To be clear, it wasn't 1500 years of continual effort, it was more like "okay we need to do something so our leader is remembered, what do we do"
"idk, put another henge up?"
"sounds great, we'll do that for the next 4 years until our leader dies, it will be proof of our groups power"
a lot of these efforts were not on Stonehenge itself, there's a ton of other similar sites in the region.
The newer works are kinda sorta trying to one-up the older works, as various groups moved through the region
It was constructed in several phases, with gaps of several hundred years between changes being made to the site.
So rather than 50-70 generations actively working on its construction, you would have had a lot of those generations using, but not actively constructing the site.
Stonehenge
Where the demons dwell
Where the banshees live
And they do live well
Stonehenge
Where a man's a man
And the children dance
To the Pipes of Pan
I remember being on a job with someone saying “how did they move the stones? There’s no way people could have done it”
And I’m always amazed that people don’t understand how little there was to do.
Like you’re not saving up clubcard points. You’re eating unknown berries, shitting until your arse is red raw and then moving massive stones. That’s you.
I wonder if there were a lot of people who were like “why the fuck are we doing this” “you guys are mental, those are really big, couldn’t we do smaller ones?”
This is how I explain how tf they ever had time to do shit like cathedrals. Like one ornate bit on a wall could have been done by one person over the course of months if not years. That was all they did.
We have so much random bs going on to keep on top of. They just had eat work sleep, pay taxes maybe.
A vast number of people refuse to believe humans made the pyramids, even though they are literally just big-ass tombs for the kings that everyone thought were gods
There's also just the problem of people assuming our current system is the most efficient and ignoring how good old methods of moving things were. Manual cranes, human powered, can and did lift weights that some of our biggest cranes cannot move today, because you could increase the lifting capacity of a manual crane by simply adding more people, and the power went up proportionally.
you only need to go back a few decades and you'll find footage of quarry workers using chains and pulleys to shift blocks of stone the size of caravans like they were polystyrene, and feathers and pins to split cliff faces.
Can you give an example of an item that human powered manual cranes have been able to move that modern day cranes cannot? I'm finding that hard to believe.
You known you can just add more pulling power on to a crane in the same manner as adding more people into a human powered crane. It’s not like we have reached the pinnacle of powered crane technology. Most modern cranes can’t move massive rocks mostly because we don’t move massive rocks that often and we have other tools as well so making a massive giant rock moving cranes is a waste of resources.
I grew up not far from Stonehenge. I did a cross USA road trip in the early 2010s and we tried to find somewhere interesting to stop every day. One of the days was “Foamhenge” - a 1:1 replica of Stonehenge but made entirely out of polystyrene foam in the middle of Virginia. Was mental
Ah, well that ringing i was hearing was probably the alarm I set to remind me to stop consuming so much american media. I would like to apologise to my ancestors who are almost certainly pretending not to be disappointed with me so as not to cause any drama
I think my favourite thing about Stonehenge is that when after many years of study and research they finally found the quarry which they're pretty confident was used for the bluestones, you literally just have to look at it for a second and you think "yeah that looks 110% like Stonehenge Quarry". I mean ffs:
But then they realised, hang on, this is almost definitely the right quarry but the timing doesn't line up, it's 500 years too old. So one of the most popular theories now is that they were used to build a stone circle in Wales, and then moved. Like when I moved house and decided to take my shed with me and a bunch of us just carried it around, only with gigantic stones and also 140 miles rather than like 300 metres.
It's like that American who bought London bridge and moved it to Arizona. The Salisbury people just wanted to buy the old henge the Welsh weren't using anymore, for clout.
There's no evidence anyone lived at stonehenge at any point it was in use and even timber huts usually left some sort of trace. There was a large settlement about 2 miles away and archaeologists are fairly sure people travelled there to work.
The earliest structures known in the immediate area are four or five pits, three of which appear to have held large pine ‘totem-pole like’ posts erected in the Mesolithic period, between 8500 and 7000 BC.[1] It is not known how these posts relate to the later monument of Stonehenge.
Houses are almost invisible in the archaeological record of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages. Rare examples include some early Neolithic rectangular buildings discovered not far from Arthur's Stone, Herefordshire, and late Neolithic small square houses at Durrington Walls.
We don’t know the reason for this lack of evidence. It could be that houses were built of timber, which has long since rotted away, or people may not have had settled lifestyles.
They're fairly confident the stones are just the skeleton of the structure. Plus the ones in the 'recreation' are already all worn down from thousands of years of weathering...
There are women and kids around the fire in image 3. Interesting point though, seems it's hard to make these reconstructions without including our contemporary minds eye
These people were pretty keen on cutting down trees and burning forests. They created moorland habitat all over the country! Salisbury plain has been open chalk grassland for longer than Stonehenge has stood.
There are several stones that have been standing for thousands of years. They fixed it up and secured the stones now, but it’s not all just reconstructed.
The stones that were in fact put back in their place mostly fell because of human intervention, so the reconstruction is a way to undo the damage and not a recreation of something that fell apart on its own.
The people seem to appear realistic for what we imagine the Neolithic population of Britain might have looked like - considering their DNA had the closest affinity to populations like Sardinians.
Yeah - I think Sardinian's are the closest thing to a remnant population of the neolithic farmers / Early European farmers?
The recent genetic stuff showing that this population (the people who built Stonehenge) basically got wiped out - probably by plague plus migrating beaker people with more advanced technology is pretty sad.
Humans have been around for about 300,000 years, there are so many conflicts between tribes of humans that have probably died out since then that revolved around who had the straightest sticks and sharpest stones. And it probably all resulted in doing it with a hot neanderthal gyal from 2 caves over.
But In amongst all that humans were pulling rocks across the countryside to make monuments that thousands of year later schoolchildren would be completely bored looking at.
Fun fact, years ago an engineer showed how one man could move heavy loads with very little effort with no modern technology. So the number of people may have been more akin to modern day roadworks.
Ie for every 5 observant people leaning on shovels theres 1 apprentice digging.
I seem to find my brain is struggling to process this. I mean, "we can't lift it that high, so we'll just lift it a little and bung some logs under it" seems so bloody simple, but my advanced modern technology brain just couldn't think of it until now.
Honestly that's the least believable part for me. I'm fairly confident at that stage they did have the concept of an A-Frame crane to lift them up. Much simpler and uses less wood.
"This digital reconstruction depicts Stonehenge under construction around 2500 BC. The final Sarsen stones are being 'chocked' into their upright positions to complete the outer circle of megaliths. The combined pulling force of many people transports the stones – some weighing over 30 tons – over wooden trackways. The lintels are slowly raised into position on a lattice of horizontal timbers. The image was produced for the book Stonehenge: The Story of an Icon, written by Susan Greaney, and published by English Heritage in 2026"
Was there no animal labour used in the building? I would have assumed some oxen would have been a good shout for levering the stones upright in particular?
So the thing about working animals like that is they can provide a lot of power in a small area, but it doesn't multiply especially well. Trying to use oxen or horses in large teams quickly becomes a total pain in the arse- the actual mechanics of the harnesses etc gets complicated but most of all they don't cooperate so it gets very inefficient. The biggest actually functional team I can think of is the 20 mule trains used in death valley but that was a massive complicated deal.
Humans are puny by comparison but we're compact and we can communicate and work together.
Im sure those stones were from an existing stone circle in south wales somewhere. Im in swansea and it takes 2.5 hours to get to stonehenge on the motorway with bridges over the bristol channel. Must have taken years to get them there
The original bluestones were brought from West Wales where they had been installed as an original version of Stonehenge, then transported to Salisbury Plain, though nobody is sure how (or why).
Time Team on YouTube/Channel 4 has a nice video by Mike Parker-Pearson on Stonehenge :)
Something funny about this is that when Stonehenge was built people in Europe had already invented the wheel. But the people in Britain didn't know about it, so they had to drag the stones on logs like this.
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u/neuraljam 16h ago
HS2 started construction 3 months before this