Lake Michigan Stonehenge – What have researchers learned? | Hacker News Reader

Lake Michigan Stonehenge – What have researchers learned?

illinoisfishinghub.com

89 pointsjanandonly44 comments

Not convinced this is anything at all. Where's some clearer pictures? Where's a diagram of the circles?

and sure enough from the man himself.

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

> 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.

>The site in Grand Traverse Bay is best described as a long line of stones which is over a mile in length.... Dr. John O’Shea from University of Michigan has been working on a broadly similar structure over in Lake Huron... [He] thinks that it may be a prehistoric drive line for herding caribou.... It is highly possible that the site in Grand Traverse Bay may have served a similar function to the one found in Lake Huron.

So not like Stonehenge but seems interesting to me.

The "Stonehenge" reference is likely utilized as an imagery anchor that most people will recognize. Whereas the implication is that it is suspected that the possible structure under discussion and Stonehenge are similar because they both may be intentionally built megalithic structures (generally from the Neolithic). Of which there are a lot of worldwide examples that are in straight lines, as well as other configurations.

Funny to contrast it to Stonehenge by noting the lack of a henge, since Stonehenge does not actually have a henge either. But I suspect he means there is no ditch structure at all.

Isn't it essentially a henge made of megalithic blocks?

Why is the baseline assumption that early humans were not as intelligent as we are now? I've never understood that. It seems like levers and rolling logs would be pretty easy to figure out, or what am I missing?

Probably the lack of similar structures in the area at the time makes this significant. If large arranged stones from 10,000 years ago were common around the great lakes then we'd assume everyone knew how to move large rocks back then.

This assumes we've been comprehensive in unearthing ancient structures that were buried under water and dirt 10K years ago. We mostly find these types of sites when doing new construction. There is likely countless underground ancient structures undiscovered off the coastline, since sea levels rose more than 120 meters at the end of the last glacial period.

Also, I wouldn't assume at all that knowledge would transfer outside of a localized area. It didn't happen like that in the so-called hearths of civilization like Babylon, Egypt, China, etc.

There's also the assumption that humans in the Americas, prior to the mass arrival of Europeans, were primitive and did not form sophisticated societies like those found in the "Old World". I think this has been otherwise shown, but old assumptions die hard.

The large American civilizations (Inca, Aztec, etc) were essentially bronze-age civilizations. Perhaps Europe would have been so as well had there not been a bronze-age collapse.

Yes, for instance in 1100AD Cahokia Mounds had a larger population than London.

https://cahokiamounds.org/

I don't think London was a particularly important city in the world in 1100AD

That isn't the assumption. Modern archaeologists usually assume that ancient people were as intelligent as we are today, or even more so.

What's not assumed is that they had the same thought patterns. People don't derive ideas uniformly from the space of all possible ideas, they tend to think within the constraints and realities of past experiences. If you build a house, it's going to be similar to houses you've seen before. If you paint a painting, it's going to be a painting rather than some other means of expressing yourself with colored pigments.

In other words, ideas are subject to the same kinds of path dependence that technology is. When we see something that's severely anachronistic (outside of it's "normal" place in time), the initial priors are that things like the dating are wrong rather than ab initio invention of a whole suite of different ideas that just happened to be preserved for us.

You are missing nothing they used to do brain surgery.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/in-roughly-150...

How is a square hole in a skull conclusive evidence for brain surgery?

Few things in the field are _ conclusive _ many things are highly suggestive and have few other explainations.

WRT "brain surgey" - the operation in question would be to relieve swelling under the skull that was pressing on the brain - probably caused by a blow.

The remaining skull would show that the hole was cut using an edge, likely extremely sharp flaked stone similar to a modern ceramic edge knife - an original blow would have splintered bone and caused a swelling, the splintering would have been cut away. Other evidence would likely have included signs that the bone restitched itself and "grew back" to a degree, demonstrating the person survived for some years afterwards.

I know nothing about this specific skull, there are others with similar work discussed in journals.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187887502...

You might like Graeber's book "The Dawn of Everything". He goes into some of the scientific historic reasons for why.

My view is on why that is the assumption is because anthropology seems to put a lot of pressure on higher level tasks only being achievable through some mass of individuals. The idea is that ancient people had a struggle to survive and deal with daily tasks, so they must not have had enough time to pursue advanced topics or even care to focus on them.

One aspect of this is knowledge is part of intelligence and lifespans influence shared/communal knowledge.

I don't think anyone claims that early humans were not as intelligent as we are now but the weakest link in the knowledge of how to effectively use levers or roll logs, or not (metaphorically) 'reinvent the wheel', would have been the eldest members in the community.

I'd never heard of this, despite growing up in Chicago. It makes you wonder how many other archeological treasures are underwater and undiscovered, given how water levels used to be lower.

Lake Michigan is BIG. The location of this thing isn't public but Chicago is closer to Cleveland than the middle of Grand Traverse Bay. Washington DC and NYC are closer together than Chicago and G.T.B.

I'm no expert in the Great Lakes but I'm surprised they found something that far north that old. From a little reading the glaciers were retreating from that area around the same time frame. I guess +/- 1,000 years is a big deal.

There are a bunch of cool signs of the precursor to Lake Michigan around Chicago from the time when the lake was "capped" in the north and drained to the south. Blue Island and Stony Island were real islands. Ridge road to the north marks where the shore once stood. Pretty cool to imagine.

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

Where I live in Oak Park, there is a ridge on the appropriately-named Ridgeland Avenue, which marks the shore of the ancient Lake Chicago. I think my current home would have been in marshy shoreland.

Edit: Just looked at the article, and see that Ridgeland avenue is listed as one of the shoreline areas in the article.

Interesting. I grew up in Roseland, and there was a hill east of Michigan Ave. going down. I always thought that was from Lake Calumet which used to be a lot bigger.

Also the Mount Forest Island [0] in the Palos area of Chicago! This used to be an ancient island. It's also not far from Site A/Plot M Disposal Site [1] which contains buried radioactive waste from Chicago Pile 1/2/3 nuclear reactors and first home of Argonne National Laboratory [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palos_Forest_Preserves [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_A [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argonne_National_Laboratory

Add this to the list with the Serpent Mound in the middle of nowhere Ohio where the “conventional explanation” makes no sense once you see it in person.

I'd really enjoy actually seeing one of the pictures of mastodons.

Unfortunately they are extinct

Right! The pictures on the rocks are either extinct, or close to it.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/prehistoric-structure-lake...

https://imgur.com/gallery/lake-michigan-mastodon-rock-undoct...

Somehow reminds me of the face on mars...

… and yet another theory was that a time traveler became stranded in the past, and devoted the rest of their life to marking their presence as a signal to their colleagues in the future, similar to a Vernor Vinge or Michael Crichton storyline.

Further thought - humans are obsessed with powers of 10. These stones were arranged 9,000 to 10,000 years ago. Would it not make sense that the traveler dialed up “10,000 years ago” in their machine? Can we use this with our own relative position to the stones’ placement (eg 9,500 years) to predict when humans will achieve time travel (eg 500 years from now)? Lovely fantastical thoughts for a Saturday - enjoy!

This is just further evidence to show that there’s some periodic reset of civilization. Perhaps sun forced(micro-novas triggered by the black hole at the center of our Milky Way flipping its magnetic field). The shedding of the sun’s outer convective layer throws a big disturbance to the earth’s tectonic plates causing plates to move(or poles to be perceived as moving if the tectonic plates were to be used as frame of reference). This is led by a period where earth doesn’t have a strong magnetic field(as it takes time to recover), and low solar output which sputters back up leading to an ice-age with intermittent blasts. This prolly forced humans to build large underground shelters(Gobekle Tepe, Cappadosia, etc) to live when there’s intense solar outbursts.

Our genome hasn’t evolved much since the last 150,000yrs meaning that all faculties have been the same for ancient man. What we’ve effectively achieved in 2000yrs must’ve been replicated a few times in history. Even if the silicon age never came, it is likely man had strong agriculture, pottery, understanding of nature, evolution of animals(wolves were effectively bred into dog companions 40,000yrs ago), etc that would’ve surely lead to vast amounts of knowledge being gathered. And with high CO2 concentrations, it is likely that agriculture produce and access to energy(coal, firewood, nutrition, etc) was abundant to support fairly complex civilization that could support occupational specializations.

There’s evidence across the world in anthropologic, natural history and other evidence left behind. However, the full interpretation lies behind a series of walls of resets where we can only guess, but not fully understand the context of how things were. Imagine a 10,000yrs from now, someone finds a portion of a fossilized city dump with no direct access or lineage from present day. There’s not much that can be gleaned of things there. And some of these events are so catastrophic that they move oceans/atmospheric currents at supersonic speeds and cover large swathes of land under miles of slurry.

One simple shift is that the Astrological calendar Was based on the sun’s position between the constellation’s.

Imagine the crisis of faith when the monuments started to mislead society.

How is this evidence of the "periodic reset of civilization?" Why what we have done in the past 2000 years have been replicated before? These just seem to be unfounded speculations like pyramid lasers and Atlantis.

> Imagine a 10,000yrs from now, someone finds a portion of a fossilized city dump with no direct access or lineage from present day. There’s not much that can be gleaned of things there.

You say this has all happened before, and yet that "a modern city dump in 10,000 years" would have a LOT of artifacts that do not exist in any 10,000 year old sites we've found. If we were to find one, a lot could actually be gleaned from it.

Which artifacts would last 10k years?

Glass bottles, aluminium cans, ceramics

you'd think we'd have more "bail top" bottles around today if they were so durable.

I've got a gully that was used as a trash dump in the 1920s. We found some "rust colored areas" in the soil and some ~10mm shards of ceramics with recognizable glazing still. even the bricks were shattered and easy to mistake for rock.

I think the speed of natural recycling is vastly underestimated. There's a few rare occasions and circumstances where preservation can happen; the default state is entropy eating things as fast as they're built.

It varies a lot by location and conditions. I find lots of stuff in fields around me, of all ages. Loads of Victorian ceramics, but also 1920s glass, 1980s ring pulls, Roman tiles, Mesolithic flint.

Things made of stone are easy ones, of course, since they already have. The volume of those today is far higher than in any historical sites. Glass, ceramics could also survive in many conditions. Copper, I think? But just the stone/concrete infrastructure remains of an NYC would be very noticable.

The volume of human remains would be wildly different too, admittedly we're getting away from just "city dumps" then.

Radioactive ones.

Nokia 3310s, mostly.

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