How Stonehenge Works

I've heard New Zealand is like America in the nineteen fifties that it's like I've heard it described that way. It's very pure still and like oh yes, friendly and just sort of uncorrupted. So um, Apparently New Zealand ranks fourth on the Global Peace Index, which is you know, it takes into account like, yeah, you don't get the impression that there's this nie a day or innocence necessarily.

It's more just like they are a thoroughly content, peaceful people and it's not like, you know, it's not like that manufactured like labored kind of like friendly contentedness that you kind of run into sometimes this is the real deal and it rubs off on you while you're there.

Like New Zealanders are a okay in my book. Everyone we met, everyone was friendly, except for one truck driver who I had an incident with, But in retrospect, I look back and I'm wondering if he thought he was trying to protect me by not letting me go around him. But everybody else was just like totally friendly, neat, cool people. And we were everywhere, Like we were in a little spot town of Rhoda Rura, we were in Auckland, we were in Wellington, we were in a little Napier, which

is like the Art Deco capital of the world. They had an earthquake in and it just leveled the town all the a or afterward leveled town. So they're like, we need to rebuild. What kind of architectural movement is hip right now? Art Deco? So they rebuilt the town in Art Deco. It's really pretty that you would love Napier. Cool. Yeah, So New Zealand awesome, great stuff. Lots of sheep, like, no joke, they are probably more sheep than sheep than people. Yeah, um,

and it's a wonderful place. And then of course Okinawa we Once we got there, we're like, okay, let's start eating. Yeah, you're like a japan expert at this point, right, Uh, except I can't speak Japanese, but yeah, everything, I'm an expert. I'm learning. We hung out with with Humi's family, nice and her little I guess second cousin or first cousin

once removed a little kid. Awesome, little precocious dude at one point was trying to talk to me and he liked just put his face in his hands and said in Japanese, this communication in Japanese is not going very well, that's adorable. Yeah it was, and you ate like a king. Yes, I bet man, that sounds that sounds great. Thanks man, Thanks for welcoming me back. You're still a little jet legs, so in case I get a little weird, that's why. Uh. Well, maybe one day we can hit up New Zealand on

a tour. I would love that. Yeah, and Australia too, I know they love us over there. Well, we can't go to one without the other. I just did well first stuff you should know show Oh that would be rude awesome. Well, welcome back, thanks um and now Stonehenge, have you ever been No, I've been to London and that's it as far as the UK goes. Yeah, same here. Um,

I would love to go to Stonehenge too. It sounds like a very very cool place and I wanted to go before I researched this, but now that I have them, like, definitely want to go because it's not just Stonehenge. You think it's just Stonehenge and you go and there's like the rock formation, and sure, when you get in your car and go home, you could do that, but you'd be missing out on like a whole huge, rich tapestry of weirdo earthen works that are totally mysterious to us

still to this day, in that whole area. Yeah, I had no idea either. It's a hotbed of hinges. Yeah, you know which technically a hinge, by the way, we should say, is an earthworks that I didn't know that dentil I studied this, I didn't either, But so it's an earthwork that consists of a bank and a ditch, and in most cases the high bank encloses a ditch within it. But Stonehenge, which is which gives the name hinge to other hinges, is the opposite it's a reverse hinge.

It has the ditch on the outside of the bank. Yeah. And and you know it sort of looks when you look at these images of hinges from above, um, sort of like a crop circle with nothing in the middle, right, just grass, just grass. Uh. And remember that's where the home of crop circles started, was in that area, the Salisbury Plain and outer space already Stonehenge. So, like we said, Chuckers, the the whole reason for any of this stuff, for

building these things still defies understanding. But exploration has gone back many, many, many centuries. You know, you don't just walk past Stonehenge and say that's natural. It's clearly man made. But the idea behind it has been lost. But study of the whole thing has kind of has yielded some pretty good stuff. Like, for example, we have a pretty good idea of when Stonehenge was constructed and apparently, uh, it was constructive of a period of less than two

hundred years. Yeah. We also have a pretty good idea about where it is because it is where it is, which is eight miles north of Salisbury, Wiltshire, England. Crop Circles home of crop circles and where the Banshees live and they do live well, the Banshees. Yeah, you're not a spinal tap band. No, I've been having that song Stonehenge in my head all day on a loop. They talk about the Benshees. That's one of the lines where the Banshees live and they do live well. I thought

they were from Ireland, the Banshees. Yeah, I don't know. I mean they're talking about Druids and the song as well. Yeah, it's spinal tap, which is a common, uh, a common misconception that the Druids built Stonehenge, right, Yeah, they have dated it and they were not there at the same time, correct. Yeah.

So back in the nineteenth century, some antiquarians which was what they used to call historians and archaeologists and stuff before there were such things, um, figured that Stonehenge was some sort of Druidic temple, which made a lot of sense because the Druids were a weird mystery cult that um we're big on, like human sacrifice and all sorts of like really interesting stuff. They were the priestly class

of the Celts, right. Um. The problem is is the Druids were around from about till the first century c E when the Romans suppressed them. H and Stone Inch is way older than that, at least the whole earthworks thing goes back at least five thousand years. Yeah, and that's the earthworks, the actual large stones that it's most famous for. UM. They date that between b c. E, which is about the same time as the Great Pyramids in Egypt. So UM, if you're wondering how they managed

to get these large stones, that's still a mystery. But um, they were not as advanced as the Middle East at the time. Right. So in the Middle East they know they were well into I guess the Bronze Age UM, while the I guess so well at the time Europe, Western Europe at least was still in the Neolithic, the New Stone Age UM. So yeah, the idea that there was this massive public works UM is a huge mystery, like why that happened, how it happened, how they got

the stones there. There's another um long held theory that was recently discarded that the stones were moved there through glacial activity, uh thousands, hundreds of thousands of years before UM. And they've they've checked it out and they said, no, these stones actually did come from quarries at a minimum, I think of forty miles away. Yeah, they said that even if um there was glacial evidence, then it would not have been able to carry it that far. There's

just no way. Yea, So humans did again no idea how because this is before the wheel was around in Western Europe, which makes the whole thing that much more impressive. Yeah, they've got some theories like um, basically things that sort of acted as wheels before they were technical wheels, like small rocks or stone ball bearings or the old log roller trick, which makes sense because the largest of these

things can weigh up to fifty pounds. Yeah, and the smallest ones are you know, about five thousand pounds two to five tons, So the smallest ones get like the strongest men to lift these things that you've got a hundred strong men because they're you know, only so big. You can't crowd that many dudes around and lift this thing anyway. Exactly. There's just no way. It's a mystery. It's a mystery. So let's talk about the stones themselves. I mean, this is what people think of when they

when they talk about Stonehenge. But there's more too, and we'll get into it. But the stones, um, they're the upright stones are called um Sarsen's right, that's right, And sarson it's a it's a kind of sandstone that's particularly peculiar to the region. Uh. Yeah. And the closest um they found this is the Marlborough Downs about twenty miles away. So, um, basically, if you haven't picked up on it by now, what we're saying is these stones weren't just laying around and

they decided to prop them up right. At the very least, they were brought from twenty miles away and likely much much further. Oh I thought it was forty miles away. Twenty miles away. Well, they said the closest source of this sandstone is twenty miles away. But there were there's all different kinds of rocks, which we'll see. Yeah. Um,

so the Sarson's it's a type of stone. But when you're talking about Stonehenge, if somebody points to a stone and say, is that sarson there, they're talking about the upright column, that's right. The Sarson's are topped in the outer circle and in the inner circle of stones by what are called lentils, that's right, which are also starsin stone, I believe. But um, because they're horizontal on top of the upright ones, they're called lintels, and the upright ones

are called Sarsen's right, Yes, pretty cool. And again these are really heavy stones. And again we have no idea how they got them there, how they erected him, and how they got the heavy ones on top of the upright ones. That's crazy because again we're talking about many many tons stones right each. But as if just to show off for the the people that followed, um, the people who erected Stonehenge carved the Sarson's with a knob knobs on top, and carved the lentils with grooves so

that they fitted and they were replicating a type of woodworking. Yeah, mortis and tinnin um and I'll put together. These are called the trilothon in the inner circle, the big ones. Yeah, when you have the Sarson's and the lentils, it's called the trilathon. And uh yeah, they they don't know why they carved those because apparently when I heard that, I was like, well, probably to make them fit together better, But they said that it really has nothing to do

with it. Well, they said, it's totally unnecessary. Yeah, so they think it may be symbolic. Um, which we'll get too later. Um. So so you've got inside the inner circle and I found, um this kind of thing. It's like describing a yo yo e motion or something like that, like a yo yo trick. It's just easier to go see it yourself. There's a thousand, a million and a thousand great pictures of stone Hings, yes, one million, one thousand pures. You just gotta look at one of them.

So yeah, it'll help if you if you're checking this out or we're describing it. But there's the inner circle of Stonehenge, and those are made of trilothons, which are two upright Sarsen's and a lintel, right, yeah, there's five of those. And then and those are the big boys. Those things are like thirty ft tall. I think it's the tallest pine. Yeah, which is I didn't realize it was that big. That's like ten Yeah, you have to I would say, you probably have to go there and say, oh,

this is bigger than I thought. Right, unless you thought it was bigger than you might say it was smaller than you thought, you know, uh yeah, unless the opposite is true Um. And then in the outer uh circle it was apparently it was intended or it was at

one point to be a complete circle. And this is made of lentils and sarson's, but they're not trial athons because it's just basically, if you took a bunch of um sarsen's, a bunch of upright columns and put them a circle and then topped it with as few lentils as it would make a complete circle, that's what you have. So it made a ring. Yeah, And I think my impression is that it was not ever completed because there would probably be some evidence of the you know, falling

down sarsens or something. Um. Well, there's unless they were taken away. That is the theory that when the Romans came along, or then later on when the Church came to power after the fall of the Roman Empire, that um locals were like, well, that's some pagan weirdness. We don't want to encourage paganism. Let's just take it and build a church that'll show them. So it's possible that some of those rocks are found in medieval churches in

the area. Interesting and that crazy, that is crazy. That's gray uh and there are four more of the stars and stones um that actually have names. The slaughter stone, the heel stone, which is huge, uh, and then to station stones and they're out of the outer Sarson circle inside the circle, and then also outside the circle or what are called blue stones. These are the smaller stones that are between two and five tons. Still little guys, but that's that's what they're calling. There's a bunch of

those guys too. Yeah, and they're called bluestones because when they're cut or when they're wet, they look blue. Yes, pretty neat. So that's the stones and um, but that's just the bluestones. It's there's they're all different kinds of rock, which proves that they came from different sources. It is the key. It also might um, it might get to the bottom of why Stonehenge was built, but we always we just touched the tip of the iceberg here by

just talking about the rocks. We're gonna talk about the larger hinge part and what was originally there right after the Yeah, alright, chuckers, we're back. Yeah. I mentioned quickly before we broke about the blue stones being uh coming

from different places. Um. One of the places they think that eleven of these bad boys came from was in western Wales and forty miles away Nuts, so that that's probably the maximum some of these stones traveled, which it kind of um gives a little bit of credence weirdly to one of the old legends of where Stonehenge came from,

which was Merlin. Merlin and some of his boys stole it from Ireland and the stones proved too heavy for the uh, I guess Merlin's men to lift even fifteen thousand of them, so he just uses magic to load them onto the boats, which he should have done to begin with. Yeah, they were like, why don't you try this before, Like Jimmy broke his back, right, Jimmy the

U the night Um. That was from the Historia Regum Britagnier. Yeah, the History of the Kings of Britain from Jeffrey of Monmouth's name, and that was the one of the original um Jeffrey of Monmouth. Yeah, with the g Geoffrey Geoffrey Um. That was one of the original theories was that giants built this and that to commemorate the death in the battle against the Saxons. Was when Merlin was like, let's

steal this stuff. The giants dance, let's steal it. The giants built it in Ireland, and Merlin was like, let's go steal that because four Britons died. Al right, So that was one of the theories. We'll get to a few more of those in a bit. But jumping back to the Salisbury Plain, what they do think it's true is that they not giants. Not giants not Merlin was that this was a good place for hunting. It was a good hunting ground because there's a causeway from glacial

heaving and thawing. It formed what they call like an avenue um which made of chalk apparently, so this avenue coincides with the rising of the summer solstice and then the setting eventually with the winter solstice um. And for many years they thought this was like this meant something, but now we think that it's just coincidence. Right. But I mean, like if you're if you're you know, hunting wooly mammoths and eating psychedelic mushrooms and that's your existence.

You see the sun come up and then go down, and this crazy like the on the longest and the shortest day of the year, and it's like a white chalk line connecting the two. You gotta put a little significance on this um. So they did. That's why they think that they chose the site for um for Stonehenge, like it was sacred and divinely inspired. Exactly. Again, you were on a ton of mushrooms at the time, so it made sense. Then, Okay, that's right. Don't judge. So

we mentioned the hinge earlier. That was these hinges, I don't think we pointed out they're not natural formations. They

are designed and built by people. And so something like three thousand years BC, so about five thousand years ago on the nose almost some Neolithic uh Western Europeans in the area of what is now the Salisbury Plain um grab some deer antlers, turn them into pick axes and started digging the circles that ended up becoming the ditches that ended up becoming U. Stonehenge built the earthworks, they dug the ditch, they made the bank, and then you

had this raised ground long four the stones ever showed up, Yeah, about three d and thirty feet across. And like you said earlier at the beginning, it is um a reverse hinge because the high bank is on the inside and not the outside. Right, Usually the ditches inside the bank, that's right, rather than outside. I don't know why stone Hinge is different. Who knows. Maybe they started to make him. We're like, oh man, we made it backwards. Yeah, but

we've already done like a hundred feet. I'm not digging another one. Uh. So they left a wider entrance on one side, on the northeast end um, which is that's like where the avenue runs into stone Hinge. Yeah, the main entrance almost like a road to a roundabout or cul the stack. Yeah, that's maybe that's what it was, was sun temple called the stack um. And then there's a narrow entrance on the south side. And um, that's not all. That's not all that's there. They found all

these holes, the Aubrey holes, fifty six of them. Um, basically where they think that they're or wooden post that there were either totems or some kind of a structure there previously. Yeah, that structure that's very significant. Something like uh ten thousand years ago, I think about eight thousand BC, somebody put up three pine posts. They think it was probably pine Yeah, those are not the Aubrey holes. Those

are those are different? Right? They discovered those. They were going to make a parking lot for Stonehenge in the sixties, and while they were while they were excavating. Yeah, I guess they should qualify that there would be a parking lot in the sixties. Well, actually, I guess we do know now there wouldn't be one. So in the nineteen sixties they were going to put a parking lot, and um, they discovered these three post holes and they were like,

these probably held totems of some sort. This is huge because there's no other site like it. There's no evidence of any other kind of monument building this far back ten thousand years ago in Europe. It was a very that's crazy. So at least as far back as that, this site was considered somehow significant, if not sacred, by

the locals years ago. Yes, all right, but then again we're fast forwarding to five thousand years ago, three thousand b C. And that's when the earthworks have have been constructed, the Henge is built. Now we're under the Aubrey holes because I think they were deposited at the same time, right, yeah, fifty six of them, and um, like I said, they could have had Um, they could have held blue stones.

Maybe that was a structure. Maybe it was some sort of a astrological or astronomal astronomy astronomical design or layout or something. Uh. They didn't leave a book behind saying what they were doing, so we don't know. It's all the speculations. All we know is there is a circle of holes that probably held something at some point. We don't know what. But that was the original hence the original stone henge. Yeah. Uh. And then um, that was the first stage, right uh yeah. Basically at between is

when these starson the stars in Horseshoe came about. Yeah, about three hundred or so years after the first construction of the earthworks, the stones come in, that's right. Yeah. Um, so they bring the stones in again, like you said, from as far away as Whales. The nearest is twenty miles away. There's definitely a quarry. Some stones came from like forty miles away. Um. So they're coming from all these different places and they're being brought in and erected. Um.

And then the that's the second phase. So the stonehenges we know and love it today was built about then about um b C. The last phase of construction as far as anybody can tell as undertaken, and it's basically like sprucing up the place. That's right. That's when they dug their ditches and banks. Um, that's when the avenue was cleared out, which is one point seven miles long by the way. Yeah, that's significant. Using deer antler axe

picks they dug. They they made ditches on either side of this avenue to to um clarify it, I guess for two miles. Basically, it's pretty amazing. And they it followed a route um to the river avon Um and then over the next few hundred years, basically they would reposition some of these stones, these blue stones um to. I don't know why, to fit their whims maybe or should they had reasons. That's another mystery too. Some of

this stuff would be moved around from one place to another. Yea, uh, you said that it goes to the river Avon and I think about two thousand there was a big archaeological survey undertaken that uncovered another hinge called blue Stone hinge that was at where the avenue hits the River Avon and so at the far end of stonehenge Um that they think that's where the bluestones came from. So apparently originally they may have had another type of hinge closer

to the river and decided let's move it into Stonehenge proper. Yeah, no idea. Why you know. I used to go camping at a place called Sunfish Pond at the Delaware Water Gap when I lived in New Jersey, and there was at Sunfish Pond there was this there's this one big rock bank basically with just tons of these huge, awesome rocks, and people would build just things out of them. Yeah, it looks a little like uh little totems or a

little little uh structures, and uh. I think everyone that went there it was part of the ritual of camping there was to like spend a day moving these rocks around and doing stuff. And I think like this could very well be what happened here. People would show up hundreds of years later and be like, I kind of like the look at that, but maybe this was better over there. Yeah, like maybe it was. There wasn't some grand reason other than artistic. I get that. You know.

My question is this, if you're talking about the smallest stone weighing two tons, that's not like you know, some hippie just going like, I've kind to move the stone, Like you gotta get a bunch of hippies together to move one of those, you know. So it's a community effort. Every every stage of Stonehenge is a communal effort, which

is it's it's that's important. You know, they probably had more significance than just artistic But what is that urge that drove people out in the woods, you know, to where it's sun fish gap, sunfish pond, some fish pond um, that that drove them to move the rocks around? Like what made you do it? Seeing other people doing it and thinking I want to build my own? Yeah? Yeah, Well like rock stacking is a thing too, right, Yeah, I mean that's basically what we were doing, Okay, stack

in rock. Yeah. So it's an ancient prime orige um. So we'll talk a little more about some of the surrounding landscape in Um and Stonehenge right after this. So Chuck Stonehenge isn't the only place the only Neolithic weirdness in the area. Man that places there's a lot of wicker man stuff going on. Yeah, there was, you know, Uh, there's something like a thousand barrows which are um like tombs, mound tombs. Um. There's uh some other hinges that don't

have stones necessarily. There's one called Woodhenge, but probably the most important other site around there is called Durrington Walls. Yes, it is also a hinge and it's on the other side of the River Avon. And one of the very significant things about during Tom Walls is that it is it has an avenue as well that's aligned with the sun on certain days and they just happen to be the opposite days of the Stonehenge avenue or the same day, but the opposite position, that's right. Uh. It had a

couple of timber circles. Um. It's about the same size as Stonehenge roughly. And they think that this could have been like a staging area for what Stonehenge would become, which doesn't make sense to me. Like they're saying like this is possibly the builders camp for Stonehenge two miles away.

That's not a convenient camp, No, No, it's good point plus. Also, so you've got Stonehenge, right, and then you have the River Avon, and then a little further up the River Avon you have but across the other side you have during ton Walls and on the summer solstice, Stonehenge hosts the sun the summer sunrise, right, But on that same day during ton Walls, that avenue features the summer sunset. So they're aligned. It's clearly they have something to do

with one another, at least in the Neolithic mind. That's right. So it's not just this, it's not just Stoneheng's. This whole site allows you with him. But why, Yeah, I mean, I guess that's we should look at some of the older theories first that have sort of been debunked. We already talked about the um the Giants dance and Merlin the Wizard, which we don't believe anymore because we're modern

thinking guys. Uh. King James the First in the seventeenth century did an uh excavation of the site and they found a bunch of animal bones and burnt coals, um, which I was just learning about him. He was a scholar king. Yeah, he was pretty interesting. Well, he had like the King James Bible, sure he had that translated, um. But he also was like an early essayist, which is a new thing at the time. He was just a

smart dude as far as kings went. He wasn't just like the fat, drunk, turkey leg eating kind, you know what I'm saying, Like he actually was. Well, if he commissioned an excavation, that means he probably had a little bit of interest in things like this. And this is before archaeology even. Yeah, he could have just said people beheaded and you know it is turkey. It's good for him. We're done with King James. Is that what you're saying?

All right? Um? So I don't think we mentioned either yet that there have been a lot of um, body well not body parts, but bones found. Yeah, human cremines, cremated remains. I think why was that defensive? Yeah? I remember funeral directors don't like to call him cremaines. They they said that that's just too shorthand r. It sounds like a McDonald's I got in my burger. Um, But there have been a lot of they think it. One possibility was that it was a burial ground um for

maybe royalty. They've mostly been men, so maybe important people. Yeah, which is another reason why what was it called Mortis and tennin um? That woodworking, and we didn't mention that with the outer circle where everything fits together. Um. They used a woodworking technique called dovetailing, so that the lentils fit together to form like a well tongue in group. Yes, um, exactly. So there's all this kind of woodworking simulation that's totally unnecessary.

So they're thinking maybe that they were replicating a monument to a human dwelling, which could suggest that basically a mausoleum of sorts. Yeah, and that that ties in with the theory that Durrington Walls was, um a place of the living. Stonehenge was a place of the dead, and that's how they are connected. Yeah, and Durrington Walls they call it a place of living because there's evidence of settlement, like human habitation, lots of um animal bones like from food,

food waste. Um. So yeah, it's clear that people lived in in during exactly. Um. There's another theory that, uh, it's possible Stonehenge was a place of healing. There's something called the Amesbury Archer who was discovered and he was contemporaneous to Stonehenge. He had a knee injury and they thought, well, maybe he was on his way to Stonehenge or something. Uh. They did a survey of the injuries and illness. Evidence of illness of the remains at Stonehengen found that it

was about the same as other contemporary sites. UM, so they don't think that it was a place of healing, not like a spa. Well, it's probably a place of the dead probably, So in a lot of this new way of thinking has come about since the two thousand's started with UM. A guy named Mike Parker Pearson UM lead the Stonehenge river Side Project, and they've kind of brought like debunked a lot of these older theories that it was maybe a a monument for astronomy or you know,

some of the other things we talked about. Yeah, apparently, like if you're a Stonehenge expert, you say, yes, stoneheng was clearly constructed and in some way related to the summer solstice and the winter solstice the sun. Yeah, but they kind of draw the line at they used it to predict solar eclipses and stuff like that. They're saying there's no evidence of that, although it could be true, but they just don't know. I just haven't figured it

out yet. Another theory that I like, UM, that's one of the more modern theories is that it was a monument to unification just kind of neat which makes sense, Um that the Britons at the time, we're from all sorts of tribes and that they blended together there and they that's why they might have brought stones from all over the place as a symbol of our unification, like here's some stones from whales, here, some from here, here's some from there, and here's a big monument to us

all coming together to one day rule the world. And well, significantly, the Stonehenge site is at the area where three different chiefdoms territories came together. Um, so it is possible that is a if not a monument to a monument from cooperation from these groups. Remember we talked about the Upper Paleolithic warlessness. Um, it's supposedly these these chiefdoms were they peacefully coexisted, which also could explain, um, that why Stonehenge

came about. You know, one of the things you do to keep your populations occupied and busy is creating massive public um structures projects or like pyramids or something like that. You know, and uh, Stonehenge could have been the result of that of clever chiefs saying I need to do something to keep everybody busy. Let's make Stonehenge my money. I mean, there's there's so many people buried there in

and around Stonehenge. They say like maybe thousands of people have been buried there, so I think it was probably just some sort of final resting place that looked nice and uh they dressed it up. Yeah, and it's probable that the people there were part of the elite ruling class. There's like they found incense burner, polished mace head, some other evidence that the people there had some sort of

political religious power that kind of stuff. And like we said, they're mostly men, which at the time, of course that that would have been the people in power. Yeah, you know yeah at the time, that's right, not like these days when women could do anything they want. We need to do an episode on the Equal Rights Amendment. Man, is just mind blowing to me. Yeah, let's do it, Okay. I would inspire that Petri Shark at the facetiousness about um men being in power, yeah or not being in power. Yeah,

let's do that one. Okay. Patricia are cat inspired me. I'm like Meryl Streep here, Yeah, she was digging it. Um, you got anything else? I'm sure we could go on about this for a while, but why you know? Um? Oh, there was one theory that they erected Stonehenge to create this piper's illusion. Did you hear about that? Oh yeah, like two pipers in a field or playing in certain places that they will cancel each other out. Yeah, which is weird. It's a weird acoustic phenomenon, and apparently in

Stonehenge the phenomenon is replicated. And there is also an old legend that Stonehenge was the result of pipers leading maidens into a field and then turning them to stone. Well there's this um acoustic archaeologist who believes that like a lot more archaeological sites than we realized were dedicated to sound um and he has this theory about Stonehenge may or may not be right. I get the imperson. And it was also postulating it to get attention to theories. Yeah,

well there's definitely some weird acoustic features at Stonehenge. Um, so you can't discount that. Yeah. Was it a byproduct or was it international? Yeah? Who knows. We don't even know why they built it in the first place. Well, we're gonna have to visit it if we ever go to England for a live show for sure. Maybe we'll do a live show at Stonehenge. Pink Floyd they did something at them, yeah, which I've been there and it's amazing,

not just because Pompei, because Pink Floyd played there. You know, we'll do our live thing at Stonehenge. I think, if I'm not mistaken, Pink Floyd Live at POMPEII was a concert in front of nobody. Yeah, well on the on the Echoes video, they're not playing in front of anybody else. The deal so cool. I've got one more thing. There

was a horrible police brutality incident at Stonehenge. Yeah. There was this hippie movement called the New Age Travelers from the sixties, seventies into the eighties and then they were gonna have they were going to celebrate the summer Solstice at Stonehenge and they had the year before, but a hundred thousand people showed up and like just trashed the place, like dug into the ground to build bread ovens and like toilets and like just just totally laid waste to

the place. Um, And so the the locals were like, you can't go to Stonehenge again. So the cops tried to barricade it. The hippies tried to break through. The cops club the hippies including pregnant women and women holding children. There were eyewitnesses. It was a horrible scene. Um. And

it was later called the Battle of the bean Field. Uh. And after that, for like the next fifteen years, there was no You weren't allowed to go celebrate the Summer Solstice, which is a big thing for neo druids and stuff at Stonehenge. And then finally in two thousand, the English Heritage Group I can't remember what the full name is, English Heritage, Um, they're in charge of Stonehenge. They opened

it back up. So now I think the most recent summer Solstice solstice had like thirty thousand or so people peacefully celebrating it. I think if you dig there, though you're in big trouble, still appropriate. Imagine it's pretty Uh that's a secure location. You can't just back into it like Clark Roswald. Okay, now I really don't have anything else. Okay, Okay, if you want to learn more about Stonehenge, you can type that word into the search bar at house to

works dot com. And since I said search bar, its time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this ice cream email. And speaking of ice cream, we should thank uh a local ice creamery here, High Road Creamery. Yeah, high Road here in UH in Atlanta, well just outside of Atlanta. They got in touch with us. Two people did and one person said, hey, I don't know if you've heard of us, but you should um try your ice cream. And another person emailed from high Road. It was like, yeah,

you should. I said, we'll send you ice cream. I was like, I like you better. Yeah. So they sent us some ice cream and it's delicious, and we just want to say things and nutritious. I don't know about that because rhymes and rhymes, but this is about ice cream from Nathan. Hey, guys and Jerry, just listen to your How ice Cream Works episode and thought your tuna gelato story reminded me of my own terrible gelato story.

I want to refresh people about tuna gelato. Yeah, if you go to Plaza Fiesta, the Latin American mall in Atlanta on Buford Highway, there's a gelato place there that, at least a year or two ago sold raw tuna flavored gelato. Is dead on the taste. Uh. So we lived in Naples, Italy for two years, guys, and fell in love with real Italian gelato. Uh and it's safe to say my wife and daughter would get it at

least three times a week all year round. We took our summer holiday one year to a city called Tropea in the Calabria region. The city is famous for red onions, so much so that red onions in Italy are all called h chipola. As we were walking through the city, we saw a place that had onion gelato. Though decided to try it. I don't know, I know. Luckily, my wife is smart and suggested I try it before I ordered a whole cone of the stuff. Let me tell you,

it was awful. It tasted like a spoonful of onion powder and had the consistency of snot oh gone and was cold. Uh if. It was all I could do to choke it down without throwing up. Even after eating tasty strawberry and lemon gelato, the taste still lingered to make it worse. Every time I burnt. The rest of the night, I got to relive the taste. Man. So that's my story, guys, will still I will steer clear of the tuna gelato if you stay away from the

onion gelato. I will stay away from the onion gelato, but I think you should try the tuna gelato. That's the deal. Nathan Chow, he says, Chow Bella and all that. I would taste any of those, the small spoonful. Yeah, like he's the very tip of my tongue. You're like the onion on the tuna was I mean, it was weird. It wasn't bad, it was just it was really surprising that like you could get that taste. Yeah, it's probably

just ground up, tuned yogurt, Like it's not hard, dummy. Uh. If you want to get in touch with us for any reason whatsoever, you can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and as always, you can hang out with us that are luxurious, nutritious, delicious home on the web.

Stuff you Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com