An aerial view of a 5,000-year-old stone cairn and other structures in southern Alberta that a maverick Edmonton scientist believes are the central features of an ancient sun temple and calendar that accurately marks the solstices and the equinoxes.
Posted on 02/03/2009 12:19:57 PM PST by BGHater
An academic maverick is challenging conventional wisdom on Canada’s prehistory by claiming an archeological site in southern Alberta is really a vast, open-air sun temple with a precise 5,000-year-old calendar predating England’s Stonehenge and Egypt’s pyramids.
Mainstream archeologists consider the rock-encircled cairn to be just another medicine wheel left behind by early aboriginals. But a new book by retired University of Alberta professor Gordon Freeman says it is in fact the centre of a 26-square-kilometre stone “lacework” that marks the changing seasons and the phases of the moon with greater accuracy than our current calendar.
“Genius existed on the prairies 5,000 years ago,” says Freeman,the widely published former head of the university’s physical and theoretical chemistry department.
Freeman’s fascination with prairie prehistory dates back to his Saskatchewan boyhood.He and his father would comb the short grasses of the plains in search of artifacts exposed by the scouring wind.That curiosity never left him and he returned to it as he prepared to retire from active teaching.
Looking for a hobby, he asked a friend with an interest in history to suggest a few intriguing sites to visit. On a warm late-August day in 1980, that list drew him to what he has come to call Canada’s Stonehenge,which is also the title of his book.
A central cairn atop one of a series of low hills overlooking the Bow River, about 70 kilometres east of Calgary, had been partially excavated in 1971 and dated at about 5,000 years old. But as he approached it, Freeman strongly felt there was much more there than previously thought.
“As we walked toward the hilltop,I saw all kinds of patterns in the rocks on the way up. As I walked around the hilltop, I could see patterns that I doubted very much were accidental.”
(Excerpt) Read more at cnews.canoe.ca ...
Ping, aye.
See what was done before the couch potato!
Yeah,,,those indian genuises again. Sitting in the middle of a circle, but never invented the wheel.
Sitting in that circle,,, cant you hear the talk? “dude,,,theres got to be a better way to transport things than dragging it on 2 poles.”
Seems I’ve seen that sort of configuration before... but where? Hmmmmm......
Dear, come take a look....
Oh yeah! Now I’ve got it.
Yeh, but back then "genius" was a bow and arrow instead of a hand thrown, or stabbing, spear.
Did mankind know about seasons, phases of the moon, etc?
Sure they did, it was all around them. They marked the spring summer, fall, and winter equinoxes. It is pretty much a given that when the sun stops drifting in one direction and starts going in reverse that someone is going to notice.
Eventually someone will make the discovery that so many days after one of these events the plants start budding and growing, or so many days after another of these events it gets colder.
That's not genius, that's attention to detail.
stones marking the time, particularly the time for planting are apparently very common. No genius, just someone who figured out that it would be easier to find out beforehand when the next planting season begun.
I thought Dr. Gordon Freeman was an astrophysicist... HL Rules!
Mostly genius is good pattern detection.
It’s a beautiful ship & one like it might have carried the technology for wheeled toys from the orient to the “New World”.
The History Channel ran a show about chinese shipbuilding technology of the past. They understood how to make large (300 foot) oceangoing vessels that were strong enough to take the stresses of open ocean waves. They simply built double hulls and filled them with a form of concrete to stiffen them.
It’s easy for us to say someone else was stupid for not coming up with something we’ve lived our entire lives with (like wheels) But if we had never encountered that technology we might be a thousand years away from it now.
ROFLMAO... the answer was all around them. guess thats how it is when youre a genius.
Man’s been smart since God made him.
Ok well lately we’ve gone ‘round the bend and elected Obama.
I hate to say it, but I am not overly impressed.
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