The Human Race is slowly discovering what it forgot over millennia. It’s now been proven that the main stone in Stonehenge, called the Altar Stone, was brought there from at least 460 miles away, from N.E. Scotland about 5000 years ago.
This was a monumental effort that had to be completed by people along the path that was taken, indicating that Britain was a united nation 5000 years ago and not just scattered tribes and villages as has long been thought.
The well-preserved ruins of Gobekli Tepi in Turkey are at least 12,000 years old and display very advanced stone work, stone carving and engineering, over a long period of time, as they cover a large area.
The Sphinx in Egypt is also at least as old as Gobekli Tepi, and the various massive stoneworks found in South America, Egypt and other lands that all feature the exact same type and shape of stones and construction, indicating a global network of human interaction, are thought by many archaeologists to also be at least 12,000 or more years old. Additionally, there’s reason to believe that the Great Pyramids may be, as well.
No one today knows how the truly massive stones that were moved many miles to their construction sites were moved there, how they were made to fit so precisely, how they appear to be molded to shape, how they were carved so exactly, as if turned out in molds like concrete building blocks, how they were obviously cut with saw blades, drilled with drills and faster than we can drill stone today.
We know that there are ancient settlements, stone structures, under coastal waters that were covered when the last Ice Age ended, some 10,000-12,000 years ago.
When you build with large blocks of stone, it’s because you expect to be around a very long time. Temporary shelters only need temporary materials. To have this expectation, then you must have already been there a very long time and have learned over time the best methods of working with stone.
I have a theory. Ice ages last a very long time, generally 100,000 years or so, with warm periods like ours in between them. North America was mostly covered in an ice sheet along with a lot of Europe, but there wasn’t a great loss of habitable land because the ocean dropped up to 400 feet when the water turned to glaciers, and that created a lot of dry land. Places for people to live wasn’t the problem and there were far less people then anyway.
The problem was that it was so cold. Humanity had to live in the warmest coastal regions if they were to be more than hunter-gatherers huddling together for warmth. During the thousands of years of ice age, people had to cooperate for survival. Wars would have been too counter-productive to contemplate. All the other beasts of the planet also moved into the warmer climes or adapted with warmer fur and different food sources.
The people would have had to build walls that would keep the animals out, and endure for thousands of years and they had thousands of years to work out the best ways of working with this material. By the time the last ice age began to wane, humans had been cooperating and sharing knowledge everywhere they lived across the planet. But when it waned, it did so rapidly as we know now, and most of humanity was living in coastal areas, which were 400 feet below what we call Sea Level now.
My theory is that the ocean rose so quickly, world-wide, that most of our ancestors were drowned. Certainly, all of our great cities were, and the civilization that they were part of.
The amazing stonework that mystifies us today was done by those who escaped to higher ground and continued to build as they had for thousands of previous years. But as Earth warmed up and food became more plentiful, human society changed, the attitude of building for forever faded away, and temporary shelters became more popular. The secrets of the stone builders weren’t passed on from father to son anymore, and were lost.
This is my theory of a condensed history of humanity during the last ice age. To me, it explains those massive stoneworks and why they stopped being built. We still need an explanation of HOW they did it, though, because what they did is far beyond our ability to do anything like it today.