People buried at Stonehenge may have come from as far away as Wales | Hacker News Reader

People buried at Stonehenge may have come from as far away as Wales

arstechnica.com

38 pointscurtis47 comments

I am lucky enough to live not too far from Stonehenge. The most surprising thing is how unremarkable the surrounding area is - geography-wise. It must have meant something to those people. It's pretty flat but that's not remarkable for Wiltshire.

There are so many 5,000 year old ancient sites in this part of the Britain. Make sure you also visit Avebury if you are ever in the area - it's just as old as Stonehenge but you can still walk among the stones and touch them.

May be there was forest back then?

In the man-made department, I always wonder if missing pieces of buildings were made of wood. Maybe Stonehenge would make much more sense that way.

There have been serious academic archaeological suggestions that the original monuments were circles and lines of trees, and the stones were added to make the layout permanent.

I'm not completely convinced. Dragging giant rocks over open chalk land is hard. Dragging them through woodland is a lot harder.

Was it maybe their capital city because the area was flat?

> The most surprising thing is how unremarkable the surrounding area is - geography-wise.

Salisbury plain? It’s some of the most commanding land in the south of England.

What do you mean by commanding?

You can stand on the high parts and see large parts of the Kingdom of Wessex, enabling you to literally command it.

Avebury is remarkable. You can walk among the stones and touch them. People took some of the stones for building materials. And there's a modern road that cuts through the circle.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Avebury/@51.4289196,-1.8...

When I was there I was wondering that same thing. Nice little river valley. Pretty surrounding hills. Maybe if you could feel ley lines the experience would be different?

Is 150 miles a big deal because of the time period or because it's the UK? For some reason they seem to make a big deal about distances that are a day trip in the US.

Probably took about 10 days to cover those 150 miles one way.

Why? Is the terrain tough or they just would have been on foot? (Having no knowledge of the geography)

Probably the dead body was a tough logistics problem. Gotta haul a casket, and also feed the party over the course of the days, while also watching out for roving highwaymen. Perilous days.

The California missions are spaced approximately 30 miles apart, which was considered a days journey with the intention one could travel from mission to mission. This was, of course, with horses and wagons, etc... So about 10-15 miles a day back then is a reasonable assumption I think.

The scientists in the article suspect that the bodies were cremated elsewhere, and the ashes transported to Stonehenge.

> highwaymen

You're about four-and-a-half thousand years out there...

Perhaps they would be more like roving barbarians.

They seemed to manage moving the several ton blue stones from Wales to the site, a dead body seems trivial by comparison.

That's assuming the body was dead prior to arrival. For all we know they could have been part of the group delivering stones and died on arrival.

> they just would have been on foot?

What era do you think we're talking about? This is about five-thousand years ago. It's the Neolithic Age. There were no cars and probably very few domesticated horses. Yeah... they would have been on foot.

> For some reason they seem to make a big deal about distances that are a day trip in the US.

The terrain in the UK is much, much more dense than in the US. I live in Wales, UK. My train to the nearest city takes (almost exactly) an hour and 10 minutes to travel less than 24 miles distance because of the local geography, it takes the same via car and bus. To contrast, one of my ex-colleagues traveled daily to the same location from 72 miles away via the car, and it took them only 40 minutes because of the variation in geography.

EDIT: This isn't to mention the extremes in weather that both the position of the entire island, and the local geography creates. We kept away the Romans for a long time simply through our geography, and weather.

Did you perhaps mean “72km away”? If you did mean miles, that’s some very fast driving.

According to Google the exact driving route is 72.6 miles, it is along several motorways.

There are motorways where people (safely) drive 175km/hr in the UK?

I used to hitch rides in the UK. The number of travelling salesmen who drive continuously at over 90 miles/hr freaked me out (lorry drivers didn't speed nearly as much. They have tachometers)

So whilst this is the upper edge, from personal experience I can believe it.

> They have tachometers ...

Heavy Goods Vehicles are also legally required to be ECU speed limited to 90 kph (56 mph) as well - which is pretty soul-crushing if you ever have to drive one.

On my motorbike, I'd comfortably do 95 to 100 mph on the motorway. But you're asking for trouble if you push it to 120, which is what you'd need at least to reliably average 114 mph.

Most cars don't travel above 90mph. I'd say that's the 98th percentile speed, with 100mph somewhere near 99.5 percentile - ie one in 200 cars going faster.

North Wales is a particularly poor choice of place to speed (notorious amongst bikers for harsh enforcement), but that's probably with a focus on rural roads.

>The terrain in the UK is much, much more dense than in the US.

Probably depends on whether you're comparing it to Wyoming or Cascadia.

The people who built Stonehenge probably didn't have wheels or domesticated horses.

Also, Wales is hilly [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wales&t=ffab&iar=images&iax=images...], and there is a the choice of a either rather dangerous river [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=severn+bore&t=ffab&iar=images&iax=...] or the Irish Sea [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wales+south+coast&t=ffab&iar=image...] to get past to get from Wales to Stonehenge.

On the other hand, all that water probably helped when they had to get the stones there.

Sledges were a thing before 4000BC, the wheel became widespread by 3000BC, so at least the later structures sure had some wheel tech involved.

In fact no one knows how the stones were moved. You will not find an archaeologist willing to put money down with a definitive statement - even for the sarsens, which are relatively local.

Whatever the tech used, it was beyond a Moon shot in neolithic terms.

In addition to what others have said, this is also one part of a larger mystery. The stones that make up Stonehenge also came from Wales, and people have been trying to work out for a long time how on earth people transported rocks that size.

> Is 150 miles a big deal because of the time period or because it's the UK? For some reason they seem to make a big deal about distances that are a day trip in the US.

Can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not... but Stonehenge was built before there were cars or widespread domesticated horses in Britain. 150 miles is not a day-trip on foot.

I wasn't implying that 150 miles was a day trip when Stonehenge was built. I was questioning more why the distance was significant in the original title.

Assuming the bodies were brought from Wales, 150 miles wouldn't be a remarkable distance to transport a body. I say that because the stones in Stonehenge came from Wales and are orders of magnitude more difficult to transport than a body would have been. And that's assuming these are people who died in Wales when it's entirely possible these might have been the people moving the stones or constructing the monument who died on site.

On the other hand, people in the UK today seem to make a much bigger deal about travel distances than people from other countries.

You do understand that people 5000 years ago didn't have cars, right?

I suggest going for a long walk some time. It gives you a proper understanding of geography.

Still, 150 miles on foot seems like noting in this context considering the stones are from what 30 miles away? That is hard to fathom.

The original title implied the 150 mile distance was significant. Consider however that the stones for the monument came from Wales too and are much much heavier than a corpse. Also it's entirely possible the "corpse" was alive when it left Wales and died en route or at the monument. Perhaps they were involved in transporting the rocks.

So my question was, what's the significance of the distance here? Doesn't seem like there's much and that it's just British people being British about their distances.

It's been known since the 20's that some of the stones came from Wales, (although the the view on which quarry has recently been revised [1]), so it shouldn't really come as a huge surprise that some of the people involved in the mind boggling task of transporting them should also have originated there.

As for why, or how -- that remains a mystery.

[1] http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1215/071215-stonehen...

I really think the reason why might be the same as why I've spent ten hours reorganising my emacs configuration this weekend. Why not?

What really makes me wonder is how much of the output of people like us will be recognised in the far future. How much will be lost? Probably a tiny fraction will be remembered. Then it makes you wonder about what has been lost if we're only seeing a tiny fraction of their civilisation.

Stonehenge really affected me. It’s essentially a circle of big rocks in the middle of nowhere, but what it says about humanity is fascinating. I highly recommend seeing it if you have any interest in human history.

The number of visitors and the nearby motorway really detracted from it for me, but it might have been a bad day. Much smaller but really impressive were other ones that appear on ordinance survey maps all over the U.K. (check the wiki). Even the relatively busy Avebury one is easy to escape the tourists due to is vast size and long Meg sticks in my mind.

I was on a working holiday, and can recommend getting an ordinary survey map of any area you’ll be around in the U.K. and visiting the old stuff. World War Two airbases, Neolithic barrows, canal locks, quarries, mines and churches etc.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stone_circles

> nearby motorway

There’s no motorways by Stonehenge - that’s the A303 you’re thinking of.

While a motorway is a special designation of road in the UK, in practice roads like the A303 are motorways, as in roads consisting of constant, heavy motorised traffic.

> ordinance survey > ordinary survey

Ordnance Survey. Interesting couple of auto-complete errors.

Very interesting take on strontium isotope counting revealing a corpse's pre-death geography. I didn't know they can do that.

"But strontium turns out to withstand the heat," ... what a surprising discovery!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbyzgeee2mg&feature=share related

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