Stuff You Should Know - How Stonehenge Works

Episode Date: March 5, 2015

Even as far back as the Roman invaders, people have had absolutely no idea just what the massive monument complex in England known as Stonehenge was built for. Join Josh and Chuck as they try to get to the bottom of this Neolithic mystery. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-Pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, it's Chikis from Chikis and Chill Podcast and I want to tell you about a really exciting episode. We're going to be talking to Nancy Rodriguez from Netflix's Love is Blind Season 3. Looking back at your experience, were there any red flags that you think you missed? What I saw as a weakness of his, I wanted to embrace. The way I thought of it was whatever love I have from you is extra for me. I already love myself enough.

Do I need you to validate me as a partner? Yes. Is it required for me to feel good about myself? No. Listen to Chikis and Chill on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bright and there's Jerry. It's a brand new day. It is. It is. It's a Wednesday. Yeah. Welcome back, buddy, from my vacation.

Yes. You mean I went to New Zealand and then to Okinawa? It was pretty awesome. Do you want to say anything about it? New Zealand is wonderful and I always love Japan, any part of Japan. I've heard New Zealand is like America in the 1950s that it's like, I've heard it described that way as very pure still and like friendly and just sort of uncorrupted. So apparently New Zealand ranks fourth on the Global Peace Index, which is, you know,

it takes a new account like well-being and content. You don't get the impression that there's this naivety or innocence necessarily. It's more just like they are a thoroughly content, peaceful people. Man, that's nice. And it's not like, you know, it's not like that manufactured like labored kind of like friendly contentedness that you kind of run into sometimes. This is the real deal and it rubs off on you while you're there. That's nice.

New Zealanders are A-OK in my book. Everyone we met, everyone was friendly. Except for one truck driver who I had an incident with, but in retrospect, I look back and I'm wondering if he thought he was trying to protect me by not letting me go around him. Interesting. But everybody else was just like totally friendly, neat, cool people and we were everywhere. Like we were in the little spa town of Rotorua, we were in Auckland, we were in Wellington, we were in Little Napier, which is like the art deco capital of the world.

They had an earthquake in 1931 and it just leveled the town. Well the fire after we leveled the town, so they're like, we need to rebuild what kind of architectural movement is hip right now. Art deco. So they rebuilt the town in art deco. It's really pretty. I love art deco. That'd be nice.

You would love Napier. Cool. Yeah. So New Zealand. Awesome. Great stuff. Lots of sheep. Like no joke.

Yeah. Yeah. They're probably more sheep than people. Yeah. And it's a wonderful place. Awesome. It's like you can now, once we got there, we're like, okay, let's start eating. Yeah, you're like a Japan expert at this point, right?

Except I can't speak Japanese, but yeah, everything, I'm an expert. I'm learning. We hung out with Yumi's family and our little, I guess, second cousin or first cousin once removed. Little kid. Awesome. Little precocious dude. At one point he was trying to talk to me and he just put his face in his hands and

said in Japanese, this communication in Japanese is not going very well. That's adorable. Yeah. It was very nice. And you ate like a king. Yes. I bet. He did.

Man, that sounds great. Thanks, man. Thanks for welcoming me back. Yeah. Still a little jet lag, so. I've noticed. In case I get a little weird. That's why.

Well, maybe one day we can hit up New Zealand on a tour. I would love that. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll show you too. I know they love us over there. They don't without the other. I just did.

Well, first, stuff you should know. Oh, I see. Yeah. Yeah, sure. That would be rude. Yeah, it would. Awesome. Well, welcome back.

Thanks. And now, Stonehenge. Have you ever been? No. I've been to London and that's it as far as the UK goes. Yeah. Same here. I would love to go to Stonehenge.

Me too. It sounds like a very, very cool place. Yeah. And I wanted to go before I researched this, but now that I have, I'm like, definitely want to go because it's not just Stonehenge. You think it's just Stonehenge and you go and there's like the rock formation and you get in your car and go home. You could do that, but you'd be missing out on like a whole huge, rich tapestry of weirdo

earthenworks that are totally mysterious to us still to this day in that whole area. Yeah. I had no idea. I didn't either. It's a hotbed of hinges. Yeah. You know? And technically a hinge, by the way, we should say is an earthworks that I didn't know that

until I studied this. I didn't either. Yeah. But so it's an earthwork that consists of a bank and a ditch. And in most cases, the high bank encloses a ditch within it. Right. But Stonehenge, which is, which gives the name hinge to other hinges is the opposite. It's a reverse hinge.

It has the ditch on the outside of the bank. Yeah. And you know, it sort of looks when you look at these images of hinges from above, sort of like a crop circle with nothing in the middle. Right. Just grass. Just grass. Yeah.

And remember, that's where the home of crop circle started was in that area, the Salisbury Plain. And outer space. Right. Alrighty. Stonehenge. So like we said, Chuckers, the whole reason for any of this stuff, for building these things still defies understanding.

Yeah. But exploration has gone back many, many, many centuries. You know, you don't just walk past Stonehenge and say, oh, that's natural. It's clearly manmade. But the idea behind it has been lost. But study of the whole thing has kind of, has yielded some pretty good stuff. Like for example, we have a pretty good idea of when Stonehenge was constructed and apparently it was constructed over a period of less than 200 years.

Yeah. We also have a pretty good idea about where it is, because it is where it is, which is eight miles north of Salisbury, Wiltshire, England. Right. Home of crop circles. Home of crop circles and where the banshees live, and they do live well. The banshees? Yeah.

You're not a spinal tap band? No. I've been having that song Stonehenge in my head all day on a loop. They talk about the banshees. That's one of the lines where the banshees live and they do live well. I thought they were from Ireland. The banshees? Yeah.

I don't know. I mean, they're talking about druids in the song as well. Yeah. It's spinal tap. Which is a common misconception that the druids built Stonehenge, right? Yeah. They have dated it and they were not there at the same time, correct? Yeah.

So back in the 19th century, some antiquarians, which was what they used to call historians and archaeologists and stuff before there were such things, figured that Stonehenge was some sort of druidic temple, which made a lot of sense because the druids were a weird mystery cult that were big on human sacrifice and all sorts of really interesting stuff. They were the priestly class of the Celts, right? The problem is the druids were around from about 300 BCE till the first century CE when the Romans suppressed them and Stonehenge is way older than that. At least the whole earthworks thing goes back at least 5,000 years.

Yeah. And that's the earthworks. The actual large stones that it's most famous for, they date that between 2620 and 2480 BCE. Which is about the same time as the great pyramids in Egypt. So if you're wondering how they managed to get these large stones, it's still a mystery. But they were not as advanced as the Middle East at the time. Right. So in the Middle East, they were well into, I guess, the Bronze Age while at that time

Western Europe at least was still in the Neolithic, the New Stone Age. So yeah, the idea that there was this massive public works is a huge mystery. Like why that happened, how it happened, how they got the stones there. There's another long held theory that was recently discarded that the stones were moved there through glacial activity hundreds of thousands of years before and they've checked it out. You know, these stones actually did come from quarries at a minimum, I think, of 40 miles away.

Yeah. They said that even if there was glacial evidence, then it would not have been able to carry it that far. Right. There's just no way. Yeah. So humans did. Again, no idea how because this is before the wheel was around in Western Europe, which

makes the whole thing that much more impressive. Yeah. They've got some theories like basically things that sort of acted as wheels before there were technical wheels like small rocks or stone ball bearings or the old log roller trick, which makes sense because the largest of these things can weigh up to 50,000 pounds. Yeah. And the smallest ones are about 5,000 pounds, two to five tons. Yeah.

For the smallest ones. You can't just get the strongest men to lift these things. You've got 100 strong men because they're only so big. You can't crowd that many dudes around and lift this thing anyway. Exactly. There's just no way. It's a mystery. It's a mystery.

So let's talk about the stones themselves. I mean, this is what people think of when they talk about stonehenge, but there's more to it and we'll get into it. But the stones, the upright stones are called sarsens, right? That's right. And sarsen, it's a kind of sandstone that's particular or peculiar to the region. Yeah. And the closest they found this is the Marlboro Downs about 20 miles away.

So basically, if you haven't picked up on it by now, what we're saying is these stones weren't just laying around and they decided to prop them up. Right. At the very least, they were brought from 20 miles away and likely much, much further. Oh, I thought it was 40 miles away, 20 miles away? Well, they said the closest source of this sandstone is 20 miles away. Gotcha. Okay.

But there's all different kinds of rocks, which we'll see. Yeah. Sarsens, it's a type of stone, but when you're talking about stonehenge, if somebody points to a stone and says, that's sarsen there, they're talking about the upright column. That's right. The sarsens are topped in the outer circle and in the inner circle of stones by what are called lentils, which are also sarsen stone, I believe, but because they're horizontal on top of the upright ones, they're called lentils and the upright ones are called sarsens,

right? Yes. And again, these are really heavy stones. And again, we have no idea how they got them there, how they erected them, and how they got the heavy ones on top of the upright ones. That's crazy. That is pretty crazy. Because again, we're talking about many, many ton stones, right, each.

But as if just to show off for the people that followed, the people who erected stonehenge carved the sarsens with a knob, knobs on top, and carved the lentils with grooves so that they fitted, and they were replicating a type of woodworking. Yes, mortise and tenon, and all put together, these are called a trilothon. In the inner circle, the big ones. Yes, when you have the sarsens and the lentils, it's called a trilothon. And yes, they don't know why they carved those because apparently when I heard that, I was like, well, probably to make them fit together better.

But they said that it really has nothing to do with it. Well, they said it's totally unnecessary. Yes, so they think it may be symbolic, which we'll get to later. So you've got inside the inner circle, and I found this kind of thing. It's like describing a yo-yo motion or something like that, like a yo-yo trick. It's just easier to go see it yourself. There's a thousand, a million, and a thousand great pictures of Stonehenge. Yes, one million, one thousand pictures.

So just go look at one of them. So yeah, it'll help if you're checking this out or describing it. But there's the inner circle of Stonehenge, and those are made of trilothons, which are two upright sarsens and a lentil. Right? Yeah, there's five of those. And then, and those are the big boys. Those things are like 30 feet tall, I think is the tallest one.

Yeah, which is, I didn't realize it was that big. That's like 10 meters. Yeah, you have to, I would say you'd probably have to go there and say, oh, this is bigger than I thought. Right. Unless you thought it was bigger than you might say it was smaller than you thought. You know? Yeah, unless the opposite is true.

And then in the outer circle, it was apparently, it was intended or it was at one point to be a complete circle. And this is made of lentils and sarsens, but they're not trilothons because it's just basically if you took a bunch of sarsens, a bunch of upright columns and put them in a circle and then topped it with as few lentils as it would make a complete circle, that's all you have. So it made a ring. Yeah, and I think my impression is that it was not ever completed because there would probably be some evidence of the, you know, falling down sarsens or something.

Right. Well, there's the... Unless they were taken away. That is the theory that when the Romans came along or then later on when the church came to power after the fall of the Roman Empire, that locals were like, well, that's some pagan weirdness. Sure. We don't want to encourage paganism.

Let's just take it and build a church. That'll show them. So it's possible that some of those rocks are found in medieval churches in the area. Interesting. Isn't that crazy? That is crazy. That's cray. And there are four more of the sarsen stones that actually have names, the slaughter stone,

the heel stone, which is huge, and then two station stones, and they're out of the outer sarsen circle. Right. Inside the circle and then also outside the circle are what are called blue stones. These are the smaller stones that are between two and five tons still. Yeah, little guys. But that's what they're called. And there's a bunch of those guys too.

Yeah, and they're called blue stones because when they're cut or when they're wet, they look blue. Yes. Pretty neat. So that's the stones. But that's just the blue stones. They're all different kinds of rock, which proves that they came from different sources. Right.

Which is the key. It is a key. It also might get to the bottom of why Stonehenge was built. But we just touched the tip of the iceberg here by just talking about the rocks. We're going to talk about the larger hinge part and what was originally there right after this. Attention, bachelor nation. He's back.

The man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new tell all podcast, the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. But I promise you this. We have a lot to talk about. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all.

And now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward, and letting everybody hear from me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this, and I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day. Truly, every day of my life, I think about this and what I want to say.

Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikala, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to

look for it. So, I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop, but just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology?

It changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, suckers, we're back. Yeah, I mentioned quickly before we broke about the Bluestones coming from different places. One of the places they think that 11 of these bad boys came from was in Western Wales, 140

miles away. Nuts. So, that's probably the maximum some of these sons traveled. Which it kind of gives a little bit of credence, weirdly, to one of the old legends of where Stonehenge came from, which was Merlin. Merlin and some of his boys stole it from Ireland, and the stones proved too heavy for the, I guess, Merlin's men to lift, even 15,000 of them. So he just uses magic to load them onto the boats.

Which he should have done to begin with. Yeah. They were like, why didn't you try this before? Like, Jimmy broke his back. Right. And that was the night. That was from the Historia Regum Britannia. That sounds like magic.

Yeah, the history of the Kings of Britain from Geoffrey of Monmouth. I love that guy's name. And that was the one of the original Geoffrey of Monmouth, yeah, with a G. Joffrey. Joffrey. That was one of the original theories, was that giants built this, and that to commemorate the death in the battle against the Saxons was when Merlin was like, let's steal this stuff.

Right. The giants dance. Let's steal it. The giants built it in Ireland, and Merlin was like, let's go steal that. Yeah. Because 400 Britons died. Britons. All right.

So that was one of the theories. We'll get to a few more of those in a bit. Okay. All right. But jumping back to the Salisbury Plain, what they do think is true is that they... Not giants? Not giants. Merlin was that this was a good place for hunting, was a good hunting ground.

Oh, yeah. Because there's a causeway from glacial heaving and thawing, it formed what they call like an avenue. Yeah. Which... Made of chalk, apparently. Oh, really? Uh-huh.

So this avenue coincides with the rising of the summer solstice, and then the setting eventually with the winter solstice. Yeah. And for many years they thought this was like this meant something, but now we think that it's just coincidence. Right. But I mean like if you're, you know, hunting woolly mammoths and eating psychedelic mushrooms and that's your existence, you see the sun come up and then go down in this crazy like

on the longest and the shortest day of the year and there's like a white chalk line connecting the two. Sure. You're going to put a little significance on this. Yeah, of course. So they did. That's why they think that they chose this site for Stonehenge. Like it was sacred and divinely inspired.

Exactly. Yeah. Again, you were on a ton of mushrooms at the time, so it made sense then. Okay. That's right. Don't judge. So we mentioned the hinge earlier. That was, these hinges, I don't think we pointed out, they're not natural formations.

No. They are designed and built by people. And so something like 3,000 years BC, so about 5,000 years ago, on the nose almost. Some Neolithic Western Europeans in the area of what is now the Salisbury Plain grabbed some deer antlers, turned them into pickaxes and started digging the circles that ended up becoming the ditches that ended up becoming Stonehenge. Yeah. They built the earthworks, they dug the ditch, they made the bank and then you had this raised

ground long before the stones ever showed up. Yeah, about 330 feet across. And like you said earlier at the beginning, it is a reverse hinge because the high bank is on the inside and not the outside. Right. Usually the ditch is inside the bank. That's right. Rather than outside.

I don't know why Stonehenge is different. Who knows? Maybe they started to make it and were like, oh man, we made it backwards. Yeah, but we've already done like a hundred feet. Yeah. I'm not digging another one. So they left a wider entrance on one side on the northeast end leading to that avenue. That's like where the avenue runs into Stonehenge.

Yeah. Yeah. The main entrance. It's almost like a road to a roundabout. Uh-huh. Or a cul-de-sac. Yeah. Maybe that's what it was.

It was a Sun Temple cul-de-sac. And then there's a narrow entrance on the south side and that's not all that's there. They found all these holes, the Aubrey holes, 56 of them basically where they think that there were wooden posts, that there were either totems or some kind of a structure there previously. Yeah, so that's very significant. Something like 10,000 years ago, I think about 8,000 BCE, somebody put up three pine posts. They think it was probably pine. Yeah.

Like the Aubrey holes, those are different. Right. They discovered those. They were going to make a parking lot for Stonehenge in the 60s and while they were excavating, yeah, I guess I should qualify that. Well, there would be a parking lot in the 1860s. You don't know. Who knows?

Well, actually, I guess we do know now there wouldn't be one. So in the 1960s, they were going to put a parking lot and they discovered these three post holes and they were like, these probably held totems of some sort. This is huge because there's no other site like it. There's no evidence of any other kind of monument building this far back 10,000 years ago in Europe. Yeah. That's crazy.

So at least as far back as that, this site was considered somehow significant if not sacred by the locals. 10,000 years ago. Yes. All right. Fast forwarding to 5,000 years ago, 3,000 BCE and that's when the earthworks have been constructed. The henge is built.

Now we're on to the Aubrey holes because I think they were deposited at the same time, right? Yeah. 56 of them and like I said, they could have held bluestones. Maybe that was a structure. Maybe it was some sort of an astrological or astronomical design or layout or something. Yeah. They didn't leave a book behind saying what they were doing so we don't know.

It's all the speculation. All we know is there is a circle of holes that probably held something at some point. We don't know what. But that was the original henge, the original stone henge. And then that was the first stage, right? Yeah. Basically between 2620 and 2480 is when the sarsen horseshoe came about. About 300 or so years after the first construction of the earthworks, the stones come in.

That's right. Yeah. So they bring the stones in. Again, like you said, from as far away as Wales, the nearest is 20 miles away. There is definitely a quarry. Some stones came from like 40 miles away. So they're coming from all these different places and they're being brought in and erected. And then that's the second phase.

So the stone henges we know and love it today was built about 2620 BCE. Then about 2,300 BCE, the last phase of construction, as far as anybody can tell, is undertaken. And it's basically like sprucing up the place. That's right. That's when they dug their ditches and banks. That's when the avenue was cleared out, which is 1.7 miles long, by the way. Yeah. That's significant using deer antler axe picks.

They dug, they made ditches on either side of this avenue to clarify it, I guess, for two miles, basically. It's pretty amazing. And it followed a route to the river Avon. And then over the next few hundred years, basically, they would reposition some of these stones, these blue stones, to, I don't know why, to fit their whims, maybe, or I'm sure they had reasons. That's another mystery, too.

Some of this stuff would be moved around from one place to another. You said that it goes to the river Avon, and I think about 2000, there was a big archaeological survey undertaken that uncovered another hinge called Blue Stone Henge that was where the avenue hits the river Avon, so at the far end of Stone Henge, that they think that's where the blue stones came from. So apparently, originally, they may have had another type of hinge closer to the river and decided, let's move it into Stone Henge proper. No idea why.

I used to go camping at a place called Sunfish Pond at the Delaware Water Gap when I lived in New Jersey. And there was at Sunfish Pond, there was this one big rock bank, basically, with just tons of these huge, awesome rocks, and people would build just things out of them. Those little totems or little structures, and I think everyone that went there, it was part of the ritual of camping there, was to spend a day moving these rocks around and doing stuff. That's cool.

And I think this could very well be what happened here. People would show up hundreds of years later and be like, I kind of like the look of that, but maybe this would look better over there. Maybe there wasn't some grand reason other than artistic. I get that. My question is this. If you're talking about the smallest stone weighing two tons, that's not like some hippie just going, I'm going to move this stone.

You've got to get a bunch of hippies together to move one of those. So it's a community effort, every stage of Stonehenge is a communal effort, which is that's important. It probably had more significance than just artistic. But what is that urge that drove people out in the woods, where it's Sunfish Gap? Sunfish Pond. Sunfish Pond, that drove them to move the rocks around. What made you do it?

I was seeing other people doing it and thinking, I want to build my own. Well, like rock stacking is a thing too, right? Yeah. I mean, that's basically what we were doing. Stacking rocks. Yeah. So it's an ancient primeval urge, I guess so. So we'll talk a little more about some of the surrounding landscape in Stonehenge right

after this. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all, and now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward and letting everybody hear from me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this, and I have a lot of thoughts.

I think about this every day. Truly, every day of my life, I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to

look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Patrick Curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop, but just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Find the Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, Stonehenge isn't the only place, the only neolithic weirdness in the area. No man, that place, there's a lot of wicker man stuff going on. Yeah, there was. There's something like a Thousand Barrows, which are tombs, mound tombs. There's some other hinges that don't have stones necessarily.

There's one called Woodhenge. But probably the most important other site around there is called Durrington Walls. Yes, it is also a hinge. And it's on the other side of the river Avon. And one of the very significant things about Durrington Walls is that it has an avenue as well that's aligned with the sun on certain days. And they just happen to be the opposite days of the Stonehenge Avenue, or the same day, the opposite position.

That's right. It had a couple of timber circles. It's about the same size as Stonehenge, roughly. And they think that this could have been like a staging area for what Stonehenge would become. Which doesn't make sense to me, like they're saying like this is possibly the builder's camp for Stonehenge. Two miles away, that's not a convenient camp.

No. No. That's a good point. Plus also, so you've got Stonehenge, right? Right. You have the river Avon, and then a little further up the river Avon, you have, but across the other side, you have Durrington Walls. And on the summer solstice, Stonehenge hosts the summer sunrise, right?

But on that same day, Durrington Walls, that avenue, features the summer sunset. So they're aligned. Clearly they have something to do with one another, at least in the Neolithic mind. That's right. It's not just Stonehenge, this whole site is lousy with it. But why? Yeah. I mean, I guess we should look at some of the older theories first that have sort of

been debunked. We already talked about the Giant's Dance and Merlin the Wizard, which we don't believe anymore because we're modern thinking guys. King James I in the 17th century did an excavation of the site, and they found a bunch of animal bones and burnt coals. I was just learning about him. He was a scholar king. Oh really?

Yeah, he was pretty interesting. Well, he had like the King James Bible. He had that translated. But he also was like an early essayist, which was a new thing at the time. He was just a smart dude, as far as kings went. He wasn't just like the fat drunk turkey leg eating kind. You know what I'm saying? Like he actually was a thinking person.

Well if he commissioned an excavation, that means he probably had a little bit of interest in things like this. Yeah. And this is before archaeology even. Yeah. He could have just had people beheaded and ate his turkey. Sure. It's good for him.

We're down with King James. Is that what you're saying? Yes. All right. So I don't think we mentioned either yet that there have been a lot of body, well not body parts, but bones found. Yeah. And remains.

Yeah. Human cremains. Yeah. If I remember correctly. Oh really? Cremated remains, I think. Why was that defensive? Yeah.

I remember funeral directors don't like to call them cremains. They said that that's just too shorthand. Right. It sounds like a McDonald's. Yeah. I got cremains on my burger and my McJob. But there have been a lot of, they think one possibility was that it was a burial ground for maybe royalty.

It's mostly been men, so maybe important people. Yeah. Which is another reason why, what was it called, mortise and tenon, that woodworking? Yeah. And we didn't mention that with the outer circle where everything fits together, they used a woodworking technique called dovetailing so that the lentils fit together to form like a well, a tongue and groove. Yes.

Yeah. Exactly. So there's all this kind of woodworking simulation that's totally unnecessary. So they're thinking maybe that they were replicating a monument to a human dwelling, which could suggest basically a mausoleum of sorts. Yeah. And that ties in with the theory that if Durrington Walls was a place of the living, Stonehenge was a place of the dead and that's how they are connected.

Yeah. And Durrington Walls, they call it a place of the living because there's evidence of settlement like human habitation. Yeah. Lots of animal bones like from food, food waste. Yeah. So yeah, it's clear that people lived in Durrington Walls. Not as many dead bodies.

Exactly. There's another theory that it's possible Stonehenge was a place of healing. There's something called the Amesbury Archer who was discovered and he was contemporaneous to Stonehenge. He had a knee injury and they thought, well, maybe he was on his way to Stonehenge or something. Right. But they did a survey of the injuries and illness, evidence of illness of the remains at Stonehenge and found that it was about the same as other contemporary sites.

So they don't think that it was a place of healing, not like a spa. Right. Well, it was probably a place of the dead. Probably so. And a lot of this new way of thinking has come about since the 2000s started with a guy named Mike Parker Pearson who led the Stonehenge Riverside Project. And they've kind of debunked a lot of these older theories that it was maybe a monument for astronomy or some of the other things we talked about.

Yeah. Apparently, if you're a Stonehenge expert, you say, yes, Stonehenge was clearly constructed in some way related to the summer solstice and the winter solstice, the sun. But they kind of draw the line that they used it to predict solar eclipses and stuff like that. Yeah. They're saying there's no evidence of that. No.

Although it could be true. But they just don't know. They just haven't figured it out yet. Another theory that I like that's one of the more modern theories is that it was a monument to unification. It's kind of neat, which makes sense, that the Britons at the time were from all sorts of tribes and that they blended together there. And that's why they might have brought stones from all over the place as a symbol of our

unification. Yeah. Like, here's some stones from Wales. Here's some from here. Here's some from there. And here's a big monument to us all coming together to one day rule the world. And well, significantly, the Stonehenge site is at the area where three different chiefdoms, territories came together.

So it is possible that is a, if not a monument to a monument from cooperation from these groups. And remember, we talked about the Upper Paleolithic warlessness. Yeah. It's supposedly these chiefdoms where they peacefully coexisted, which also could explain why Stonehenge came about, you know, one of the things you do to keep your populations occupied and busy is creating massive public structures, like pyramids or something like that, you know, and Stonehenge could have been the result of that, of clever chiefs

saying, I need to do something to keep everybody busy. Let's make Stonehenge. Yeah. My money. I mean, there's, there's so many people buried there in and around Stonehenge, they say like maybe thousands of people have been buried there. So I think it was probably just some sort of final resting place that looked nice and they dressed it up.

Yeah. And the people that the people there were part of the elite ruling class, there's like they found incense burner, polished mace head, some other evidence that the people there had some sort of political religious power, that kind of stuff. And like we said, they're mostly men, which at the time, of course, they would have been the people in power, you know. Yeah. At the time.

That's right. Not like these days, when women can do anything they want. We need to do an episode on the equal rights amendment man is just mind blowing to me. Yeah. Let's do it. Okay. What inspired that? Patricia Arquette.

The facetiousness about men being in power. Oh, sure. Yeah. Or not being in power. Yeah. Let's do that one. Okay. Patricia Arquette inspired me.

I'm like Meryl Streep here. Yeah, man. That was awesome. Yeah. She was digging it. Yeah. You got anything else? I'm sure we could go on about this for a while, but why?

You know, oh, there was one theory that they erected Stonehenge to create this Piper's illusion. Did you hear about that? Oh, yeah. Like two Piper's in a field or playing in certain places, they will cancel each other out. Yeah. Which is weird.

Yeah. It's a weird acoustic phenomenon. And apparently in Stonehenge, the phenomenon is replicated. And there is also an old legend that Stonehenge was the result of Piper's leading maidens into a field and then turning them to stone. Well there's this acoustic archeologist who believes that like a lot more archeological sites than we realize were dedicated to sound. Interesting.

And he has this theory about Stonehenge. May or may not be right. I get the impression that he was also postulating it to get attention to his theories. Yeah. There's definitely some weird acoustic features at Stonehenge. So you can't discount that. Yeah. Was it a byproduct or was it intentional?

Right. Yeah. Who knows? We don't even know why they built it in the first place. Well, we're going to have to visit it if we ever go to England for a live show. For sure. Maybe we'll do a live show at Stonehenge. Pink Floyd, they did something at the...

They did a Pompeii. Yeah. Yeah. Which I've been there. Yeah. And it's amazing. Not just because of Pompeii, but because Pink Floyd played there. Sure.

You know? They did something at Stonehenge. I think if I'm not mistaken, Pink Floyd live at Pompeii was a concert in front of nobody. Yeah. Well, on the Echoes video, they're not playing in front of anybody. Yeah. I think that was the deal.

That's so cool. Wow. I've got one more thing. There was a horrible police brutality incident at Stonehenge. Oh, really? Yeah. There was this hippie movement called the New Age Travelers from the 60s, 70s into the 80s.

In 1985, they were going to celebrate the summer solstice at Stonehenge. They had the year before, but 100,000 people showed up and just trashed the place, dug into the ground to build bread ovens and toilets and just totally laid waste to the place. And so the locals were like, you can't go to Stonehenge again. So the cops tried to barricade it. The hippies tried to break through. The cops clubbed the hippies, including pregnant women and women holding children. Wow.

There were eyewitnesses. It was a horrible scene, and it was later called the Battle of the Beanfield. And after that, for like the next 15 years, there was no, you weren't allowed to go celebrate the summer solstice, which is a big thing for Neo Druids and stuff at Stonehenge. And then finally in 2000, the English Heritage group, I can't remember what the full name is, English Heritage. They're in charge of Stonehenge. They opened it back up.

So now I think the most recent summer solstice had like 30,000 or so people peacefully celebrating it. I think if you dig there, though, you're in big trouble still, which appropriate. I imagine it's pretty, uh, it's a secure location. Yes. You can't just back into it like Clark Griswold. Right. Uh, okay.

Now I really don't have anything else. Okay. Okay. If you want to learn more about Stonehenge, you can type that word into the search bar at howstoveworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this ice cream email. And speaking of ice cream, we should thank, uh, a local ice creamery here.

High Road Creamery. Yeah. High Road here in, uh, in Atlanta, well, just outside of Atlanta, they got in touch with us. Two people did. And one person said, Hey, I don't know if you've heard of us, but you should, um, try our ice cream. Yep.

And another person emailed from High Road. It was like, yeah, you should. But it said, we'll send you ice cream. I was like, I like you better. Yeah. So they sent us some ice cream and it's, uh, delicious. And we just want to say thanks. And nutritious.

I don't know about that because I have rhymes and you know what rhymes, but, uh, this is about ice cream from Nathan. Uh, hey guys and Jerry, just listen to your, how ice cream works up. So I thought your tuna gelato story reminded me my own terrible gelato story. Want to refresh people about tuna gelato? Yeah. And Plaza Fiesta, the Latin American mall in Atlanta and Buford highway. Yeah.

There's a gelato place there that at least a year or two ago sold raw tuna flavored gelato is dead on the taste. Uh, so we lived in Naples, Italy for two years guys and fell in love with real Italian gelato. Uh, and it's safe to say my wife and daughter would get it at least three times a week all year round. Uh, we took our summer holiday one year to a city called Tropea in the Calabria region. The city is famous for red onions. So much so that red onions in Italy are all called, uh, Chipola di Tropea.

Yes. As we were, uh, walking through the city, we saw a place that had onion gelato though, decided to try it. I don't know. I know. Uh, luckily my wife was smart and suggested I try it before I ordered a whole cone of the stuff. Let me tell you, it was awful.

It tasted like a spoonful of onion powder and they had the consistency of snot and was cold. Uh, if it was all I could do to choke it down without throwing up, even after eating tasty strawberry and lemon gelato, the taste still lingered to make it worse. Every time I burped the rest of the night, I got to relive the taste. Man. Uh, so that's my story, guys. I'll steal, uh, I will steer clear of the tuna gelato if you stay away from the onion

gelato. I will stay away from the onion gelato, but I think you should try the tuna gelato. That's the deal, Nathan. Yep. Ciao, he says. Ciao. Ciao. And all that.

I would taste any of those with small spoonful. Uh, yeah. I, like, use the very tip of my tongue to lick the onion one. The tuna was, I mean, it was weird. It wasn't bad. It was just, it was really surprising that, like, you could get that taste, yeah. It's probably just ground up tuna, but it throws with some yogurt. They're like, it's not hard, dummy.

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