[imagesource: Sky News]

“Every age has the Stonehenge it deserves — or desires,” wrote archaeologist and writer Jacquetta Hawkes in 1967.

That might just be the truest fact about Stonehenge, the prehistoric monument on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England.

Over time, people have come up with some wild theories about the strange structure, alluding to how it would be impossible for humans to move the massive stones over miles without outside help or advanced technology.

(Possible but gruelling, as each sarsen stone needed at least 1 000 people to transport it over a distance of 24 kilometres, according to an exhibition in the British Museum.)

That theory also follows suit with what many have said about the ancient Egyptian sites, the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid of Giza, which were built around the same time as Stonehenge.

Out of the riddle of Stonehenge, per an article by The New York Times, people have posited that it was built by extraterrestrials, and is actually a landing pad for spacecraft.

Others have said that it is a place of healing, embued with magical and mystical powers, while Canadian gynaecologist Anthony M. Perks believed it to be “the opening by which Earth Mother gave birth to the plants and animals on which the ancient people so depended”.

In an essay illustrated with sketches of Stonehenge and of female genitalia, he wrote that the stones could be a metaphor for “the human vulva, with the birth canal at its centre”.

I mean, sure:

Image: Sky News

Meanwhile, Sky News reports that the mystery of Stonehenge has actually been solved, with the latest batch of researchers saying that it’s a giant solar calendar that seems to link the UK to ancient Egypt.

Image: English Heritage

Professor Timothy Darvill, from Bournemouth University, built on the knowledge by analysing the stones and comparing them to other calendars from around 2 500 BC, suggesting that Stonehenge was influenced by ancient cultures:

Prof Darvill concluded that the site was created based on a solar year of 365,25 days to help people keep track of days, weeks and months. Weeks were ten days long and there were more months than we are used to today.

“Such a solar calendar was developed in the eastern Mediterranean in the centuries after 3000 BC and was adopted in Egypt as the Civil Calendar around 2700 BC and was widely used at the start of the Old Kingdom about 2600 BC,” he said.

The fact that the stones are aligned in the direction of the sunrise of the summer solstice and the sunset of the winter solstice makes the idea of it being a calendar very likely.

You can read more about how the stones work to tell the time here.

Now we know where to go when our digital clocks and Google calendars cease to exist.

[sources:skynews&nytimes]