STONEHENGE WAS BUILT BY IDIOTS

After centuries of everyone wondering what the heck it was for, from the Romans assuming it was a temple to one of their own goddesses, modern Englishmen figuring it was built as an altar by the Druids, and Star Trek nerds figuring it to be everything from a giant calendar predicting the movements of the stars to a UFO landing site, some guy has now figured out what Stonehenge really was, that mysterious circle of giant stone slabs in the middle of a field in the England's Salisbury Plain. An archaeologist with the very British name of Doctor Michael Parker-Pearson has dug up the surrounding area and found out the place was just one part of a huge complex serving as a cemetery for the royalty of the day, sort of like the Egyptian pyramids minus the beauty, the intricate engineering and the staying power.

Stonehenge predates the pyramids, being around 4,500 years old, even before the wheel was invented. There was no written language back then so there's no record of these people other than what Professor Parker-Pearson and his people dig out of the ground. So far they think Stonehenge was a burial place for royalty built by the back-breaking labor of many thousands of people over a period of several generations. They had to drag forty-ton stone slabs thirty miles with ropes and logs, set them upright in the ground and then hoist some more slabs to lay on top of them without the benefit of any sophisticated building tools. Archaeological evidence also suggests that in order to get people to do these things, just like the Egyptians, a religious reason was given, the site doubling as a temple of sorts.

So maybe the conversation with the laborers went something like this:

"You will erect a great and majestic tomb in which to bury your king with a lot of gold and valuables and a bunch of slaves who will be slain to serve me in the afterlife. God wants this."

"So, let me get this straight, Rex; you want me and thousands of others to spend our life's labor and that of our children and grandchildren building a giant building that will not be public or of any use whatsoever to anybody else but you and your immediate family and then only when you're dead?"

"Precisely! I command you to do so."

"Okay, sure, why not? We were all getting a little tired of living in this lightly populated paradise with plenty of game to eat and lots of fertile farmland. We were actually hoping for some sort of prolonged agony with no reward for our efforts."

And so these people, both in Egypt and in England, set forth to build the biggest mausoleums ever. It took humanity the better part of 4,000 years to figure out that kings and pharaohs don't really have their best interests at heart. Heck, England still keeps a royal family around as a sort of reminder of how stupid we all used to be. Following kings and queens and elevating them to the status of gods has to have been one of humanity's more idiotic ideas. When the biggest and fanciest buildings around are the homes and tombs of one person while everyone else lives in crowded mud huts you'd think the people would rise as one and beat the royal family with blunt objects.

But, no, that's not how the story unfolded. It would be centuries before any large buildings were erected that were open to the public, and then most of them were temples and churches of some kind, the public only welcomed in during services or to sweep the place up, those magnificent premises being erected for the benefit of another set of quasi-royalty, the priests and shamans and various muckety-mucks of our many religions, that breed of human whose job it is is to carefully regulate and supervise the daily lives of the many people who live in the kingdom since the king was far too busy enjoying a life of decadent leisure to do it himself.

So it seems our distant ancestors, even with their great engineering prowess and artistic skills, were pretty much idiots for spending their entire careers in the service of somebody called "Your Majesty." Not that we're exactly geniuses the way we still follow some leader or another into ruinous wars that benefit exactly none of us common people, and then thanking our intrepid leaders for "protecting" us with their large armies, never stopping to think that such protection would be unnecessary without their territorial aggression, but at least we're starting to open our eyes. A little bit, anyway.