British geologist Herbert Henry Thomas’ seminal study on Stonehenge was wrong
livescience.com
livescience.com
He thought they came from Carn Meini; the article says we now think they came from Craig Rhos-y-felin and Carn Goedog.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/nov/20/archaeologis... says that Carn Goedog is less than a mile from Carn Meini.
Science "journalism" certainly has the reputation it deserves.
200 miles inside of England is like him pointing to Guatemala instead of Iowa.
When we (now, and in the past) look at ancient construction projects, we instinctively tend to imagine fairly "brute force" construction methods. Basically, the way things are done now but with people powered trucks, cranes and such. Think of all those depictions of many people dragging huge loads on rollers or sleds. Very large groups of people using muscle power.
Thousands of labourers, hundreds of years. Herodotus suggests that it took 100,000 builders over 20 years to build a pyramid, 2m man years. In egypt, it's plausible. They had huge numbers of people, an empire, large scale slavery...
With stonehenge in 5,000 ypb britain, there are thought to be far fewer people. It wasn't a massive urban culture like egypt. People are thought to have lived in small dispersed groups at that time, with little evidence of large "political" authority that could command a large labour force.
Gogleki Tepeh's builders achieved similar feats 12,000 YBB. This is before large scale societies are thought to have existed at all, anywhere.
So either, (1) "civilised" society was much more common historically and ancient in origin (2) There were "pre-civilised" ways of organising very large numbers of people. Or (3), they had very clever building techniques that did not require many people.
Any of these answers, or some combination of them could add a lot of flavour to our understanding of the neolithic, culturally.
In reality nobody has any idea how, when or even by whom (I would despute the cartouche as solid evidence) the great pyramid was actually built and egyptology certainly won't figure it out (at least not with its current systemic issues).
I think it sounds plausible in terms of the amount of work. 1 man year per stone.
This is some pretty incredible jargon is this widely used, I've never seen it before and needed to look it up.
Is it really that hard to say 2,500 years ago?
It's pretty widely used in the context of history these days, mostly because it's common to look at long stretches of time. It's really the easiest system once you know the acronym.
Here...
Herodotus is a 5th century BC historian, a favourite among the 13th century European historians that founded the modern discipline. He was relaying information that may have been invented sometime in the 2nd millennia BC, as many primary records were lost during the 19th century BC dark period. The Pyramid itself was constructed in the 24th century BC.
This is a little more confusing to me than ybp.
BTW, I'm still not really sure what AD stands for.
I like the holocene calendar idea, personally. I can live with AD, but kind of dislike the non-universalism of using a specific church's calendar.
As I understand it, the "present" in YBP refers to 68 years ago, 1950. This is related to the advent of carbon dating, and the way widescale nuclear tests altered the proportion of carbon isotopes found in nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present
Insofar as 68 years is a rounding error when discussing the Great Pyramids, YBP is a lot less clumsy. But 500 years from now it will probably begin seem just as clumsy as BC/AD. At least this time there is a pragmatic reason for the delineation (carbon 14 levels being altered.) Of course in 1,000 years you'll probably have people on hyper-reddit very smugly pointing out that nuclear testing actually started in 1945 not in 1950, just as today they point out Christ was not born in 0AD. ;)
2.5 tons sounds really heavy, but just 25 people could lift and move that much weight. 50 people could move reasonably quickly and 100 people could carry that at a normal walking pace all day long.
PS: They also used larger stones on the bottom and smaller stones at the top.
In which planet's gravity?
And carrying them from which remote location, on which nicely paved roads to make this easy?
People building these things where not stupid. These stones where not being lifted over boulders or anything just reasonably flat level ground.
PS: You will note the pyramid happens to be near a very nice river flowing in the correct direction. So, they don't exactly need to build hundreds of miles of roads, just enough to minimize effort.
Wearing specially mounted load, in specially designed clothing, hooks and suck, and nicely distributed among various body parts.
And even the higher end of that range (100 pounds) is still 1/55 the weight of the huge, monolithic, piece of rock.
>People building these things where not stupid. These stones where not being lifted over boulders or anything just flat level ground.
They didn't have to be stupid to have to lift them over non-flat ground. They just had to not have a source of such rocks in a straight line over flat ground to the pyramids.
Plus, when they got them there, they had to raise them appropriately.
Not to mention the cutting of those stones at the quarry itself.
They are also expected to be able to move someone else with most of that gear attached to the both of them.
Really, carrying 50 pounds most of the day or lifting 200 pounds off the ground and moving to is reasonable for most physically fit people.
What I try to get across is that this is not some army backpack and paraphernalia.
We're talking going in extreme heat (Egypt!), with sandals on your feet, and with 20+ people coordinating to pull a 2.5 ton rock (with some larger rocks going up to 6 tons). And then somehow pull it up, up to 400+ feet.
And even for the army, most of them having to carry 200 pounds for any extended period will end up royally fucked up after a few hours of this, much less entire years of working on such projects for hours every day...
For a direct comparison you can look at how many people moved litters over long distances. There are a few natural poisons to carry a litter especially if you can group people by height. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litter_(vehicle) People would get swapped in an out for long trips allowing for faster speeds, but up to ~100lb per person via logs was not uncommon.
Actually, do you know that for certain? These were decades long efforts, at least, so some specialized harnesses and paraphernalia probably were invented along the way.
A few months ago lidar revealed a lost Purépecha city that had more buildings than Manhattan. The Purépecha were contemporaries of the Aztecs that most people have never even heard of.
Sometimes archaeology makes me feel about humanity the same way a Randall feels about dinosaurs--we know so much and yet it's almost nothing:
Think about how distinct the 50s, 70s, 90s, and 2010s seem, or how different pre and postwar Japan are, say, over just decades. Then think of the thousands of years since some early wonders were built.
There's got to be so much we're missing.
Well, it's also a much smaller scale project compared to a pyramid.
>So either, (1) "civilised" society was much more common historically and ancient in origin (2) There were "pre-civilised" ways of organising very large numbers of people. Or (3), they had very clever building techniques that did not require many people.
I think (1) is almost a given. Our idea for anything prehistoric is basically based on old prejudices. We find all kinds of things pushing civilization several millenia before where we thought it was.
If it takes a lot of people, that implies a lot of people coordinating at that time an place. In a sense, it gives us a minimal level of societal complexity that must have existed. Since britain didn't seem to have towns or cities, the nature of this complexity would be pre-civilised in the literal civil=city sense.
I agree though, civilisation has been getting older as evidence emerges. Or, as I prefer to think of it, the mysterious precursors to civilisation have been getting more impressive.
He claims he sent samples of his cast limestone to geologists and they couldnt tell the difference. Overall I think his theory makes much more sense. It just would have been easier to pour each block in place rather than lug huge stones around.
>If it is not convincing enough: Recent scientific studies using very powerful and modern equipment found the ultimate evidence that the pyramids stones are synthetic. Believing in the artificial stone theory, or countering it, is simply no longer relevant. It has become a fact, a truth.
https://www.geopolymer.org/faq/faq-for-artificial-stone-supp...
In my experience, people who use repetition like this are not to be taken very seriously. It's a blunt persuasion tactic employed by the likes of used car salesmen and cult leaders.
You can find videos of them on youtube actually making these stone blocks though. The method works. Based on how long it took a small team to make a couple on their first attempt, it could be a hundred or even thousand times more efficient than carving them out and transporting them.
So if I were going to build a large limestone pyramid that's how I would do it.
Analysis of pig bones at Durrington Walls - probably a work camp - showed that this animal had been brought in from Scotland.
All in all, what I'm saying is that we see the past as using "brute force" construction methods because those are the construction methods we still use today. We just use denser energy sources to make it happen faster. This isn't going to change any cultural understandings unless you're trying to paint a picture that magic was involved before.
There is a tendency to underestimate what can be done by human labor.
One of these is a far more serious charge than the other. Scientists don’t fabricate data. At least, not if their work matters. And even then, the fabrications are usually discovered.
I guess the article feels strange because it’s stopping short of saying he was an outright fraud, but strongly hints at it. And that kind of conclusion seems to require more substantive evidence than they showed.
Old work is mistaken and superseded constantly. In physics, it’s only possible to falsify a theory, not to prove it’s true. So scientists can only be sure they’re wrong (or approximately correct, if you’re feeling glass-half-full about it).
But creating fake data reduces science to nothing more than an efficient method of converting money into mistaken ideas. It undermines everything science stands for.
Could anyone dig into the paper to find out whether he did in fact make changes to any data? Either he did and was lying, or didn’t and was mistaken. It’d be interesting to know precisely which.
We can only know about fabrications after they have been discovered -- so there could be 2x or even 10x as much that we don't know about and count among the "non fabricated" work.
That assumes that the fabrications in those papers will be revealed upon further analysis.
And, what's worse, that such analysis is economically feasible.
Most metastudies don't even verify the original results, just assume them as fine.
The Reproducibility Project got a long way on a modest budget. They replicated 100 studies, got similar results on only 35%, for $15M. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility_Project.
I think you are being far too optimistic, here. It depends on your admittance threshold for "fabrication" but intentionally skewed interpretation of data seems to be the bread and butter of academic science in many fields.
Huh? Lots of prominent scientists have been found to do just that.
>And even then, the fabrications are usually discovered.
We only get to know about the ones that do get discovered, so there's no way to know if this happens "usually" rather than "rarely".
I am very surprised that the accusations of potential fraud come from the researchers themselves, despite the fact that they admit the use of tools unavailable to the older researcher.
It make me wonder whether all this talk of "debunking" and "myths" would be the case if this was not about Stonehenge, a subject that tends to attract lots of attention from quacks and loons of all stripes.
I'm not sure about this. It was a massive effort to move the stones in the first place, maybe if you could do most of the moving by boat or raft rather than dragging them all the way, it might have been a worthwhile trade-off. It's a long way from Newport (West Wales, not the one nearer to England) to Salisbury, and the terrain is hard going all the way.
We're talking here about people who reshaped Maiden Castle in Dorset by hand, using (as far as we know) tools made from antler and moving the earth in baskets. Who built Silbury Hill using similar methods. Who thought it worthwhile moving these massive stones (and hundreds like them) across the country at a time when any journey was far more difficult and dangerous than today. They were not like us.
This is another one of those "sounds good" ideas that the article is complaining about. The total population of the UK would have varied from 40,000 lower bound to 200k in this period (see below - figures really hard to find) Basically that's empty.
It's like the pyramids - at some point the labour force needed looks like "everyone" - processions did not go "past" anyone - there was basically no one to go past. And at some level of population, there was no one to go past because they were all pushing huge slabs of stone.
It's worth noting this took hundreds of years to achieve as well - this was socially deep - and we understand nothing about it ... weird
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
As a benchmark, 31% of Germany's population were in uniform in WWII. That's probably the greatest fraction a society can devote to a project.
You’d think if someone had a better idea they’d have come forward with it earlier.
I find it hard to believe no one spoke up because old dead guy is so renown.
A friend of mine, who is an archaeologist once explained me there are topics in archaeology you cannot touch without risking your career.
Though there can be some examples of scientists unwilling to question past experts, the bigger obstacle is the limited amount of evidence that scientists are able to collect.
http://andrewgelman.com/2017/06/15/pizzagate-gets-even-ridic...
Dan Shechtman had to wait for Linus Pauling to die to be unlabeled as fraud (and later receive a nobel). Turns out he wasn’t the first to observe the supposedly impossible 5-fold crystal symmetry - but he was the only one willing to risk his name and career to make it known (and was not far from being pushed out as a fraud).
Barbara McClintock had a similar story with jumping genes. Semmelweis with washing hands.
There are cranks, of course, and they likely outnumber the real discoverers 100:1 - but the price of knowledge is eternal vigilance against prevailing dogmas, especially those of deferring everything to leaders of the field.
The title also seems unfairly overstated, claiming Thomas was 'spectacularly wrong'. He correctly identified where the rocks came from, to within a few miles of the location identified in the study.
Or more precisely: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniemlee/russell-berger-crossf...
We naturally encourage questioning honorable confidence in the abstract but rarely in concrete actions.
Serious question: Is there a field, or even a social context, in which doing so would actually be rewarded?
And sort of related: Is a system for such questioning a necessity for a meritocracy or can a be meritocratic system still exist at the same time? I guess I just assume that, for example, companies claiming meritocracy were just actively ignoring organic social structures responsible for most of the honor hierarchies in the first place. I always thought social paradigms associated with enlightenment we’re essentially anti-structures to contend with this sort of thing. But doesn’t meritocracy in tech somehow seem to take those efforts for granted? I have never worked at these companies so I am really curious.
Health care is putting considerable effort into creating psychological safety and just culture, in front line staff and in the board, to create the ability to question what happens.
This is to prevent things like the Argon Beam Liver Tattoo doctor from carrying on without being stopped; or to ensure boards question the serious incident reports they get.
So far it's had a limited effect, but culture takes a long time to change.