Prehistory Decoded

  Enclosure E, outside the main excavation area. In an earlier post I suggested the earliest phase of construction of GT could be in the Younger Dryas period. This is because enclosure D is so well crafted and so large, that it is unlikely to have been the first construction of its kind. Other enclosures must have preceded it, acting as templates or precursors for its design. Given that ground penetrating radar scans show that other large structures remain to be uncovered, and that the enclosures excavated so far represent only 5-10% of the site, it seems unlikely we have excavated the oldest parts already. This idea is reinforced by the existence of enclosure E outside the main excavation area. It seems to be a rougher and less precise example than enclosure D, and so could be a precursor. Since it is missing its walls and pillars, it is possible they were re-used in the construction of enclosure D. It has not been radiocarbon dated. But what about scientific evidence? Let's consi...

  Figure 8A from T. Darvill (2022), "Keeping time at Stonehenge", Antiquity 96, 319-335. Last year, Timothy Darvill's paper made the headlines: Stonehenge could have been used as a solar calendar. It seemed to make a lot of sense. After all, solsticial alignments and calendars go together, like cheese and biscuits, and Stonehenge is famous for its solsticial alignments. Indeed, Darvill suggested the calendar was kept in time by observing the summer sunrise or winter solstice (or both). This is the way it was supposed to work; If we consider only the large megaliths of the 'Stage 2' construction, circa 2620-2480 BCE, then... 1. There are apparently 30 upright stone megaliths in the outer Sarsen ring. Although many are missing now. there is archaeological evidence for all of them. These can obviously be used to count the days of each 30-day month. 2. Do this 12 times and you get 360 days. 3. The final 5 'epagomenal' days can be counted with the trilithon hor...

  Had a good chat with Sammy. Thanks Sammy!

 Available on  spotify . Enjoy.

Sodom and Gomorrah afire, by Jacob de Wet 11, from Wikipedia James Powell , an eminent geologist, now retired, has just published an excoriating review of Mark Boslough's  criticism of the recent  Tall el-Hammam paper , one of the most widely read scientific papers of the last decade. This paper argues that a cosmic impact destroyed Tall el-Hammam circa 1650 BCE. This event might have been remembered in Biblical terms as the destruction of Sodom. Rather than critiquing this paper in the usual way through publishing a peer-reviewed rebuttal, Mark instead published his ad-hominem-laden review in the Skeptical Enquirer, a magazine published by the Committee for Skeptical Enquiry (CSI) (oddly, it has the tagline "The Magazine for Science and Reason"). Much of his article was a targeted attack against a member of the Comet Research Group, Allen West. You can see much the same kind of attack on Allen on the talk page of Wikipedia's article on the Younger Dryas Impact Hypo...

Wikipedia is notoriously biased on some subjects. You can find plenty of information about Wikipedia's biases through Google. Also see this video by one of Wikipedia's founders,  Larry Sanger . Plenty of other videos like this can be found . The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis Wiki page, along with several related pages, provide clear examples of this bias. One reason this bias occurs is because Wikipedia is not scientific. Wikipedia is written by its editors. These editors decide which sources should be promoted and which should be neglected according to their judgement about how reliable each source is - they discuss these issues on the associated 'talk' pages. However, these editors are frequently not scientists or academics themselves and can be strongly biased. This means they often use unreliable sources, here-say, or simply their own opinion in reaching these decisions. This is not how science works. Scientists, like most academics, are trained to evaluate the q...

                                  Phaethon, by Gustav Moreau Where and how did the well-known Phaethon myth originate? This paper ... The Fall of Phaethon in Context: A New Synthesis of Mythological, Archaeological and Geological Evidence in: Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions Volume 16 Issue 1 (2016) (brill.com) argues that the myth known by the early classical Greek playwrights and philosophers undoubtedly originated with a cosmic impact. The parallels are very clear. In my book, I also argue this, since the description by Plato in his Timaeus is such an accurate description of the drawn-out process of near-Earth comet disintegration. There have been, and  will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes;  the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water,  and other lesser ones by innumerable other cau...