1960s theory that Stonehenge was a prehistoric computer | Hacker News Reader

1960s theory that Stonehenge was a prehistoric computer

bbc.com

67 pointsdabinat68 comments

As the last two paragraphs of TFA point out, this idea is now widely discredited.

However, there are a lot of things that don't seem widely known in popular culture about Stonehenge that might colour perceptions about this theory, and the counters to it.

First, it's worth remembering the thing you look at today has been mucked about with for thousands of years. It's not "original". Depending on your definition of that word, it's either a comparatively modern fake, or the current evolution of something that's always evolving.

For perspective: the stones now have concrete bases. Officials were concerned in the 1920s that the "conservation work" being done at that time was starting to head into "faking" the monument. Cranes were used to "reassemble" the famous (c.f. Spinal Tap), "Great Trilithon" in 1958. Make your own mind up.

But let's just pull it back to post holes and the archaeology of what has been discovered in more recent decades, even in this century.

Archaeologists now know that the site evolved even in the earliest incarnations over thousands of years. There is also now evidence it should not just be seen as a single stone circle. Within the nearby - ~5 miles radius - landscape, there is evidence of other circles, roads, burial mounds, feasting sites, all settlements slowly being understood.

We also now know a lot more of nearby cremations and burials, some of high-status individuals, over the course of hundreds of years. Turns out people travelled from all over, including continental Europe, to visit Stonehenge over a very prolonged period of time. Women seem to have been particularly key to the site.

All of this suggests something complex within the cultural mindset of the neolithic people who built that landscape, and the subsequent populations that moved into it and adapted it. It's not just a stone circle used to predict/measure equinoxes or eclipses - as important as those things might have been to ancient peoples. The site carried weight.

Was it the ancient version of Mecca? Or the Temple on the Mount? Or was it something more trivial and akin to the modern (nearby-ish) Glastonbury festival or Burning Man?

We don't know. We will probably never know for sure unless ancient contemporaneous writing is discovered and understood. But we know it wasn't just a prehistoric "computer".

I think people underestimate how similar to us people were a few thousand years ago. We build places like Glastonbury and Burning Man all the time and it doesn’t really mean much beyond looking kind of cool. Stonehenge might just be something like that.

Stonehenge is more like stacking rocks next to a stream than what their contemporaries were doing in other parts of the world.

Yep. Reading some of the earliest written stories really shows how little we have changed socially since then, and I imagine that goes back a lot further.

I have always thought they were likely seasonal camps. Many peoples living off of the land are seasonally nomadic. Having the stones arranged to also be season change indicators based on the sun would be helpful.

In Alaska we still head out to fish camp. Places along the river where people gather for a few months because that is where the food is. Building a permanent structure at such places for seasonal use just seems logical.

> I think people underestimate how similar to us people were a few thousand years ago.

Which is not surprising since our DNA barely evolved during that "short" time span.

We still like to think we are far superior, which all the people before us probably also thought about the people before them

And you would make a circle of little rocks at the centre. Next year you would put bigger rocks there, then you needed bigger rocks than the place up the road, or you were not as cool.

1000 years of this oneupmanship = stonehenge?

I fell down one of those rabbit holes by watching a young adult TV show called "The Children of the Stones" which was filmed at Avebury (a village built around a stone circle, about 25 miles north of Stonehenge) and the book "The Old Straight Track" which claimed all these neolithic sites were linked by Ley lines.

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

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

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

There are a lot of stone circles in Great Britain. I suspect that others located in Europe would have been dismantled for building materials over the past millennia.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Isles_Venn_D...

OA makes no mention of Fred Hoyle's 'three hours with a calculator' to check Hawkins figures (and being generally unimpressed). Also nothing about the Thoms (Alexander and Archie) who surveyed many other stone circles, or perhaps a passing reference to John North's chunky book on Stonehenge itself. Latterly Euan MacKie was working out how exactly you could test an hypothesis about ancient observers marking a celestial alignment of some type anywhere in the latitudes of Britain. A multi-route rabbit hole if you are in need of diversion.

Of course the the theory is wrong:

> new investigations since the 1960s have discredited Hawkins' ideas.

IIRC (read the book ages ago when much younger) , the theory was that by using the 56 Aubrey holes to count, say, by moving a pole from one hole to another once a year, an eclipse could be predicted to occur every 18th or 19th year. I always wondered why this was never simulated, and I guess the answer is that it would not work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_holes#Archaeoastronomy_...

At this rate, I would find it startling if ancient stonework didn't have something to do with the sun, moon, and stars. Everywhere you look some ancient society was predicting these things by tracking them.

I don’t think the italics help at all.

You dont need giant rocks to observe the sun and moon though.

What if you want the sun and moon to notice you?

At least a much more plausible explanation than the “ancient observatory” theory.

You do if you want a durable record of your observations e.g., for the purposes of showing future generations you could align with spring solstice, or predict phases of moon, or eclipses. That's impressive and maybe even useful.

Tracking those things is important to grow food.

My dad always said he would take us to Stonehenge, when they finally get the roof on

It's clearly either a giant granite birthday cake... or a prison far too easy to escape.

I suppose at some point it could have had a wooden structure around it to make it harder to escape

You'd best behave or you'll be sitting in Stonehenge!

Is this an Ylvis reference? Never thought I'd see such a thing on Hacker News.

It is, and yes, nerds hang around here ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbyzgeee2mg @ 2:13

Would be pretty stupid to spend all this energy erecting stones just for the view of it.

Like, it obviously had SOME purpose.

Yeah, why did they go through all that effort to build the Eiffel tower?

It honored the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. And it demonstrated French industrial prowess, iron craftsmanship advanced engineering capabilities..

Furthermore: The Eiffel Tower was planned to be temporary, it only still stands because it was used as a radio tower.

>planned to be temporary

Same for the Atomium in Brussels, Belgium.

Then they probably shouldn’t have used a stable atom..

I wonder if Stonehenge was only for demonstrating some tribe's engineering capabilities too

Yet if an archaeologist excavated it with no knowledge of that, like everything that is not clearly a house, it would be chalked down as a 'ritual site'

Selfie geolocation

I realize that was tongue in cheek, but what I found more interesting is that is was only to stand for 20 years and was initially set to be demolished in 1909. So your question is even more amusing as the thing was only supposed to be temporary.

Since it was part of a World's Fair, it is unsurprising today that the Eiffel Tower was slated for demolition. I grew up very near to Balboa Park, and it was rather late in life that I learned that all those buildings were sort of hastily erected for the Panama–California Exposition, 110 years ago, and they were expected to be demolished quickly, or decay, because they were never intended for permanent habitation. And so the intervening years have been a saga of very industrious preservation and restoration, as most all of the buildings have been deemed to be architectural marvels and very much worth keeping around.

Was it unsurprising at the planning stages?

The eiffel tower will be gone long before stonehenge.

To serve as the centrepiece of the 1889 World's Fair exposition.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposition_Universelle_(1889)

What's interesting is that it may have had multiple changing purposes during construction.

It took 1500 years to be established in its current form. It's pretty likely (to me at least) that the purpose of the year 1 work was different from year 1500.

Or someone told them that folks in Egypt made a huge building out of stones. They started and gave up after a while. As good a story as any?

Stonehenge is older than the pyramids though.

> Would be pretty stupid to spend all this energy erecting stones just for the view of it

I think the same way looking at medieval cathedrals or Roman and Greek era theatres, collesiums, and agoras...

At least the Ottomans used the Parthenon as an arms depot, giving those stones some meaning.

(This is sarcasm)

It wasn't "for the view," it was, in no particular order, and non-exhaustively:

* To provide work * To serve as a reminder of the power and authority of the church * To glorify God * To make sure all the other nearby kingdoms were aware of how much cooler you are than them

sarcasm (noun) - the use of words that mean the opposite of what one intends to say especially in order to insult, to show irritation, or to be funny : a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on ironic and usually bitter and caustic language often directed against an individual or idea.

> * To provide work

Cite required. Work in a pre-industrial agrarian society is ever-present, unless there's a drought. (Although in that case the coffin builders may need extra hands.)

That's a simplistic, reductive, and uninformed expression of history which completely disregards the roles of the artisan, merchant, innkeeper, or any of the numerous other trades which kept early economies moving. Not everyone was a hand-to-mouth peasant farmer, either in medieval Europe, or in earlier points in history.

The building of a cathedral provided generations of employment for stonemasons, men involved in felling and shipping timber, men involved in cutting and shipping stone, as well as people responsible for feeding the workers, making and repairing their tools, etc.; and once built, the cathedral would be a draw for pilgrims, who would need places to stay, food to eat, and so on.

A cathedral provides work.

Without disregarding other lines of work, but from the neolithic revolution to the early modern times, the vast majority of the population were farmers. Quoting Brett Deveraux:

"Prior to the industrial revolution, peasant farmers of varying types made up the overwhelming majority of people in settled societies (the sort with cities and writing). And when I say overwhelming, I mean overwhelming: we generally estimate these societies to have consisted of upwards of 80% peasant farmers, often as high as 90 or even 95%." (https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...)

To elaborate: A lot of that labour was what we would term ‘strategically important’. It is well understood today the importance of stabilising demand for strategic industries (such as those involved in the construction of weapons, siege engines, warships, fortifications, et cetera). While they may not have understood it in exactly these terms, it seems that at some level keeping these people around in times of uncertain demand would have been seen as more than simple charity.

The cathedral movement started in 1006 with a quiet goal to redirect resources away from the crusades. It was also from a sort of cultural vacuum after the world didn't end at the turn of the millennium.

1006 is 90 years before the First Crusade...

My favorite theory is that nomadic civilizations during that period were known to congregate together temporarily throughout the year.

Stonehenge was one of the places they would do this.

Makes sense to make the meeting spot nice.

It was probably a tribe that later emigrated to Australia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_things_(Australia)

Sounds like the question Ylvis posed [1], years ago. :-)

[1] https://youtu.be/mbyzgeee2mg

"Why not" is a perfectly good reason to do things, and we do things like that all the time

They even make the front page of hackernews all the time. Like spending 6 months making Doom run on a calculator

At the risk of being all "I am very smart..."

It seems like it would be a mistake to say things like "it was for science and not religion" or vice versa. Additionally, also seems like it would be very hard to say "it was definitely not for eclipses," given the difficulty in proving the negative? Like, maybe it was and it just didn't work right.

In its final configuration the answer is “80087355”

I like to think that they built Stonhenge purely to frustrate future generations. Imagining them debate endlessly about its purpose.

I think there is a world market for about five Stonehenges.

No one knows who they were, or what they were doing

When my son and I drive to London, we pass Stonehenge and always play that song. We repeat that line many, many times.

It's the only theory that makes any sense.

it was actually a doorbell

The original ring?

Alexanderthal

“The BBC, without evidence, claims that Stonehenge may have been a prehistoric computer”

The BBC does not actually claim that.

laughs in Egyptian

Reply on news.ycombinator.com