Hacker News Reader

Comment by ntrz | Hacker News Reader

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...

View on HN

> 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 :)

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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)

> 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.

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.

A fence?

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

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.

Tell me, have you ever been young ? :)

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 ).

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com