Was Stonehenge Built with Balls in Rails?



Andrew Young, a doctoral student at the University of Exeter, has a novel proposal about how ancient Britons built Stonehenge. He hypothesizes that they placed balls in grooved tree trunks to act as bearings for the heavy stones:

Young first came up with the ball bearings idea when he noticed that carved stone balls were often found near Neolithic stone circles in Aberdeenshire, Scotland (map).

"I measured and weighed a number of these stone balls and realized that they are all precisely the same size—around 70 millimeters [3 inches] in diameter—which made me think they must have been made to be used in unison, rather than alone," he told National Geographic News.

The balls, Young admitted, have been found near stone circles only in Aberdeenshire and the Orkney Islands (map)—not on Stonehenge's Salisbury Plain.

But, he speculated, at southern sites, including Stonehenge (map), builders may have preferred wooden balls, which would have rotted away long ago. For one thing, wooden balls are much faster to carve. For another, they're much lighter to transport.


Link | Photo: University of Exeter

Clinton, you should write Exeter University before they embarrass themselves with any more National Geographic articles.
University of Exeter
Streatham Campus
Northcote House
Exeter EX4 4QJ
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So did the space aliens provide the wooden balls and rails, or just the plasma beam weapons to make the wooden balls and rails? Boy, this stuff gets confusing fast.
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These balls are from the first ever baseball game - each stonehenge stone was a base. Most bats have disintegrated 'cause they were made of wood - however if you need proof of this - a disgruntled team did throw a few of their bats into a nearby bog - I'm sure they are still there, if you look you'll find them!
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