Boffin: "A person engaged in scientific or technical research".

Back in the 80's, Macallan of Scotland used a Boffins Baffled bottle label on their Folio 7.

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The same scheme is used all over the internet these days, especially Youtube

Shocking discovery! Amazing evidence!

 

 

 

Perhaps people were more creative in the 80's.  Possibly it had to do with consumption of scotch.

I notice the label warns against consumption by overweight people and against transport by car.  Or possibly against use as automobile fuel.  I remember Tom McCahill in Mechanix Illustrated magazine in 1964 commenting that the Chrysler turbine car would run on anything flammable, from kerosene to Napoleon brandy.  Anyone else miss Tom?

Hook

Edited August 29, 20241 yr by LHookins

Yes, I do. He was the heart and soul of Mechanic's Illustrated to me. I looked forward to reading his stuff in every issue. It just wasn't the same after...

Macallan's Scotch is probably the most expensive liquor in the world. That label is modern, sort of a throw back to their old adds from the 80's they ran in magazines with the headlines Boffins Baffled! Very few archaeologists or  scientists become stunned these days, except in Youtube headlines.

The 2 man team that make the videos above have their most recent one about Stonehenge. Instead of alien technology to transport the large stones weighing tons hundreds of miles, they point out that an ox can drag its own weight. And a small team can easily slide these stones on level ground, and a larger team over difficult terrain. On the other hand, recent analysis almost proves that the Alter Stone at Stonehenge apparently came from the Orkney Islands, and not Wales. In other words from a completely different place than the other giant stones. Interesting, but not really amazing.

4 hours ago, Fielder said:

 Interesting, but not really amazing.

Are you kidding?!

Whilst it’s doubtful that the Alter stone came from the Orkney Islands, it certainly seems to have come from north eastern Scotland.

This means that four and a half thousand years ago a very organised group managed to drag this six ton mother some four hundred and sixty miles across pre historic Britain.

No roads, no tracks, no bridges, plenty of deciduous forest, swamp, highlands, hills and rivers to ford.

Or did they take it by sea? As far as we’re aware, the only people with the technology to take to sea at this time with a (possible) six ton cargo were the ancient Egyptians.

The distances as well as the terrain involved in this required considerable organisation and communication.  This is yet another discovery that is going to change our perception of pre historic man.

I've never tasted a MacAllan I didn't like. Pricey, but well worth it.

Well your right that the feats of hauling the stones are amazing. But not very mysterious about how it was accomplished.

It is conjectured by reason that the peoples in the British Isles identified their local tribes with whatever type of large rocks were native in their vicinity. When large scale migrations happened (war, climate, hegemony), they needed to mark their new territory with their local tribal stone variation. "We are the gobble de gook stone people and we are not like you silly fafoofnik stone people". Our local stones are better than yours.

The huge stones they hauled in from hundreds of miles away by oxen teams say "beware, the gobble de gooks are here now and our stones are large, and we shall rule, beware!". They want to mark their territory but they cannot read nor write, and are not civilized. But these stones speak their message for them, loud and clear.

All conjecture, but something made them drag rocks weighing tons very long distances. Darwin says competition with others for survival is what prods lethargic beings into doing great deeds.

On 8/30/2024 at 12:29 AM, Fielder said:

The huge stones they hauled in from hundreds of miles away by oxen teams say "beware, the gobble de gooks are here now and our stones are large, and we shall rule, beware!". They want to mark their territory but they cannot read nor write, and are not civilized. But these stones speak their message for them, loud and clear.

The huge stones they hauled the length and breadth of the country actually represent a feat of logistics that suggest that far from being warring tribes, pre historic man was cooperative and connected over huge distances.

To move an object of this size and weight would be an undertaking of years; teams of oxen, dozens of men all having to be supplied with food, fodder and local knowledge to find a route, to provide shelter.

This doesn’t really suggest a series of small tribes at each other’s throats. It suggests a great deal of good will to see something like this through.

We really haven’t got the faintest idea of what ancient man found so compelling about Salisbury Plain but they spent centuries turning it into a ritual landscape.

We also know, from modern DNA testing of cattle remains found in bone pits in Wiltshire that it attracted visitors from as far afield as what is now Western Poland. Four thousand years ago someone saw fit to drive their cattle a thousand kilometres over the north German plain and across the North Sea for a BBQ on Salisbury Plain.

Must have been a helluva party😃!

 

The British Isles were divided into many little regions. The tales we have from much later peoples, these centuries later people, the Britains (who also were primitive and could not read nor write) sing of warfare and strife. We are now past the Golden age of Egypt, the age of the great Old Testament literature. Meanwhile the British could still not read nor write and painted themselves blue to scare their neighbors in battle. They were still illiterate and warlike centuries later, in *******' day. Far behind, for instance, the cultures of the black peoples in Northern Africa.

Anything is possible. I ask myself which hypothesis is the more likely.

One possibility is that the small group of people living around Stonehenge traveled hundreds of miles to a land of a completely strange culture. And persuaded the local tribe to let them take from then humongously large stones. And from this foreign land they dragged them all the way back to where their journey began. They now had, after prodigious effort, strange foreign rocks, different from their own culture.

Another possibility is that a migration happened. A people took their own stones and dragged them into their new land. Thus bringing a very important part of their culture with them.

But we will never the know the real story of the buildings that ultimately resulted in Stonehenge.

 

 

 

 

 

The first evidence of construction at the site of Stone Henge is dated to around 3200BC, at the start of the Bronze Age. All the evidence we have of the following fifteen hundred years of henge, barrow and settlement construction in this area points to large, organised endeavours which must have involved whole populations.

This pre-dates the start of Egyptian pyramid building by around five hundred years and Old Testament literature by approximately two thousand years.

The only people actually writing (as opposed to proto-writing) at this time are in Mesopotamia and they’re using symbols on clay tablets. Pretty soon the Egyptians will be doing the same. Linear B doesn’t appear for another fifteen hundred years.

We know virtually nothing of the organisation of societies in Western Europe at this time. We have to await the arrival of the Romans some two thousand seven hundred years in the future for reliable, recorded accounts of these places.

What we do know is that the beginning of the Bronze Age marked the beginning of long distance trade. To make Bronze you need copper, tin and charcoal. Isotopic analysis of bronze artefacts from the Aegean during this period has identified the tin in these alloys originating in Great Britain and we do know Britain had good quantities of easily obtainable tin. This is the start of two thousand years of mining and exporting tin.

Again, evidence not of war or tribalism but of cooperating societies.  The big, warlike expansionist societies at this time are the Egyptians and the Hittites. We know this because they told us. For the rest we actually have very little evidence for organised armies or conflict.

The Bronze Age also saw the beginning of illustrative art and we have plenty of evidence of people wielding sharp, pointy bronze knives and the like in the Aegean and the Balkans.
Until the rise of the Ancient Greeks we’re simply not sure if these people are performing religious ceremonies, preparing for a punch up or merely preparing a tasty cut for that BBQ.

 

 

 

Wars began in the early stone age, we can see the evidence in their burials. We can see the wars recorded on the monuments of Mesopotamia in museums. Kings bragging of their triumphs. The first illustration in my college class textbook on The History of Art (Janson) was the Pallete of Narmer. He was hammering a foreign king on the head with a club.

Sure traders came to ancient Britain. But they came by ship. There were so few people on each of those ships that they posed no threat the local population, and they had an entire shipload of rare cargo to trade. They were of course welcomed. To the locals, their presence was low risk, big reward.

From the dawn of man until the middle of the 1800's, 95% of the population, at least, never traveled more than say 50 miles their entire life. Travel was slow by foot or horseback. And the rewards for travel were small. Unless they joined a navy to see the world and went by water.

In 1830, few Americans ventured far from either an ocean or major river. There were primitive native cultures out there in the interior who were likely to take your life. America was just 4 strips. Along the east coast (Atlantic Ocean), The western strips (the Mississippi and Missouri rivers), the Northern edge (the Ohio river). And the South (along the gulf of Mexico). Travel was by water. Overland into the middle was risking your life from the other cultures out there. Therefore, unlike along these strips, it was very sparsely populated by whites.

A culture living around Stonehenge had very little incentive to venture through at least a half dozen other tribes hundreds of miles just to bring back large rocks that were not like the large rocks which they knew and loved. Big risk. Little reward. Therefore, possible but unlikely.

But history is a long saga of migrations. These are involuntary. Wars, famines, floods. Survival is great motive to induce travel. They have almost no choice, they must go. And their bringing along holy objects like large rocks seems a more reasonable hypothesis to me for the presence of these stones at Stonehenge.

 

 

Compare ancient Stonehenge to the world's greatest cathedrals.  Both of these took considerable effort, probably for similar reasons.

It has been fashionable to think of people from a few thousand years ago as unspeakably primitive.  Think about everything you've ever heard about "cavemen."  Now think about the actual stone age people who were living right where I'm currently sitting not 500 years ago. (I'm in Texas, by the way.)  The entire concept of "cavemen" tells us a lot more about the people who came up with the idea than it does about the actual people it describes.

Actual armed conflict is a major event in the lives of those affected and will usually get recorded.  But think about the news coming out of any conflict region in the last 50 years and use that knowledge to temper what you've been told about ancient battles.  

Hook

7 hours ago, LHookins said:

It has been fashionable to think of people from a few thousand years ago as unspeakably primitive.

 

They had the same neurological capability as we do today. Just as creative. Just as much ingenuity as modern man. 

1 minute ago, martin-w said:

They had the same neurological capability as we do today. Just as creative. Just as much ingenuity as modern man. 

Some people think of prehistoric people as little more than animals.  Brutes.  Savages.  It ain't necessarily so.  There is also a trap in assuming that the customs of our tribes are the immutable laws of the universe;  we've all done it and we're all still doing it.  Examples can be quite shocking.

The idea of universal literacy is relatively recent.  A thousand years earlier, few people had any need to be able to read and write, and few would have found it useful, even if they had a written language.  The various Native American tribes may not have had written language, but they did have a well developed system of sign language to be able to talk and trade with those tribes speaking a different language.  Did *everyone* know the sign language?  No, but they didn't need to.  Those who couldn't write could employ a scribe when needed.

Not everyone was nice, but civilization advances further and faster with cooperation than with conflict.  These people weren't dummies.  Just because they didn't read/write(drive automobiles/use smart phones) doesn't mean they were beneath us.

Hook