9k-year-old Stonehenge-like structure found under Lake Michigan | Hacker News Reader

9k-year-old Stonehenge-like structure found under Lake Michigan

thearchaeologist.org

222 pointsrmason74 comments

This was actually discovered in 2007, not recently. From the archeologist who discovered it:

> This site seems to gain a life in the media about every six months or so. Sadly, much of the information out there is incorrect. For example, there is not a henge associated with the site and the individual stones are relatively small when compared to what most people think of as European standing stones. It should be clearly understood that this is not a megalith site like Stonehenge. This label has been placed on the site by individuals in the press who may have been attempting to generate sensation about the story and have not visited the site. The site in Grand Traverse Bay is best described as a long line of stones which is over a mile in length.

https://holleyarchaeology.com/wordpress/index.php/the-truth-...

Another article with some additional context: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/archaeologists...

> there is not a henge associated with the site

To be fair, the average person doesn’t know that henge is a word with a specific meaning, and Stonehenge is just the name of a place with stones stacked in a pattern. So this is kind of like that.

Also, continued public interest is probably one of the reasons that research grant money continues to be available to study something that was found 15 years ago.

So cut the general public some slack :)

My main gripe is that "stonehenge" gives an impression of these huge megalithic structures, while they're actually "4 feet high and about 5 feet long" rocks (1.2 by 1.5 metres). It's not quite a Spinal Tap sized stonehenge, but closer to that than the actual stonehenge.

I don't care that it's not actually a "henge", it's just that the mental picture of it is all wrong. Even just adding the word "small" or some such would greatly improve things.

Thanks for the Spinal Tap reference: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyh1Va_mYWI

Gotta love glam rock mockumentary pisstakes from the 80s.

The issue is with telling the public the wrong thing. It's the reporter's or the editor's fault for publishing exaggerations - not the public's fault for being misled.

If you told people that a crashed UFO was found beneath the lake, people would probably support funding more investigations - but that would be a lie. Likewise, describing the structures as what they are not like is a lie.

> Also, continued public interest is probably one of the reasons that research grant money continues to be available to study something that was found 15 years ago.

Unfortunately for Dr. Holley, it doesn't seem to have been working out that way in this case (from his page linked above):

> ...state politics in previous years have meant that we have only been able to obtain limited funding for research and as a result little progress has been made.

As a member of the general public, I find this quote from Wikipedia interesting:

> The word henge is a backformation from Stonehenge, the famous monument in Wiltshire. Stonehenge is not a true henge, as its ditch runs outside its bank, although there is a small extant external bank as well

So the word henge comes from the name Stonehenge, but Stonehenge is not a henge. This could be incorrect, however, as nearly every etymology I've found online seems to use almost the exact same wording as either Wikipedia or dictionary.com (the source cited on Wikipedia)

> To be fair, the average person doesn’t know that henge is a word with a specific meaning

It would take a journalist literally 1 sentence to explain what a henge is and why this is not it. But hey, saying they found Stonehenge II in the US probably sells more.

> The site in Grand Traverse Bay is best described as a long line of stones which is over a mile in length.

That sounds even more interesting to me

"A long line of stones which is over a mile in length" could easily be laid by a single person in a relatively short time without any special skills, tools, or knowledge.

Note: the structure described above seems to be a bit more than this.

But why? Religion? Marking territory boundaries? Some kind of barrier to stop water flowing? Fencing for animals? I think it unlikely someone just decided to do it to mess with future archaeologists.

Caribou hunting. You set these up along a path Caribou use to constrain them to a narrow route, and then you set up hunting blinds along the path.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1404404111

Oh wow very good callout and thanks for the academic (!) reference! This reminds me of the weirs used to trap fish - no surprise similar units were created on land for hunting as well

I found these fish weirs in Canada to be really interesting because of how many there were in this one area off Vancouver Island. And that they were found because most of the wood stakes came to the surface after an earthquake in 1946.

https://qmackie.com/2010/05/12/more-on-comox-harbour-fishtra... https://hakaimagazine.com/features/the-ingenious-ancient-tec...

Right on, believe I read a similar article recently because am mentally placing weirs to B.C. - though they are/were certainly utilized throughout the world

Yeah, there's a similar ancient hunting strategy of building two converging fences, then driving herd animals into them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_kite From what I remember similar methods have been used by northern/arctic peoples as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-Smashed-In_Buffalo_Jump

> The buffalo jump was used for 5,500 years by the indigenous peoples of the plains to kill bison by driving them off the 11 metre (36 foot) high cliff. Before the late introduction of horses, the Blackfoot drove the bison from a grazing area in the Porcupine Hills about 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) west of the site to the "drive lanes", lined by hundreds of cairns, by dressing up as coyotes and wolves. These specialized "buffalo runners" were young men trained in animal behavior to guide the bison into the drive lanes.

> ...

> In Blackfoot, the name for the site is Estipah-skikikini-kots. According to legend, a young Blackfoot wanted to watch the bison plunge off the cliff from below, but was buried underneath the falling animals. He was later found dead under the pile of carcasses, where he had his head smashed in.

You know, people are herd animals too. People must be engineering stuff like this for use against us too. Like the GameStop mania.

This reminds me of that standup routine from Billy Connolly where he talks about archaeologists finding the remains of an aircraft disaster 400 years from now in the middle of mountainous terrain, seeing people in life jackets and believing there must have been a river nearby.

Tell me, have you ever been young ? :)

It could be any of the above, but it could have been just about anything. Maybe it was just some bored kid, maybe with autism. At that scale it could have been done by one person all at once over a few days, or bit by bit over the course of a year or so. Maybe somebody commuted that way to their favorite fishing spot and tripped over a rock one day, then decided to clear whichever rock stood out the most to the side. Then the line grew slowly over the course of many years, like farmers creating hedge rows by throwing whatever rock they plow up to the side of the field.

"The boulder with the markings is 3.5 to 4 feet high and about 5 feet long. Photos show a surface with numerous fissures."

A very strong bored kid.

At the bottom of my garden there was the concrete remains of some bridge footings. There's a stream at the perimeter and Dr Beeching caused the bridge to be no longer needed back in the day. Anyway, I dug them out and the largest was a lump about 4'x3'x2'. It nearly killed ... it took a lot of effort and some funky lever action with a very long modern steel crowbar to move and the rest had some quality time with my hammer drill and a SDS chisel bit and the mechanism set to hammer with no spin (obvs).

Anyway, enough of the foundations of my rockery.

Autism? Not indicated. You are looking for Godzilla or King Kong.

Some time in the next few hundred years we will discover that the majority of mysterious archaeological finds were placed there by future humans to mess with past archaeologists.

That would be amazing if someone did that.

So many things we do are useless. I can imagin humans a few thousand years ago saying „ lets put some stones in a line for the fun of it“

Could we pls mess with future archeologists now!

I already do. I’ve bashed strange designs and my initials into rocks far from civilization when I’m out hiking. With the exact thought of throwing someone for a loop long into the future. They are always subtle and small (so as not to be annoying to other users ).

Sure, but what prompted them to do it? When did they do it? What else do we know about them?

> them

Welp, if the TV series “Ancient Aliens” has told us anything it’s that if there is any chance “prehistoric” or “non-white” folks did it, it was aliens. Always aliens. Except when it’s time traveling white humans from the future come to the past to help “those people” carve stones.

(I am mocking the horseshit show, in case anyone worries.)

It's a show PT Barnum would recognize.

The article posted by the top commentor suggests it was used for herding caribou

A fence?

That's okay, even Stonehenge isn't a proper henge. For official henge status you need to have a ditch inside a raised bank. At Stonehenge, it's the opposite; the ditch is outside the bank. When I visited there a few years ago with some friends I took to calling it Stonething.

To be fair though, the modern word ‘henge’ meaning a circular embankment with an internal ditch, was derived from the name of Stonehenge. So that while Stonehenge is not a henge monument, one cannot fairly complain that it is named incorrectly. If anything, its the term 'henge' which has been incongruously repurposed.

Listening to Graham Hancock, I have only recently learned that the "Clovis first" theory that people arrived to the Americas only 13k years ago, belongs to the 1970s. Since then, there have been findings of much older human presence:

Bluefish Caves, Yukon, 24k years ago

Old Crow Flats, Yukon, 25k-40k years ago

White Sands, New Mexico, 21k-23k years ago

Hartley Mammoth site, New Mexico, 38k years ago

Cerutti Mastodon site, San Diego county, California, 130k years ago

Monte Verde, Chile, 14k-33k years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluefish_Caves

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/old-crow-b...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/fossil-fo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartley_Mammoth_Site

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerutti_Mastodon_site

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde

Thank you for posting this. It’s interesting that the 9k date puts this at the younger Dryas, right around the time when massive devastation then hit the North American continent. Hancock writes about this.

Graham Hancock isn't a reliable source for anything.

> Graham Hancock isn't a reliable source for anything.

He was on these.

Bluefish Caves and Old Crow Flats were published in Canadian Journal of Archaeology, White Sands in Science, Hartley Mammoth site in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, Cerutti Mastodon site and Monte Verde in Nature.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41102194

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41102449

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg7586

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2022.90379...

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22065

https://www.nature.com/articles/332150a0

Apparently he can be, as he reliably informed sampo that pre-Clovis people existed, as demonstrated by the multiple links that sampo provided above.

Your ignorance and bias are showing.

Not being reliable is not the same as being untruthful. And here, Graham was right.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/archaeologists...

> Back to the media-hyped “Stonehenge” Holley found in Lake Michigan: It might be a small version of a prehistoric hunting structure, similar to the one found in Lake Huron. As for why it was falsely labeled in headlines, VanSumeren says that a hunting blind underwater “doesn’t have the same ring to it” as an internationally recognized prehistoric structure like Stonehenge.

maybe this paper? https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.11395945

Here's a direct link so you don't have to give traffic to some dinguses blog https://archaeology-world.com/9000-year-old-stonehenge-like-...

Regardless of who stole from whom, this copy of the article isn't any better. It just adds some links, half of which are incorrect like the links for Mark Holly and Greg MacMaster to completely different people that happen to share the same names.

It is marked as the source by TFA. So why not directly link to the source.

This site seems to gain a life in the media about every six months or so. Sadly, much of the information out there is incorrect. For example, there is not a henge associated with the site and the individual stones are relatively small when compared to what most people think of as European standing stones. It should be clearly understood that this is not a megalith site like Stonehenge.

[...]

Dr. John O’Shea from University of Michigan has been working on a broadly similar structure over in Lake Huron. He has received a NSF grant to research his site and thinks that it may be a prehistoric drive line for herding caribou. This site is well published and you can find quite a bit of information on it on the internet. It is highly possible that the site in Grand Traverse Bay may have served a similar function to the one found in Lake Huron.

https://holleyarchaeology.com/wordpress/index.php/the-truth-...

There's other things like entire trees under water there too. When you read the geological history of an area like the Great Lakes, it makes you think a lot about things and how they change slowly and quickly. 10,000 years ago Lake Michigan looked very different and it recessed and came back multiple times over thousands of years. A few thousand years ago the water level was much higher than it is today. Even over a small number of years major changes happened. Glaciers, etc have such an interesting history.

This whole website needs flagging, it's chocked full or ridiculous hyped up pseudo archaeology videos.

The 'photo' of the diver doesn't seem to match up with the other images in the article. Is there any confirmation or caption for that picture from other articles?

It's not from the site discussed in the article, but instead the stern of a shipwreck called the Acme [0], which sunk in Lake Erie in 1867 [1]. Here's a photo from the actual site [2].

[0] http://www.wrecksandreefs.com/acme.htm

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/VuskDMS3ZZYmpWDK8

[2] https://holleyarchaeology.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2...

So, basically nefarious clickbait. They put in a photo of a shipwreck that just happens to look like a henge.

It is as if someone is baiting for clicks!

Yeah, scrubbing the #SecretUnderground video linked elsewhere, I don't see that structure shown anywhere. If it was part of this structure I would certainly expect it to be front and center in that hype-driven video, since that image is more visually stunning than the actual rocks shown.

Yeah, noticed the same thing. The image seems more consistent with a shipwreck than anything else (at least according to my quick image search).

Wonder if it’s the civil war era pier mentioned. That’d look about right

This is a non-amp version of the article: https://archaeology-world.com/9000-year-old-stonehenge-like-...

From 2020, post at the time[0] included 77 comments, 252 pts. That article was also a repeat, the original finding seems to have been in 2007 at https://holleyarchaeology.com/wordpress/index.php/the-truth-...

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25478693

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21649869

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24102035

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27695726

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25478693

(edited for formatting)

The direct link is littered with ads to the point it's difficult to read.

The fact that it's not as big as Stonehenge seems irrelevant - there are many henges across Britain, France, and other places which are smaller than this. The thing I'd like to know is if there's any significant archaeo-astronomical alignment of this structure and if so, is it related to the observations which Stonehenge was undoubtedly used for? If so this opens up some very interesting questions about the peopling of North America.

> "If found to be true, the wannabe petroglyph could be as much as 10,000 years old – coincident with the post-Ice Age presence of both humans and mastodons in the upper midwest.

The formation, if authenticated, wouldn’t be completely out of place. Stone circles and other petroglyph sites are located in the area."

But if it's under 40 ft of water wouldn't that mean it was constructed (?) during the Ice Age? Not after?

My favorite fringe archaeological theories for this region revolve around the ancient copper mining in the upper peninsula.

Fringe theories don't demand absolute belief. That approach misses the opportunity for an imaginative flight of fancy. Whatever is celebrated as truthy today may be contradicted by tomorrow's truth mongers. A bit of nuance goes a long way here.

What is currently stopping someone knowledgeable about dating techniques from making a fake underwater Stonehenge with fake caveman inscriptions in order to generate sensational press? Are there properties of dating techniques that can't be (easily) falsified?

(I can't find anything on this website on how the scientists concluded the inscription is from 9k years ago)

Dating inscriptions is difficult because you usually can't directly date the removed material. The typical method is to start constraining when the carvings could possibly have been made. The Winnemucca lake petroglyphs are a good example of this process [0]. I'm unable to find a public field report for the site, but my guess is that the 9kya date is a terminus ante quem for when the site was flooded and the stones submerged.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnemucca_Lake#Petroglyphs

So a kid in Michigan grows up wanting to be Indiana Jones, also likes diving (a not-uncommon combo), but lives in Michigan. Gets certified for drysuits and finds some rocks. I wonder if there's Bonferroni correction here...

Heads up: Just recently, Graham Hancock has challenged John Hoopes (his arch-nemesis?) for a debate on JRE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyQ4-PVtqRA

>Heads up: Just recently, Graham Hancock has challenged John Hoopes (his arch-nemesis?) for a debate on JRE.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but why (and why should we care) is an archaeologist challenging an anthropologist to debate about the Java Runtime Environment?

FYI, Hancock is a writer not an archeologist.

>FYI, Hancock is a writer not an archeologist.

Thank you. My mistake.

And so, why (and why should we care) is a writer focused on history/archaeology challenging an anthropologist to debate about the Java Runtime Environment?

Graham Hancock is largely known for putting pseudoscientific nonsense on TV and claiming Atlantis is real, and got a Netflix doc this year with more of the same. Archaeologists are mad at him because he keeps making stuff up and claiming they're hiding the truth. JR likes him because he's been hit on the head too many times and believes anything anyone tells him.

JRE in this case would be Joe Rogan Experience

>JRE in this case would be Joe Rogan Experience

Thanks!

So a history writer and an anthropologist are going to debate the value of the "Joe Rogan Experience?"

Doesn't seem all that interesting to me. Hopefully others will find it so.

If creationists have taught me anything, it's that debates 1) are largely won by rhetorical style, not correctness of the underlying concepts, and 2) promote the impression that both viewpoints have roughly equal validity.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220201083303/https://scienceba...

> it’s such a classic tactic of science deniers to demand a “debate” and then to accuse science advocates of cowardice if they decline. ...

> Common “live public debate” formats favor science deniers because they are not bound by science or even the truth. They are free to Gish gallop to their heart’s content; that is, to “baffle them with a torrent of BS” that includes obscure studies, bad studies, studies that don’t support their points, and even irrelevant information that superficially to nonexperts appears to support their arguments. Unless a scientist or science communicator is not only very skilled at dealing with this technique but also very familiar with the deep well of studies ranging from the highly dubious to the good studies misrepresented by the science denier, it is easy to fall into the trap of trying to swat down each gallop in turn and have no time left to make an argument for science. Such “debates” also value glibness, rhetorical skill, and the debater’s charisma far more than facts, logic, reason, and science. ...

> “live public debates” are meant for one thing and one thing only: To sway public opinion to a viewpoint not supported by science, in the process elevating pseudoscience or the unproven to the same plane as the scientific consensus as a scientifically viable “alternative”.

Related: Map of cool stuff underwater in grand traverse bay: https://www.gtbup.org/interactive-map

"not far away" from the famous Rock Lake Pyramid. There's a lot of unusual stuff in the general upper midwest.

The great lakes are the North American cultural equivalent of the Mediterranean sea. There were people living here for thousands of years before European settlers got here.

If they are not naming it Damonreach, all Chicagoans must to sign a letter in protest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com