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stonehenge | Neural Gourmet Archives

stonehenge

tng | 2007-03-20 03:49

Building Stonehenge — This Man can Move Anything

Wally Wallington has shown that it would have been possible for neolithic man to not only build Stonehenge, but to build it with a far greater ease than one might think. In this video, Wally uses only himself, ingenuity and gravity to move and lift a 19,200 pound monolith into place. Why? Because Wally likes moving things. Really big things.

I love stuff like this. For instance, I remember a WGBH/PBS Nova special where Norm Abram, the master carpenter of This Old House fame showed how the Egyptian pyramids could have been built using only the tools and materials available in the 25th Century BC. Sure, neither Wally nor Norm can prove that their methods are how the pyramids or Stonehenge were actually built, but rather what they show is that humans are incredibly clever primates and there's no need to look any further than ambition and the human intellect to explain the construction of ancient monuments.

Like the pyramids, Stongehenge attracts a lot of woowoo explanations for its' construction, often invoking the supernatural or, in modern times, UFOs. It's really a curious form of soft-bigotry embedded in our culture. After all, we have no trouble believing the Ancient Greeks or Romans built the great architectural wonders of their civilizations yet for some reason we see other ancient peoples as incapable of carrying out such massive construction projects. Thanks to people like Wally, we can all see how silly these sorts of prejudices are. And how much fun it is to move a pole barn using just simple mechanical principles and your own muscle power!

You can find out more about Wally at his website The Forgotten Technology. Hat tip: Deeply Blasphemous.

Updated March 21, 2007 — We get a fact check from Rich of the podcast Bloodthirsty Vegetarians who e-mailed me to say that it was actually This Old House's stonemason Roger Hopkins who did the documentary on the technique he figured out to construct the pyramids and not Norm Abram as I mentioned. I'm sure my memory is flawed here, this was many years ago. Of course, that would mean conceding to Rich that he was right about a trivial matter, and that can never be. Sorry Rich. I still have vivid memories of Norm Abram building the pyramids (with Al Gore's help of course). Sticking out tongue


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