England, when there appeared in front of me a circular formation of big stones standing on a barren field. Like you, I was familiar with the famous (and much larger) Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England, but had never been aware of any others. Yet there it was, all by itself in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. There were no people anywhere. Just the lonesome rocks, standing out in a circle.
As I walked among them I felt a gnawing desire to know who put them there. There were no bronze plaques naming the place so I stood there alone with the stones, listening to the wind and wondering.
There was a mystery on display on that hillside field and you could almost feel it closing in. I got the sense of being an unwanted guest, almost as if those who placed those stones thousands of years ago were standing around me.
Cornwall has been inhabited for about 10,000 years, meaning that descendants of the people who built that circle 4,500 years ago are still living nearby and have been living right there all during those many years. Yet to those same descendants, the stones are as much a mystery as they are to you and I. It’s as if the past has been surgically removed from the present.
Years later, riding across northwest France with friends, I encountered more stone circles and more mystery. There were plaques in place, telling the story of the stones or so I thought. I couldn’t read French but my friends could and translated them, only to reveal that the people who made the plaques had only guesses about who the builders were. How strange!
The plaque could just as well have said “stones be here”, because there was where the information stopped and the speculation began. This only increased the frustration. You stand there, looking at these things and you think “what in the world was going on here?” Nobody knows. And yet, the people living nearby are descended from people who lived right there at the time. The point is the people have been there the whole time!
Unable to figure out who built the stone circles, local inhabitants simply invented tall tales to explain them. One of these is “The Merry Maidens” in Cornwall … they supposedly were 19 maidens who were turned to stone for dancing on a Sunday. Other stone circles around Cornwall also associate them to petrified dancers and pipers and maidens who were “a-STON-ished” by their sinful acts.
Nowadays some souls attribute such mysterious ancient structures to visitors from outer space and feature spectacles on TV, complete with mysterious background music, about shadowy super-geniuses who made the Pyramids or who co-existed with the dinosaurs before zipping back to their respective galaxies. Had to be them; humans are just not that smart.
The fact that our earliest ancestors built such monuments is beyond the comprehension of many of us today but the fact is they had their Newton and Einstein equivalents also. Without writing and the subsequent ability to store information, cultural memory simply doesn’t reach back far enough to realize the contributions of ancient geniuses.
Is there anybody left who even knows how to make a wheel for a horse-drawn wagon? This was a common skill less than 200 years ago. Can the ordinary person living today make leather from an animal hide or make an urn for churning butter or forge a door hinge?
The best evidence for this memory loss over time is that human generations could remain in place over very long stretches. Instead of endless migration, some groups of early people simply stayed put and forgot where they came from.
The strange story of “Cheddar Man”
One of these groups settled down in what is now Somerset, England, during the Stone Age, 10,000 years ago, when England was still attached to the European continent. The skeleton of an individual who belonged to these people was uncovered in 1903. Today, he is known as “Cheddar Man" since he was discovered by excavators in a cave in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset.
What makes this particular find so amazing is that one of Cheddar Man’s direct descendants was identified in 2018, as a middle-aged school teacher, living in Somerset only a half mile from the discovery of his ancestor’s skeleton in the Cheddar cave! Think about that! You have people living for at least 9,000 years in the same place and completely ignorant of the genetic and cultural chain which dates with unbroken smoothness back to that time.
This descendant of Cheddar Man is Adrian Targett whose DNA was traced to his ancient ancestor who, as it turns out, had blue eyes and dark skin.
The past has a way of disappearing from our awareness and it may be that we fabricate it anew based on the realities of today. Those would be such human achievements as cell phones, moon landings, self-driving cars, inoculations and microwave ovens. We call these things “advancements” but only an infinitesimal group of people know how to make them. A thousand years ago almost everybody knew how to make flint arrowheads and grind flour and build canoes and tan leather and make shelters from animal skins.
Language is the way we transmit information into future generations. Without the capability of writing things down, our early ancestors had to use story telling for this transmission and the stories had to be easy to memorize from one generation to the next which means we had to weave them into fascinating myths.
Some of these myths are tall tales indeed but can be useful in understanding the movements of the sun, moon and planets because that is what they typically referenced. Others, like the “Merry Maidens” of Cornwall are simply nonsense.
It’s probably human nature to make things up and assert them as evidence when there is none. This may give us a sense of being in control, of being knowledgeable or wise and thereby provide some comfort. But to attribute such antiquities as the Nazca lines, the Pyramids or the Stone Age circles to space aliens would seem proof enough that we do tend to make things up and assert them as evidence when there is none.