[HN Gopher] 9k-Year-Old Stonehenge-Like Structure Found Under La...
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9k-Year-Old Stonehenge-Like Structure Found Under Lake Michigan
Author : rmason
Score : 119 points
Date : 2023-01-25 20:52 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thearchaeologist.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thearchaeologist.org)
| umvi wrote:
| What is currently stopping someone knowledgeable about dating
| techniques from making a fake underwater Stonehenge with fake
| caveman inscriptions in order to generate sensational press? Are
| there properties of dating techniques that can't be (easily)
| falsified?
|
| (I can't find anything on this website on how the scientists
| concluded the inscription is from 9k years ago)
| ducktective wrote:
| Heads up: Just recently, Graham Hancock has challenged John
| Hoopes (his arch-nemesis?) for a debate on JRE.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyQ4-PVtqRA
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Heads up: Just recently, Graham Hancock has challenged John
| Hoopes (his arch-nemesis?) for a debate on JRE.
|
| Perhaps I'm missing something, but why (and why should we care)
| is an archaeologist challenging an anthropologist to debate
| about the Java Runtime Environment?
| LarryMullins wrote:
| FYI, Hancock is a writer not an archeologist.
| gaucheries wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21649869
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24102035
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27695726
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25478693
|
| (edited for formatting)
| killjoywashere wrote:
| So a kid in Michigan grows up wanting to be Indiana Jones, also
| likes diving (a not-uncommon combo), but lives in Michigan. Gets
| certified for drysuits and finds some rocks. I wonder if there's
| Bonferroni correction here...
| ankaAr wrote:
| If they are not naming it Damonreach, all Chicagoans must to sign
| a letter in protest.
| VLM wrote:
| "not far away" from the famous Rock Lake Pyramid. There's a lot
| of unusual stuff in the general upper midwest.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| The great lakes are the North American cultural equivalent of
| the Mediterranean sea. There were people living here for
| thousands of years before European settlers got here.
| freitzkriesler wrote:
| Here's a direct link so you don't have to give traffic to some
| dinguses blog https://archaeology-world.com/9000-year-old-
| stonehenge-like-...
| pavon wrote:
| Regardless of who stole from whom, this copy of the article
| isn't any better. It just adds some links, half of which are
| incorrect like the links for Mark Holly and Greg MacMaster to
| completely different people that happen to share the same
| names.
| layer8 wrote:
| It is marked as the source by TFA. So why not directly link
| to the source.
| [deleted]
| itronitron wrote:
| The 'photo' of the diver doesn't seem to match up with the other
| images in the article. Is there any confirmation or caption for
| that picture from other articles?
| TylerE wrote:
| Wonder if it's the civil war era pier mentioned. That'd look
| about right
| poly_morphis wrote:
| Yeah, noticed the same thing. The image seems more consistent
| with a shipwreck than anything else (at least according to my
| quick image search).
| RajT88 wrote:
| It is as if someone is baiting for clicks!
| pavon wrote:
| Yeah, scrubbing the #SecretUnderground video linked elsewhere,
| I don't see that structure shown anywhere. If it was part of
| this structure I would certainly expect it to be front and
| center in that hype-driven video, since that image is more
| visually stunning than the actual rocks shown.
| wwfn wrote:
| https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/archaeologists...
|
| > Back to the media-hyped "Stonehenge" Holley found in Lake
| Michigan: It might be a small version of a prehistoric hunting
| structure, similar to the one found in Lake Huron. As for why it
| was falsely labeled in headlines, VanSumeren says that a hunting
| blind underwater "doesn't have the same ring to it" as an
| internationally recognized prehistoric structure like Stonehenge.
|
| maybe this paper?
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.11395945
| nemo44x wrote:
| There's other things like entire trees under water there too.
| When you read the geological history of an area like the Great
| Lakes, it makes you think a lot about things and how they change
| slowly and quickly. 10,000 years ago Lake Michigan looked very
| different and it recessed and came back multiple times over
| thousands of years. A few thousand years ago the water level was
| much higher than it is today. Even over a small number of years
| major changes happened. Glaciers, etc have such an interesting
| history.
| adolph wrote:
| _This site seems to gain a life in the media about every six
| months or so. Sadly, much of the information out there is
| incorrect. For example, there is not a henge associated with the
| site and the individual stones are relatively small when compared
| to what most people think of as European standing stones. It
| should be clearly understood that this is not a megalith site
| like Stonehenge._
|
| [...]
|
| _Dr. John O'Shea from University of Michigan has been working on
| a broadly similar structure over in Lake Huron. He has received a
| NSF grant to research his site and thinks that it may be a
| prehistoric drive line for herding caribou. This site is well
| published and you can find quite a bit of information on it on
| the internet. It is highly possible that the site in Grand
| Traverse Bay may have served a similar function to the one found
| in Lake Huron._
|
| https://holleyarchaeology.com/wordpress/index.php/the-truth-...
| ntrz wrote:
| This was actually discovered in 2007, not recently. From the
| archeologist who discovered it:
|
| > This site seems to gain a life in the media about every six
| months or so. Sadly, much of the information out there is
| incorrect. For example, there is not a henge associated with the
| site and the individual stones are relatively small when compared
| to what most people think of as European standing stones. It
| should be clearly understood that this is not a megalith site
| like Stonehenge. This label has been placed on the site by
| individuals in the press who may have been attempting to generate
| sensation about the story and have not visited the site. The site
| in Grand Traverse Bay is best described as a long line of stones
| which is over a mile in length.
|
| https://holleyarchaeology.com/wordpress/index.php/the-truth-...
|
| Another article with some additional context:
| https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/archaeologists...
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| > The site in Grand Traverse Bay is best described as a long
| line of stones which is over a mile in length.
|
| That sounds even more interesting to me
| prvc wrote:
| "A long line of stones which is over a mile in length" could
| easily be laid by a single person in a relatively short time
| without any special skills, tools, or knowledge.
|
| Note: the structure described above seems to be a bit more
| than this.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Sure, but what prompted them to do it? When did they do it?
| What else do we know about them?
| hammock wrote:
| A fence?
| flandish wrote:
| > them
|
| Welp, if the TV series "Ancient Aliens" has told us
| anything it's that if there is any chance "prehistoric"
| or "non-white" folks did it, it was aliens. Always
| aliens. Except when it's time traveling white humans from
| the future come to the past to help "those people" carve
| stones.
|
| (I am mocking the horseshit show, in case anyone
| worries.)
| henryfjordan wrote:
| But why? Religion? Marking territory boundaries? Some kind
| of barrier to stop water flowing? Fencing for animals? I
| think it unlikely someone just decided to do it to mess
| with future archaeologists.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| Tell me, have you ever been young ? :)
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Some time in the next few hundred years we will discover
| that the majority of mysterious archaeological finds were
| placed there by future humans to mess with past
| archaeologists.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| Caribou hunting. You set these up along a path Caribou
| use to constrain them to a narrow route, and then you set
| up hunting blinds along the path.
|
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1404404111
| dieselgate wrote:
| Oh wow very good callout and thanks for the academic (!)
| reference! This reminds me of the weirs used to trap fish
| - no surprise similar units were created on land for
| hunting as well
| harrylove wrote:
| This reminds me of that standup routine from Billy
| Connolly where he talks about archaeologists finding the
| remains of an aircraft disaster 400 years from now in the
| middle of mountainous terrain, seeing people in life
| jackets and believing there must have been a river
| nearby.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| It could be any of the above, but it could have been just
| about anything. Maybe it was just some bored kid, maybe
| with autism. At that scale it could have been done by one
| person all at once over a few days, or bit by bit over
| the course of a year or so. Maybe somebody commuted that
| way to their favorite fishing spot and tripped over a
| rock one day, then decided to clear whichever rock stood
| out the most to the side. Then the line grew slowly over
| the course of many years, like farmers creating hedge
| rows by throwing whatever rock they plow up to the side
| of the field.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| > there is not a henge associated with the site
|
| To be fair, the average person doesn't know that henge is a
| word with a specific meaning, and Stonehenge is just the name
| of a place with stones stacked in a pattern. So this is kind of
| like that.
|
| Also, continued public interest is probably one of the reasons
| that research grant money continues to be available to study
| something that was found 15 years ago.
|
| So cut the general public some slack :)
| ntrz wrote:
| > Also, continued public interest is probably one of the
| reasons that research grant money continues to be available
| to study something that was found 15 years ago.
|
| Unfortunately for Dr. Holley, it doesn't seem to have been
| working out that way in this case (from his page linked
| above):
|
| > ...state politics in previous years have meant that we have
| only been able to obtain limited funding for research and as
| a result little progress has been made.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| This is a non-amp version of the article: https://archaeology-
| world.com/9000-year-old-stonehenge-like-...
| gnabgib wrote:
| From 2020, post at the time[0] included 77 comments, 252 pts.
| That article was also a repeat, the original finding seems to
| have been in 2007 at
| https://holleyarchaeology.com/wordpress/index.php/the-truth-...
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25478693
| tomxor wrote:
| This whole website needs flagging, it's chocked full or
| ridiculous hyped up pseudo archaeology videos.
| salil999 wrote:
| The direct link is littered with ads to the point it's difficult
| to read.
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(page generated 2023-01-25 23:00 UTC)