Stonehenge boy 'was from the Med'

BBC ^ | 28 Sep 2010 | Paul Rincon

[muawiyah]

The isotopes of various elements in his teeth demonstrate where he lived and what he ate.

Archaeologists as well as forensic scientists have been doing this stuff for many years.

[allmendream]

I had heard that the Carthaginians bred “War Elephants” that were not your standard wild or domesticated breed, but bigger and more ornery.

Yep, a Knight would get up on his “high horse” and ride over other cavalry. Those suckers were like Clydesdale's, but mean!

[muawiyah]

Odds are the Carthaginian elephants were simply fed and exercised to have more muscles. It takes centuries to get those skeletons stretched and strengthened ~ and elephants are not all that easy to manage.

Still, the Middle Ages War Horses were definitely what folks had been after for a very long time.

BTW, this business about modern horses being large enough to ride has misled folks about how the horse was domesticated.

The earlier idea was that early man saw that horses were rideable and started out riding them bareback. Fact was they were edible, not rideable, and they were fit only for pulling light built wagons called "chariots". Good shot of King Tut's chariot at http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/king-tuts-chariot-heads-to-new-york.html

Gives a very good idea of what "light" meant in the early days. That one's for two horses BTW. Even the Pharoah couldn't get a really big horse.

[muawiyah]

For a thread that gets right to the heart of the problem of taking a moderate sized animal and breeding it up to where it’s among the other animals, try this thread: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2598013/posts

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

There was a show, on the Smithsonian Channel I believe, that said one of the theories is that Stonehenge was a well-known place of healing to which the wealthy but sick would make a pilgrimage . A number of the skeletons that have been found nearby have come from beyond the British Isles.

[allmendream]

Well race horses are a special case. Wild horses seem to do fine in the wild, but specialization leads to a host of problems because in biology, much like in economics, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Race horses are faster, but at the expense of a LOT of other things.

We need to take a long hard look at a race horse before anyone starts throwing around the idea of selective breeding of humans.

Gattica hit the nail on the head with this, these supposedly superior humans were also non aggressive, and just couldn't seem to compete with normal humans - heart defects and all.

[Boogieman]

“Most likely Roman. They did not surrender to Islam like the English.”

Romans in 1,550 BC?

[Boogieman]

“3,550 years ago the people who would become the Romans were still huddled in caves picking each other’s lice.
This makes the kid, as far as kids go and early patriarchs go, a near contemporary of Father Abraham, one way or the other by a couple of hundred years.”

Somebody on the thread gets it :)

I agree, the most likely solution is Phoenician. There might have been some proto-Celts living on the Iberian coast by then, but that’s a real long shot. Nobody else from that area, at that time, is really known to have travelled to England.

Of course, we’re talking a period of time that is basically pre-history as far as Europe goes, so there could have been some other people that was trading or colonizing that far, who we simply know nothing about.

[Boogieman]

“Lots of words for sheep, horses, and the parts to a chariot (axle, wheel, etc); thus they surmised that they most likely rode horses, herded sheep, and had chariots.”

That makes sense, since the Indo-Europeans spread out from the area around the Middle East, where chariots were common and very important technology. Nomadic herders would be a likely lifestyle for them, considering how far they ranged.

[Grizzled Bear]

People in the ancient world traveled in an age without passports or currency exchanges.

Try to do that today! That's why them smart Mexicans are building that wall on their southern border to block those illegal immigrants from Guatemala!

That's what you meant; right newbie?

[Gondring]

In addition, there are several British amber sites and the world's oldest spider web was found in an amber deposit located 100 miles east of Stonehenge, so it could be local. If he came from the Mediterranean, it could be from the Mediterranean (e.g., Sicily, Lebanon) or French deposits.

(I sure hope someone has analyzed it by now!)

[muawiyah]

You can supposedly determine the site amber comes from so I’d imagine they’ll get around to that. But looking at the time frame Scanderhoovian sources were already big time ~

[SunkenCiv]

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[muawiyah]

We know a whole lot more with this discovery. He had amber. He had tooth chemistry typical of the Mediterranean. He was thus and so tall, had a head shaped this and that, and had a foot to shinbone ratio of xyz.

If we recall our Sa'ami history (prehistory) the big breakouts were about 9000 years ago ~ just long enough after the Younger Dryas for plants to get a good start throughout the formerly glaciated areas. Have to have plants to get the game animals. So this is just short of half way back. Probably not a whole lot of people around yet, and most likely virtually everybody was free of infectious disease ~ unless they brought it with them from the more heavily populated Eastern Mediterranean.

[Del Rapier]

How the hell people should enforce their borders these days should more then likely involve a flamethrower and some gators.

I am going to assume that unwelcome visitors weren’t too much of a problem back then.

[ApplegateRanch]

Analysis on a previous skeleton found near Stonehenge showed that that person was also a migrant to the area.

What this tells me is that it was very dangerous to be tourist ca 3550 years ago.

Question: did the BBC's Paul Rincon really mean '3550 years ago'; or did he hear, "3,550 years Before Present," and assume it was the same as 3550 years ago? It may sound trivial, but it's not when I'm programming a destination in my time machine.

[Boogieman]

I haven’t studied much of the Sa’ami history, I’m guessing it’s an oral tradition?

[muawiyah]

Found a site that covers all of them. http://www.emporia.edu/earthsci/amber/geograph.htm

[muawiyah]

The really old stuff comes strictly from archaeology ~ still, throughout Scandinavia they find quite a few intact skeletons so they can check the tooth chemistry and so forth. They date this stuff.

Now, about 7500 years back people began putting together pictoglyphs in the Kola Peninsula ~ so let me suggest Sa'ami "history" begins about 2500 years before any other "history" ~

Remember, if you have no written record of any kind you have no "history", but if you have a written record of some kind, however primitive, you do have a "history". It's up to us to learn how to read that "history".

The next oldest records consist of the deer stones in Mongolia although some claim a few of them date back to 7500 years ago, but there's no clear cut story lines with any of them. Then we get to some old Chinese stuff, but it's pre-Shang. And finally, there's the good stuff in Mesopotamia ~ then China, then Egypt (or vice versa since Egypt and China seem to have had early systems based on the early Sumerian stuff).

The difference between archaeology and history is very simple ~ written records give you "history"; archaeology gives you "evidence".

Indo European tribes have NO HISTORY of any kind until they got writing.

[SunkenCiv]

:’) Whoever came up with the idea for building the complex must have had quite a set of stones.