Bogsnorkler said:
Bogsnorkler said:
https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/megaliths-brittany
The origin of the roughly 35,000 ancient monuments that dot Europe and the British Isles has long been a haunting mystery. From the Ring of Bodnar in the Scottish Orkney Islands to Stonehenge in the English countryside, to the Carnac stones in France, these ancient monuments have fascinated people for as long as they’ve been known.
Remarkably, there’s never been a serious effort made to date all of these structures in order to establish a single credible prehistoric timeline. Now, however, Bettina Schulz Paulsson has done exactly that using radiocarbon dating, lining up the sequence in which 2,410 of these sites were constructed. Her research has just been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on February 11.
As it turns out that it all started with single hunter-gatherer culture in an area now known as Brittany, France some 7,000 years ago.
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/9/3460
There are stone circles in the Kimberleys of Australia.
“megalithic graves emerged within a brief time interval of 200 y to 300 y in the second half of the fifth millennium calibrated years BC in northwest France, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic coast of Iberia.”
Starts with graves then
OR
Gravesite megaliths survive intact for the longest.
“These include megalithic tombs, standing stones, stone circles, alignments, and megalithic buildings or temples. Most of these were constructed during the Neolithic and the Copper Ages and are located in coastal areas. Their distribution is along the so-called Atlantic façade, including Sweden, Denmark, North Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Scotland, England, Wales, Ireland, northwest France, northern Spain, and Portugal, and in the Mediterranean region, including southern and southeastern Spain, southern France, the Islands of Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta and the Balearics, Apulia, northern Italy, and Switzerland. Interestingly, they share similar or even identical architectonic features throughout their distribution.”
Interesting. But “architectonic”? They don’t say how many in each category, eg. It makes a big difference if 95% are tombs or if 5% are tombs, annoying.
“For our time horizon, it normally provides precision ranges of 100 y to 300 y with 95% probability.”
Interesting.
“we reviewed critically the 2,410 samples, including measurements from the 1960s up to the present, to determine the quality and reliability of the sample contexts. “
Only extant measurements?
“first megalithic graves in Europe were closed small structures or dolmens built aboveground with stone slabs and covered by a round or long mound of earth or stone. These graves emerge in the second half of the fifth millennium calibrated years (cal) BC within a time interval of 4794 cal BC to 3986 cal BC (95.4%; 4770 cal BC to 4005 cal BC, 68.2%)”.
That’s a big uncertainty, unless they’re mixing together actual time differences with random errors, in which case they shouldn’t.
“There are no radiocarbon dates available from the early megalithic graves in these regions”
Well, measure them then.
