Here is a
guess at how Stonehenge might have looked
about 2400 BC. At dawn on the Summer
Solstice, the rays of the Sun would have
shone straight through what is called the
"slaughter stones" to exactly strike the
"altar stone" in the center.
Neil deGrasse
Tyson takes the mystique out of Stonehenge:
Why the
ancient civilizations who built the place
did not use the easier nearby rocks, remains
a mystery. But the skills and knowledge on
display at Stonehenge are not.
The major phases of construction took a
total of a few hundred years. Perhaps the
pre-planning took another hundred or so. You
can build anything in half a millennium, I
don't care how far you choose to drag your
bricks.
Furthermore, the astronomy embodied in
Stonehenge is not fundamentally deeper than
what can be discovered with a stick in the
ground.
Perhaps these ancient observatories
perennially impress modern people because
modern people have no idea how the sun,
moon, or stars move. We are too busy
watching evening television to care what's
going on in the sky. To us, a simple rock
alignment based on cosmic patterns looks
like an Einsteinien feat.
