So we will leave these ancient civilisations for the moment and go back to my original interest as to why the henges in England followed lines and arcs. What were they chasing?
To build a henge like Stonehenge or Gobeklitepe requires a lot of people, a lot of food and strong organisation.
The hunter gatherer society of around 12,000 BCE generally did not have this ability and farming had not yet commenced in a big way. Something else must have provided the necessities that were required for building of these henges?
Figure 16, above. Landsat of Europe with above current sea-level ancient henges plotted.
This figure is the Landsat of Europe with the major henges shown as white dots.
It is immediately seen that these henges do follow linears from England to Scandinavia, and zigzag their way in the north east and north west directions down Europe from Scandinavia to the top of Italy, Sardinia and Corsica. The linears that the henges follow in England and Ireland zigzag their way down to Spain on the same north west and north east direction.
It has long been known in England and Ireland that the henges followed lines across the country – they were called Ley Lines. The top right insert is a picture of the British Ley Lines.
What geological structures are these henges following? Are they following any geological structure?
Most importantly for the topic of ‘copper kickstarting modern civilisation’ are there copper mines on these linears that the henges are on.
So, in order to find out the relationship with the mines I plotted both the underwater and the above sea level henges right across Europe to Turkey.
The first thing that I saw was that the most dense underwater henges correlated with the land henges. Generally, where there are no underwater henges there were no land henges.
The most obvious conclusion about this peculiarity is that the underwater civilisations just moved up onto the adjacent land as the sea level rose (about 2 m every century) between 15,000 years ago and 10,000 years ago.
This strongly suggests that the older civilisations may have been advanced as well.
We will now plot Europe’s ancient mining areas to see how they correlate with the ancient henges and temples.
The webinar question is – did copper mining and trading kickstart modern civilisation?
A close correlation of mines with henges would suggest that the metal was mined locally and was important in starting civilisation.
This topography plan of Europe shows the ancient mines – the copper mines are in red.
There was no single plan from which I could get the ancient mines and so this is the best that I could achieve from the scattered plans which were generally country located.
Note that the ancient mines generally follow the elevated country, which is to be expected as in the rest of the continent they would be buried by alluvium.
This figure shows the henges and the mines on one plan. The yellow shapes enclose the areas where the henges and the mines have excellent correlation.
All these areas are where the biggest and most complicated henges are located.
I am sure this is no coincidence and suggests that mining catalysed ancient civilisation.
It is also interesting that where the henges and mines don’t correlate that they were built along the trading routes between the areas that do correlate.
The bottom right-hand corner is where Gobeklitepe, that we have been talking about earlier, is located.
Cheers
Bob