How? Why? Stone Spheres from 400AD
These stone spheres are not a new discovery. I can clearly recall reading about them in a National Geographic when I was a teenager—many years ago. But I had pretty well totally forgotten about them until I saw the link on Goodshit today.
These almost perfectly honed stone spheres are found buried in the ground. So far 300 have been dug up. They vary in size from just under 1 tonne up to 16 tonnes in weight. They have been dated to have been created around 1,400 to 1,600 years ago.
Apparently George Lucas got the idea of using a large round granite sphere in the opening scenes of the first Indiana Jones movie after seeing and article about the Costa Rica spheres.
Almost all of the stone spheres that have been found have been honed from basalt granite with a small number having been cut out of softer limestone or sandstone.
The questions are:
- What technology did a civilisation that lived about 1,600 years ago have that allowed them to hone massive stone spheres out of solid rock?
- What was the purpose of these spheres?
Also the nearest basalt quarries to where the stones are found is over 100 miles away. So the other mystery is how the stone was moved, and again, why.
For anyone interested here are some links relating to these stones:
- Wikipedia (here)
- Page at the WorldMysteries site (here)
- Page at Science Daily (here)
- Mystery Spheres site (here)
- Stone Balls of Costa Rica (here)
Interestingly a quick search of the National Geographic site did not find anything. Admittedly I only went down the first three pages of search results, but I would have expected to find it by then. This possibly means that stuff published in the magazine before the National Geographic web site was started is not available from the site. If this is the case it is a bit sad. You would expect that they would have gone back through all the pre-Web magazines and got that stuff into an electronic form on their site.
Sadly many of the stones have been destroyed by treasure seekers due to an ancient myth that at the very centre of each stone there were diamonds or other jewels. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, of all the stone that have been smash or blasted open, no diamonds or jewels were to be found—just solid stone all the way.
