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Stonehenge is a name given to a mysterious prehistoric monument that stands tall on the Salisbury Plains amid the idyllic English countryside of Wiltshire.
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Over a million tourists flock to the enigmatic site each year, marvelling at the ancient architecture.
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But, despite the popularity of one of the world’s greatest structures, nobody quite knows how and why it exists.
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Hello and welcome back to Life’s Biggest Questions, I am your host Rebecca Felgate and today we are tackling an age old mystery as we ask – Why was Stonehenge built?
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Before we get into this answer, I just want to ask you guys to leave this video with a thumbs up and leave us a comment letting us know why you think Stonehenge was built.
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Stonehenge is an impressive sight to behold.
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Its existence is heavily associated with myth, magic, ritual and religion.
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Can we do what thousands before us who have mused upon the great stone circle have failed to do and figure out why it is there?
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If only some wise prehistoric person had had the foresight to actually write something down about the process or document it in some way,
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but unfortunately this seemed to be beyond the capabilities of Neolithic Britons.
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Without any written record, it becomes infinitely much harder to determine the who, how and whys of Stonehenge.
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Luckily in the age of modern science, we are able to examine the clues on a deeper level than those who mused at the stones hundreds of years before we did.
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Carbon dating tells us the area was in active use between three thousand one hundred BC and one thousand six hundred BC,
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but that the stones were raised between two thousand four hundred BC and two thousand two hundred BC.
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Interestingly, what archeologists are also able to tell us these days is that Stonehenge as we know it is actually the third and final structure on the site.
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It seems initially the area was home to a man-made chalk circle, then a timber structure before finally becoming home to the huge stone structure we know today.
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But wait, let’s think about those huge stones a little more.
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If they were raised over four thousand years ago, like, how exactly?
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People back then didn’t exactly have cranes, forklifts or, you know, the wheel!
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Stonehenge was originally made up of approximately a hundred and sixty-five stones,
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the biggest of which are roughly being two meters by four metres and weigh around twenty-five to thirty tons.
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Eesh.
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On top of that, not all of the stones are local, some come from two hundred miles away in Wales, so "sans" wheels, how on earth did they get to the Sailsbury Plains?
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This line of questioning has led to some pretty wild theories, although let us just interject before we discuss those and say that modern experiments have proven that this was possible,
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even with the rudimentary construction tools available thousands of years ago.
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While we don’t know it for sure, it is likely the stones were moved with rolling logs and sleighs.
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Indeed at similar site in Aberdeenshire, in Scotland, cricket ball sized ball bearings were unearthed near stones by archeologists,
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suggesting the stones could have been dragged.
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This would have been a definite feat of human endeavour,
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it would have taken an educated estimate of twenty million man hours and thousands of workers to build and drag the stones.
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So, what would be worth this effort?
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Historically there really is only one answer: religion.
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This brings us from the how, to the why.
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The most compelling evidence for religion of sorts at Stonehenge is the findings from carbon dating in the area.
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Ancient animal bones have revealed that pigs were slaughtered in the area in the winter months each year, which could have something to do with the equinox.
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Lending more substance to this theory; it appears Stonehenge is built on three chalk ridges that geographically align in the midsummer and midwinter axis.
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This could suggest a architectural symbol of heaven and earth unified.
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Again, the alignment of the stones seems to suggest that those who built the structure factored in optimum viewing of sunrises and sunsets.
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Perhaps Stonehenge was a site for an undocumented ancient religion.
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Some people also suspect the area to have associations with healing, which could once again tie into the religious aspect of things.
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Burials of humans around Stonehenge generally show deformity or trauma, which could suggest that people were brought to the stones because they believed they had magical powers.
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Furthermore, some researchers in archaeocoustics suspect the structure could have been a concert chamber, saying the size and shapes of the rocks make for amazing acoustics.
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But why go through all the effort of constructing something so mammoth for simple sound?
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Again, perhaps the stones served as some kind of chamber for religious ritual.
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So, if we have a few ideas of how and why Stonehenge was built, that leaves us with the question of who commissioned it.
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While there are some logical theories that the site was built by Druids, the group don’t date back as far as early construction of Stonehenge
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and their religious rituals don’t seem to be quite on par from the evidence found at the site.
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A wilder theory suggests that the great wizard Merlin commissioned some giants, from an ancient race called Nephilim.
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I mean, if in doubt, get the giants to do it, am I right?
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Of course, there is no evidence whatsoever to support this.
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Perhaps the wildest theory out there comes from Swiss author Erich von Däniken who thinks aliens provided earthlings with godlike intelligence and power,
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and they constructed Stonehenge following extraterrstrial command.
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Again, the evidence is…er…pretty lacking.
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Interestingly, the Stonehenge Landscapes Project recently discovered, using underground radar and magnetic imaging, that actually, Stonehenge is at the centre of a whole bunch of structures,
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spreading out around four and a half square miles in the area.
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Now, this points to some kind of cultural significance in the area that we don’t yet know about, and maybe we never will.
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What we do know is that several different generations of people were involved in building Stonehenge, meaning that the area was significant for several centuries, maybe even millennia.
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This could support a hypothesis about an old religion lost with the sands of time.
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So, like a lot of questions out there, this one doesn’t have a fully formed answer, but we can only work with our best available information,
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and at the moment it seems to point to the reason behind Stonehenge’s existence being for ritual and religion.
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But, like all good questions, we are open to more options with the emergence of new evidence.
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So, guys, what do you think?
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Why is Stonehenge there and who built it?
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Let me know in the comments section down below.
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For now, thanks for tuning in to Life’s Biggest Questions,make sure you give the video a thumbs up and stay subscribed for more big answers.
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I am Rebecca Felgate, I’ll catch you in the next video, but for now, stay curious, stay alert and never ever stop questioning.