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’ve got big balls
They’re such big balls
And they’re fancy big balls
And he’s got big balls
And she’s got big balls
But we’ve got the biggest balls of them all
Scrimshaw in stone. Art done for the sake of art, not all that different in its way from, say, traditional patterns woven into cloth or wood carvings for ornamental purposes.
Much too expensive in terms of time and effort expended to be used as weaponry, when a simple river rock of that size is both much more available and fitted to the hand.
Loom weights?
That one looks like a heat sink for a prehistoric processor.
Maybe they weren’t carved. Maybe they were a soft sludge/putty that were removed from some pond/river then rolled, decorated and left to dry and hardened into stone? There was a lake I used to go to that had sludge like that, and you could form it like putty and it then hardened.
Maybe...jjjeeeesssssssss...maybe, someone just had an interesting hobby. A pastime. An inner inspiration to create something.
Then, I could be wrong.
Either way, I don’t much care about them.
I don’t think they were weapons either; but that level of effort usually had some kind of symbolic meaning and sacred or magical purpose.
I was thinking of a headline something like this:
President’s stones continue to baffle Democrats.
Balls, said the Queen,
If I had two, I’d be King!
And I’m just itching to tell you about them
A winter hobby maybe...
I know, President Trump isn’t even 80 years old yet...
When men were hunting from trees, the stones were used to disable/kill the prey and used to dissuade larger predators from also climbing up the tree (bears).
I’m sure they used stones for fighting and hunting; it just seems that works of art this embellished with so much effort put into them would be reserved for some ceremonial purpose.
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