Posted on 06/18/2018 10:56:29 AM PDT by BBell
Some of the most enigmatic human-made objects from Europe's late Stone Age intricately carved balls of stone, each about the size of a baseball continue to baffle archaeologists more than 200 years after they were first discovered.
More than 500 of the enigmatic objects have now been found, most of them in northeast Scotland, but also in the Orkney Islands, England, Ireland and one in Norway.
Archaeologists still don't know the original purpose or meaning of the Neolithic stone balls, which are recognized as some of the finest examples of Neolithic art found anywhere in the world. But now, they've created virtual 3D models of the gorgeous balls, primarily to share with the public. In addition, the models have revealed some new details, including once-hidden patterns in the carvings on the balls
Hugo Anderson-Whymark, a curator at National Museums Scotland who created the online models, explained that many functions have been proposed for the stone balls over the years.
Such proposals have included the possibility that they were made as the stone heads for crushing weapons, or standardized weights for Neolithic traders, or rollers for the transport of the giant stones used in megalithic monuments.
One theory is that the knobs on many of the carved stone balls were wound with twine or sinew, which allowed them to be thrown like slings or South American bolas. Other theories describe the balls as objects of religious devotion or symbols of social status.
"Many of the ideas you have to take with a pinch of salt, while there are others that may be plausible," Anderson-Whymark told Live Science. "What's interesting is that people really get their imaginations captured by them they still hold a lot of secrets."
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I wonder how many different people made these. The quality is all over the place.
One of them on the 3-D website looks like a grenade. Another, a round meat tenderizer.
They like 4 and 6 knobs - tetrahedron and cube based. Platonic solid based. There’s a reference to these under “History”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_solid
It would be fun if some genius had made ones based on the Dodecahedron or Icosahedron.
They also carved their bats out of stone. Thanks BBell.
Four balls???? STRUT, MFer, strut!
Superstitious people spend time and effort on creating items to appease or intimidate.
Mid-century armaments are covered in them.
Maybe these stones are models of molecular orbitals handed down from the long-lost physics tradition of Atlantis.
Maybe not.
Maybe they were a form of finals exam for stone age students?
This rings a bell.
I'm sure that if you check out Mel Brooks' 2000-year old man routine, there should be something in there about stone balls...
Could be. The wiki indicates that they aren’t found in graves, which suggests that they weren’t personal items. But the context in which most were found appears to be lost, so they could have been in graves...
I wondered if they were some way of teaching math and geometry.
I think they were ‘seals’ identifying the sender of a message or on a legal document. They may have been ‘deeds’ that show the owner of the land was given by the king................
Stone workers calling cards... “yes, this is the quality of work I do”...
The "Forbidden" part refers to the fact that mainstream Archeologists do not allow themselves to talk about it in any way...
That's my first thought as well, rope or sinew. Those binding grooves make their use completely obvious to anyone with common sense - especially when you consider that weapons in every society in history have always been the most technologically advanced objects produced at the time.
Thats what I thought right away. The little bumps would work with an open sling.
And baseball sized rocks leave a mark. I have one ( a mark from a rock fight) on my left temple. (I learned a lesson about why its good to have the high ground in a rock fight.)
Well, there has been plenty of “talk” about these balls; it’s just that nobody is sure what they were for.
I don’t think anyone has really suggested that they represent a technology out of place for their time (which is what I usually think of when I hear something like ‘Forbidden Archaeology’).
Not bloody likely.
Even primitive man was not an idiot.
Spend weeks engraving a perfect sphere to kill the Sabre-tooth Tiger, when there are a gazillion free rocks scattered everywhere?
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