Did megaliths first arise in northwestern France?

Angela

Angela

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See:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/201...-structures-may-trace-their-origins-monuments

"A new study suggests these megaliths weren’t created independently but instead can be traced back to a single hunter-gatherer culture that started nearly 7000 years ago in what is today the Brittany region of northwestern France. The findings also indicate societies at the time were better boaters than typically believed, spreading their culture by sea."

"What she did was sift through radiocarbon dating data from 2410 ancient sites across Europe to reconstruct a prehistoric archaeological timeline. The radiocarbon dates came mostly from human remains buried within the sites. The study looked not just at megaliths, but also at so-called premegalithic graves that featured elaborate, earthen tombs but no huge stones. Schulz Paulsson also factored in information on the sites’ architecture, tool use, and burial customs to further narrow the dates.The very earliest megaliths, she found, come from northwestern France, including the famous Carnac stones, a dense collection of rows of standing stones, mounds, and covered stone tombs called dolmens. These date to about 4700 B.C.E., when the region was inhabited by hunter-gatherers. Engravings on standing stones from the region depict sperm whales and other sea life, which suggests the precocious masons may also have been mariners, Schulz Paulsson says.
Northwestern France is also the only megalithic region that also features gravesites with complex earthen tombs that date to about 5000 B.C.E., which she says is evidence of an “evolution of megaliths” in the region. That means megalith building likely originated there and spread outward, she reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."
 
I think there may be a link with the Evora stones, Algarve, Portugal, which are older, starting from 6000 BC.
Along the coast, their subsistence was more or less the same, living on seafood, but they combined it with hunting seasons inland.
 
interesting idea but extremely flawed with the human remains data.
If they used charcoal, like for instance the grains found at the wandering nomads totem pole at stonehenge dates 10000 years.
Or maybe the 3 firepits at the the welsh quarry site that date from 8500bc - 7000bc. that would shunt the whole thing back, if there all ready
in wales by 8500bc in there boats. lifting blue stones onto cargo ships.
i would hazard a guess and say they was at brittany allready by 8500bc.
 
Brittany had been colonized by farmers in 5000 bc so how could they have been hunter gatherers?
 
I wonder how far this group had port/settlements ?
Now this silly idea of wandering nomads is being replaced quite rightfully with an advanced maritime civilization.
if you add the pieces together like bouldnor cliff on the isle of wight, an 8000 year old boat building site under 12 meters of sea water.
complete with einkorn wheat from turkey. That for some strange reason is 2000 years more advanced than the rest of the world.

Then we find that dating evidence at the oldest monument in britain points to an 8500bc origin as does the quarry site for said monument,
all being backed up by by the fact that ancient rivers used to run alongside them at that exact same time in history.
Coincidence i think not.

Another suggestion i once made on here was that it was this very same boat people that were sending cornish tin all the way to the near east.
whats more they navigated rivers just like the vikings and had a route from the bay of biscay, With a part of the route being overland by joining 2 rivers, That brought you out in the Med. Cutting out the much longer and more dangerous route around spain and along the coast of North Africa.

All coming together nicely.
If i am right stonehenge must be the first.
 
Sorry before i get banned or whatever, I just want to add one more strange coincidence and that is the route of this journey.
basically its the Irish legend journey in reverse Britain Spain Sardinia Lebanon. Britain France Sardinia turkey close enough for my liking.

If you consider they were in Britain 10k years ago they perhaps left the area of around turkey in boats sometime before this time.
Then consider that there was virtually no competition what so ever for the next 6k years.

Thats quite impressive if you ask me. That i find much more amazing then R1b story in all its glory.
If i could be a fly on the wall when those 2 met :)
 
Where did I2a2 arrive in Iberia from? And why isn't it blonde like GAC - what ancestry separates the two? It looks like I2a1 wasn't very much present in Megalithic Spain and that I2a2 was the predominant Megalithic lineage; so where did I2a1 in Sardinia come from?
 
New radiocarbon dating suggests that megaliths spread from Brittany from 4500 BCE

New York Times: Ancient European Stone Monuments Said to Originate in Northwest France

"Thousands of years ago, megaliths began to appear in Europe — standing stones, dolmens, stone circles. They vary from single stones to complexes like Stonehenge.

There are about 35,000 such monuments in Europe, many along the Atlantic coast of France and Spain, in England, Ireland, Scandinavia and throughout the Mediterranean. They attract both tourists and archaeologists, who have spent a century debating how the knowledge to build such monuments spread.

One idea suggested that this cultural change came from the Near East, and spread west along coastal routes, perhaps by a priestly caste. Later theories suggested techniques may have developed independently in different locales.

But a scientist who analyzed 2,410 radiocarbon dates of megaliths and their surroundings reported on Monday that the first such tombs appeared in France, about 6,500 years ago, and then spread along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, as well as to England, Ireland and Scandinavia.

“It took me 10 years of my life for this research,” said the scientist, Bettina Schulz Paulsson, a prehistoric archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. She combed the literature in 11 languages, assessed the validity of the dating tests, and used a statistical method called Bayesian analysis to narrow the dates further.

She reported her findings in the journal PNAS, concluding that the building of megalithic graves appeared and spread along the coast of France, Spain and Portugal and the Mediterranean within a period of 200 to 300 years. [...]"


Here is the paper: Radiocarbon dates and Bayesian modeling support maritime diffusion model for megaliths in Europe, by
B. Schulz Paulsson

F3.large.jpg


F5.large.jpg
 
O Neill said:
I wonder how far this group had port/settlements ?
Now this silly idea of wandering nomads is being replaced quite rightfully with an advanced maritime civilization.
if you add the pieces together like bouldnor cliff on the isle of wight, an 8000 year old boat building site under 12 meters of sea water.
complete with einkorn wheat from turkey. That for some strange reason is 2000 years more advanced than the rest of the world.

Then we find that dating evidence at the oldest monument in britain points to an 8500bc origin as does the quarry site for said monument,
all being backed up by by the fact that ancient rivers used to run alongside them at that exact same time in history.
Coincidence i think not.

Another suggestion i once made on here was that it was this very same boat people that were sending cornish tin all the way to the near east.
whats more they navigated rivers just like the vikings and had a route from the bay of biscay, With a part of the route being overland by joining 2 rivers, That brought you out in the Med. Cutting out the much longer and more dangerous route around spain and along the coast of North Africa.

All coming together nicely.
If i am right stonehenge must be the first.
Click to expand...

Just curious: what about their material culture was 2000 years more advanced than the rest of the world?
 
La Península Ibérica es, junto con las Islas Británicas y Francia, uno de los lugares de Europa donde más abundan los megalitos. Toda la fachada atlántica, Andalucía y una buena parte del interior, son territorios con dólmenes variados, tanto por su tipología como por su cronología, así como por la ocupación de espacios muy diferentes, desde las verdes montañas del Golfo de Vizcaya hasta el Tierras secas de Almería, pasando por las llanuras de Salamanca, los Pirineos o las mesetas y mesetas castellanas. Para realizar un recorrido virtual por el megalítico español, simplemente elija la provincia deseada, que dará paso a un mapa más detallado y, donde sea posible, a algunos ejemplos, con fotografía, breve descripción y coordenadas (siempre que la integridad del monumento) .

http://www.megalitos.es/espana.htm
 
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This was said because of the design and cut marks on pieces of timber that was preserved in clay, A 8000 year old boat design 2000 years ahead of its time.
Shame theres been no update in 2 years but if this is confirmed somehow, its 1000 years older then this study's result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouldnor_Cliff
https://digventures.com/2016/06/has...-site-been-discovered-near-the-isle-of-wight/

7000 year old old sperm whales ? Maybe they spotted them while climbing to the top of there totem poles lol.
 
hahahaha is that some kind of joke /insult because i dont get it, but you show up to attack me every post.
keyboard warrior muppit
 
O Neil,
My apologies! Now I understand your post. I do not master English well and misinterpreted your words just like a funny joke.
Excuse me!
 
Ok fine gidai
I was a little quick of the mark aswell all good.

All im claiming is 1 very simple thing, and that is dismissing the early dates for 2 sites is a mistake. That is all.
Theres 4 pieces of evidence they ignore but i believe they are the most important pieces of datable evidence.
 
In Southern Corsica megaliths are older than bronze age if i'm not wrong...circular tombs

Utilizzando Tapatalk
 
ToBeOrNotToBe said:
Where did I2a2 arrive in Iberia from? And why isn't it blonde like GAC - what ancestry separates the two? It looks like I2a1 wasn't very much present in Megalithic Spain and that I2a2 was the predominant Megalithic lineage; so where did I2a1 in Sardinia come from?
Click to expand...
maybe I2a2 megalith builders from the West replaced in part G2a farmers and brought WHG

Utilizzando Tapatalk
 
This awesome blogpost provides a nice DNA supplement to the hypothesis.

With the results from the graphs, D-stats, and also parental markers, it seems that it is quite probably that farmers from France are responsible for the spread of Megalithism. Not only do graphs prefer a closeness of farmers from France, England, and Germany, but there are new markers of “Western” origin in Germany Middle Neolithic farmers. This includes many shared Y-DNA markers, including I2a1b, and shared mtDNA that are not in Danubian farmers, such as U3, H3, H4, and others. Also notable, is the f3(England_N LBK_Austria Germany_MN -0.000433 -0.382 353272), suggesting gene-flow from France to Germany does work. While more sampling across France will help, it does seem that there is a shared ancestry between England, France, and Germany that has more to it than shared Danubian ancestry.
Click to expand...

https://populationgenomics.blog/201...f-the-megalithic-expansions-work-in-progress/
 
The paper is talking about the beginning of the megalithic tradition of Neolithic western Europe, with passage graves and dolmens and such, not trying to find out what was the very first place in the world where some people decided to make a cool monument out of huge rocks.
 
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