Prehistoric balls may have built Stonehenge

by Sean McLachlan on


There have been a lot of theories over the years about how Stonehenge was built. Moving massive stones ranging from 4 to 45 tons over hundreds of miles isn’t easy in modern times, and certainly was a challenge 4,500 years ago. The two leading theories–log rollers and wooden sledges greased with animal fat–both have detractors. Many archaeologists believe rollers would have left deep scars in the landscape and one can be found, while reenactments with sledges have shown it would take hundreds of people to move the largest stones.

Now National Geographic reports a new theory. British graduate student Andrew Young thinks grooved wooden rails fitted with stone balls would have made an easy surface on which to move the stones. The balls acted like ball bearings and giant stones could have been pulled along on top. He tried it out with a team of seven people and found they could easily move a load of four tons. Only a relatively short length of track would be needed because the rails and balls could be pulled up once the stone passed and placed at the front.

He got the idea by studying mysterious stone balls found near stone circles in Scotland. They didn’t appear to have any purpose until he noticed they’re all exactly 70mm (3 inches) in diameter, suggesting they were part of some greater mechanism.

It’s an interesting idea, but this former archaeologist isn’t convinced yet. No stone balls have been found in England. Young says old-growth wood could have worked just as well and wouldn’t have survived, and that’s possible, but civil engineer Mark Whitby told National Geographic that the biggest stones in Stonehenge would have crushed the balls into the tracks. A larger-scale demonstration is being planned to study this issue.

Generally the KISS method (Keep It Simple, Stupid) points to the most probable solution. Wood was plentiful and making smooth rollers out of tree trunks would have been the easiest solution. Rollers and a bunch of strong prehistoric Britons, helped by teams of oxen, would have been the cheapest and least technologically demanding way to move the stones. While this would have left marks on the land, it’s an open question whether they’d still be visible after 4,500 years of weathering.

The KISS method also explains why aliens didn’t build Stonehenge.

The balls idea is still worth investigating, and considering that Young has come up with such an innovative and perhaps correct answer to a major archaeological mystery while still a PhD student in biosciences hints that I’ll be writing more about him in the future.

[Photo courtesy Mister Rad via Gadling’s flickr pool]

“The Tourist”: Is it worth the trip?

by Don George on

At the beginning of the new movie “The Tourist,” a mild-mannered American schoolteacher is sitting alone on a train from Paris to Venice. A mysterious and beautiful English woman approaches him, sits in the open seat across from him, and engages him in conversation. Soon they’re drinking wine and flirting over an elegant dinner on the train.

When they arrive in Venice, they are briefly separated, but when the teacher is poring over a map near St Mark’s Square, the beauty pulls up in a sleek motorboat and whisks him off to the Doge’s Suite at the five-star Hotel Danieli, where they end up in a long kiss.

This so closely resembled my own first experience as a tourist in Europe that I thought the movie was a documentary. But then I realized that in this version there were no pigeons in St. Mark’s Square. Now that’s bending the truth a bit too far.

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I had been excited to see this movie. I’m a big fan of Johnny Depp, and Angelina Jolie is, well, Lara Croft incarnate, and the movie was shot on location in Paris and Venice – the geographical equivalents of Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. So how could this movie not be smoking hot?

I also thought that a movie with the title “The Tourist” might provide some interesting perspective on that old-as-Venice debate about the difference between a traveler and a tourist.

Well, movie-viewing is like traveling. Sometimes you look at the brochures and the postcards and you arrive thinking, “This place is going to be unbelievable.” And it turns out to be unbelievable – but in the wrong way. That’s how it was with me and this movie: I felt like a duped tourist at “The Tourist.”

The plot was contrived and implausible, and the actors just seemed to be going through the motions – there was none of the passion-spark that ignites a new infatuation, whether with a person or with a place.

But let me tell you what I did like about the film: Venice. (Paris, I should note, played just a cameo role in the first 15 minutes of the film.) Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmark presented Venice in the same way that he presented Angelina Jolie: with long, lingering, loving shots. After a while, this didn’t work so well for Ms. Jolie, but Venice handled this treatment superbly, the old pastel buildings reflected in lapping canals, the ceaseless water traffic of gondolas, taxi-boats and barges passing elegantly sculpted facades, the terra-cotta roof-tiles, shadowy side-streets, voluptuous bridges and romantic terraces. Venice at dawn and at dusk, at noon and midnight – we got to revel in a variety of Venetian moods, all of them glorious.

Of course, one could quibble. Like it or not, Venice smells, and the Venice in “The Tourist” looked antiseptic, deodorized. Similarly, the city was less littered and crumbling than the Venice I love, and certainly less pigeoned, and while there were a couple of promising chase scenes, the plot didn’t allow the film-makers to get lost in the intricate and beguiling back-alleys of the city, where its real magic blooms. (Come to think of it, the plot didn’t allow us to get lost in the characters’ back-alleys, either – a real shame.)

But still, in addition to the majestic Danieli and elegant St. Mark’s, the film offered a sumptuous selection of Venetian sights, including the incomparable Grand Canal itself, the Peggy Guggenheim Museum and its alluring canal-level terrace in the Dorsoduro district, the workaday Rialto Fish Market near the Campo de la Becarie, and the peaceful, mostly residential island of Giudecca – a particularly rewarding off-the-beaten-path stop for real tourists.

Which reminds me of one new ripple in that old tourist vs. traveler tempest: I was delighted to discover that STA Travel has a prominent advertisement on the movie’s official home page proclaiming, “Visit STA Travel to find trips to experience Italy like a true tourist!” I can’t recall any other time when experiencing somewhere “like a true tourist” has been touted as so exciting!

Is “The Tourist” worth the ticket? Well, as a cinematic traveler, I didn’t get to see the Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie I had been hoping to see, but I did get to savor La Serenissima in wide-screen splendor for an hour and a half, and that was a real trip.

Stasi Museum in Leipzig: 40 Years of Spying and Terror

by Lillian Africano on

The Berlin wall came down in 1989, reuniting East and West Germany. But though the German Democratic Republic is no more, there is still, in the city of Leipzig, one chilling reminder of the dreaded Stasi (SSD), the secret police of the GDR. It is the Stasi Museum and it encompasses the original rooms of a Stasi headquarters.

Located in the stately 19th century building known as “Runde Ecke” — the Round Building — the museum features a powerful permanent exhibit called “Stasi – Power and Banality.” Walk through the rooms where the secret police operated a sinister network of spying and terror and it becomes clear how the Stasi infiltrated every aspect of the everyday life in the GDR.

The Stasi had agents in the post office, opening and reading mail; they routinely broke into homes and planted bugs; they had a network of “safe houses” from which they monitored what went on in people’s homes. They photographed citizens going about their business and punished expressions of discontent with the GDR regime.

Though living standards were much lower in East Germany than in the West, and though there were chronic shortages of basic consumer goods, the discontent was more about the loss of personal freedom than the lack of personal comforts.

Some of the tools used to keep track of citizens were very James Bond: tiny cameras, sophisticated bugging equipment, devices for opening letters, forged rubber stamps, number plates and passports. Some look almost comical: disguises, including false noses, wigs, glasses — the false stomach made of padded fabric with a hole in the middle for a hidden camera. Or the jars containing the preserved body scents of potential suspects, gathered by summoning them to Stasi headquarters, having them sit on a cloth for 10 or 15 minutes, then storing the cloth in sealed jars-so if the suspects dropped out of sight, they could later be tracked by dogs.

There is an eeriness to the ordinary-looking office of a Stasi official, the interrogation room, the cells where prisoners awaited trial. The outcome of the trials generally turned out as the Stasi wished; the death penalty was carried out in Leipzig for the entire 40 years.

After East Germany’s Erich Honecker signed the Helsinki Agreement on Human Rights in 1975, the Stasi often became more subtle in the persecution of its enemies, spreading lies and rumors and using tactics like anonymous letters and anonymous phone calls.

Suddenly people found their careers stalled, their jobs terminated; divorces occurred after wives received letters purporting to be from mistresses. Opportunities for education disappeared. In short, anyone who was not a “good” citizen of the GDR found his life under siege in a dozen different ways.

The Stasi boasted that it had “helpers” everywhere, and that included children as young as 13. But to achieve this “honor,” the children had to have been brought up in a home with solid GDR values; they could not have any close relatives living in the West. Once accepted as part of the SSD family, they were put to work-spying on family and friends. Those who performed well eventually became part of the Stasi hierarchy.

While the use of children recalled the Nazi era’s “Hitler Youth,” the Stasi operation took much of its inspiration from the Russian secret police of the post-Stalin years, and there is a room devoted to the icons of communist Russia, including Stalin and Lenin.

Yet in spite of the risks, grassroots opposition to the GDR regime grew and intensified. In Leipzig, people gathered on Mondays to pray in St. Nicholas Church. By 1989, the prayer services had become political protests in the square, growing in number-and spreading to other cities. The number of protestors peaked to 300,000 on October 30.

In a last-ditch attempt to maintain power, the entire government resigned. The tactic failed-and the so called “Peaceful Revolution” brought an end to the GDR.

Tens of thousands of people stormed the Stasi headquarters. Many records had been destroyed; when SSD officials saw the end coming, they shredded and pulped as much as they could. But there remains some 30,000 items documenting the “work” of the Stasi.

Many citizens found their own dossiers-and when they saw how their lives had been crippled, not by bad luck but by deliberate design, they broke down and wept.

Today both tourists and locals visit the exhibit; on any given day, you’ll see clusters of students, taking in the lessons of the past. Some longtime residents say that the smell associated with GDR offices still lingers in the place where they were robbed of their basic freedoms.

Admission to the museum is free, but as all the placards explaining the exhibits are in German, visitors might wish to use the excellent audio guide, which costs 3 Euro.

Check out photos from the museum:
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A new nativity scene: Jesus, Mary, and a Pile of Poo

by Gadling Staff on

When I was little, it was my Christmastime job to arrange my family’s nativity scene on a shelf for all to see. I would ponder how the birth of Christ must have gone down, where the wise men had stood to get the best view, and whether camels and sheep got along. The one thing I didn’t think about was someone needing to take a dump. That was mistake number-one.

It was my first holiday season living in Seville, Spain. And there, the nativity, called the Belén (or Bethlehem), is the cornerstone of the holiday decorations, depicting the entire city of Jesus’ birth. So while I missed the snowmen, Christmas trees, and Macy’s storefronts of my Chicago home, I was glad that I would still be able to set up a nativity scene in my temporary one.

In the Plaza de San Francisco, a huge square in the city’s cobblestone center, was the annual nativity festival. I had never seen the plaza so full-full of white tents, of artisans, of families.

There, it’s also the kids’ jobs to assemble the nativity. Each winter the kids pick out new figurines to add to their scenes. On tiptoe, they peer over the edges of the makeshift booths, thrusting their little fingers at the characters and set-dressings they want in their Belén that year. Some buy miniature pig legs, rabbits, and morcilla (blood sausage). Others buy miniature gardens, loaves of bread, and tables. Observing the tradition amid the throngs of shoppers, it looked to me as if the children were preparing tiny, ceramic feasts for their tiny, ceramic Jesuses.Finally, I reached the edge of the plywood booth and surveyed the miniature rivers, mountains, stables, and farmers that stretched for at least 15 feet on either side of me. And that’s when I saw him: a boy, bent over, pooping. He was holding the sides of his jeans around his knees.

I furrowed my brow, blinked a few times, and moved on from the rogue pooper. But soon I realized he was not alone. He and his minions were everywhere. They came in all shapes, sizes, and styles. Some were small, simple cartoonish; others were large, ornate, and lifelike. But all assumed the ill-famed position-a Hershey’s Kiss-shaped plop of poo under their exposed hind ends. Some were exhibitionists, and others bashful, hiding their deed behind a haystack.

I decided to purchase my Belén from an artisan with a collection of fun, juvenile-looking figurines. They were small enough to fit into my suitcase without worsening my already abysmal luggage fees (I don’t travel light).

After dwelling on the mischievous pooper for several days, I finally summoned the courage to ask my brash host mother why the little guy was defecating in front of the Christian savior.

“So, I went to the nativity fair the other day and saw figurines of boys and men pooping…” I hesitated. “Well, we have nativity scenes in the United States, but I have never seen that figurine before,” attempting to ease into the inquisition. “Who is he?”

“Just a guy,” she responded, not getting my point. “He could have been a shepherd, a stable boy, or anyone else.”

“Well, what is he doing pooping?”

Cocking her head to the side, she let out a little chuckle, reminding me that I, the stupid American, had emerged once more. “Well lots of things happened at the birth of Jesus,” she began. “The three wise men came with gifts, the shepherd tended his flock, and probably someone had to poop. We call him the caganer.”

I stared at her, waiting for further explanation. There wasn’t any. So I turned to my pocket Oxford University Press dictionary. Shitter. Caganer means shitter.

The following winter, in my family’s Indiana home, the Plaza de San Francisco and my host mother’s frankness were distant memories. It was a week before Christmas, and Frosty, the Douglas-Firs, and Silent Night felt like the holidays. And as always, I assembled the nativity scene. My family’s reaction was a mixture of shock, disgust, and crude delight.

But now, to my family, the caganer is a staple of the Christmas season. He’s a reminder that Christ was-and is-here with the angels, with the wise men, and with all of us, even in the biggest of dumps.

K. Aleisha Fetters is a Seed.com contributor.

Lady Gaga now a waxwork model at eight Madame Tussauds museums

by Sean McLachlan on

Ah, Lady Gaga, what would we do without your telephone hats and nude suits?

Now the famous wax museum Madame Tussauds has unveiled Lady Gaga models at eight of their branches: London, New York, Las Vegas, Hollywood, Amsterdam, Berlin, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.

The figure at the London branch has the crazy suit shown here: a telephone hat designed by Philip Treacy and a midnight-blue Armani suit. Keeping up with Amsterdam’s debauched reputation, the museum there has a Lady gaga in a nude body suit, white jacket, and a rather phallic-looking purple hairdo. The other outfits are equally outrageous.

Hopefully her penchant for crazy clothes will continue, but not so much that she’ll have to be stripped by flight attendants like she was in March.

[Photo courtesy Madame Tussauds]