
British geologist Herbert Henry Thomas’ seminal study on Stonehenge was wrong - mpweiher
https://www.livescience.com/63003-sloppy-stonehenge-study.html
======
mjw1007
"Spectacularly wrong" here appears to mean that he correctly identified that
the bluestones came from the Preseli hills almost 200 miles from Stonehenge
(and was the first to do so), but didn't get quite the right outcrop.

He thought they came from Carn Meini; the article says we now think they came
from Craig Rhos-y-felin and Carn Goedog.

[https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/nov/20/archaeologis...](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/nov/20/archaeologists-
stonehenge-origins-wrong-place) says that Carn Goedog is less than a mile from
Carn Meini.

~~~
zorkw4rg
The article even makes mentioned potential fraud: "[Thomas] was forgetful and
sloppy, but at worst he was being deceptive" Without any further explanation.

Science "journalism" certainly has the reputation it deserves.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
To be fair, that’s a quote from the co-author of the study not the author of
this article. And it does elaborate further later in the article on the
context of where he was either forgetful or deceptive.

~~~
lobotryas
True, but the article author decided to include it. A less charitable
interpretation might say it was included strictly as click bait.

------
dalbasal
A question that really interests me about Stonehenge, Gobleki Teppeh and other
such mysterious monumental sites is " _how many people did this?_ "

When we (now, and in the past) look at ancient construction projects, we
instinctively tend to imagine fairly "brute force" construction methods.
Basically, the way things are done now but with people powered trucks, cranes
and such. Think of all those depictions of many people dragging huge loads on
rollers or sleds. Very large groups of people using muscle power.

Thousands of labourers, hundreds of years. Herodotus suggests that it took
100,000 builders over 20 years to build a pyramid, 2m man years. In egypt,
it's plausible. They _had_ huge numbers of people, an empire, large scale
slavery...

With stonehenge in 5,000 ypb britain, there are thought to be far fewer
people. It wasn't a massive urban culture like egypt. People are thought to
have lived in small dispersed groups at that time, with little evidence of
large "political" authority that could command a large labour force.

Gogleki Tepeh's builders achieved similar feats 12,000 YBB. This is before
large scale societies are thought to have existed at all, anywhere.

So either, (1) "civilised" society was much more common historically and
ancient in origin (2) There were "pre-civilised" ways of organising very large
numbers of people. Or (3), they had very clever building techniques that did
not require many people.

Any of these answers, or some combination of them could add a lot of flavour
to our understanding of the neolithic, culturally.

~~~
zorkw4rg
The number of 20 years is often repeated for the great giza pyramid, however
its constructed using 2.3 million stones (~2.5 ton each) meaning they would
have to place a stone every 5 minutes, for 20 years to make any sense.
Traditional theories of egyptology fiercely defended by argument of authority
are utterly useless.

In reality nobody has any idea how, when or even by whom (I would despute the
cartouche as solid evidence) the great pyramid was actually built and
egyptology certainly won't figure it out (at least not with its current
systemic issues).

~~~
dalbasal
The 100k workers over 20 years figures aren't a theory of modern researchers.
Those estimates are from Herodotus, who was reporting on what Egyptians of his
day (2,500 ybp) thought. That's why it's repeated so often. It could be that
they/he was wrong.

I think it sounds plausible in terms of the amount of work. 1 man year per
stone.

~~~
nickonline
YBB YBP?

This is some pretty incredible jargon is this widely used, I've never seen it
before and needed to look it up.

Is it really that hard to say 2,500 years ago?

~~~
dalbasal
It starts to get cumbersome when you use it multiple times in a paragraph. The
problem is really the BC/AD (starting the clock 2018 years ago) is clunky.

It's pretty widely used in the context of history these days, mostly because
it's common to look at long stretches of time. It's really the easiest system
once you know the acronym.

Here...

Herodotus is a 5th century BC historian, a favourite among the 13th century
European historians that founded the modern discipline. He was relaying
information that may have been invented sometime in the 2nd millennia BC, as
many primary records were lost during the 19th century BC dark period. The
Pyramid itself was constructed in the 24th century BC.

This is a little more confusing to me than ybp.

BTW, I'm still not really sure what AD stands for.

~~~
mkohlmyr
While you may think BC/AD is clunky, having a static reference point in the
past obviously has its advantages. 200BC will forever correctly and uniquely
reference the same year, 2218 YBP not so much, as it depends on year of
writing (which is fine for a live interaction, but less handy for written and
archived content).

~~~
JackCh
> _2218 YBP not so much, as it depends on year of writing_

As I understand it, the "present" in YBP refers to 68 years ago, 1950. This is
related to the advent of carbon dating, and the way widescale nuclear tests
altered the proportion of carbon isotopes found in nature.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present)

Insofar as 68 years is a rounding error when discussing the Great Pyramids,
YBP is a lot less clumsy. But 500 years from now it will probably begin seem
just as clumsy as BC/AD. At least this time there is a pragmatic reason for
the delineation (carbon 14 levels being altered.) Of course in 1,000 years
you'll probably have people on hyper-reddit very smugly pointing out that
nuclear testing actually started in 1945 not in 1950, just as today they point
out Christ was not born in 0AD. ;)

------
shawn
_Once we realized he got everything wrong, we went back to the material he
used, the specimens he used, the thin sections he used, the maps he used. And
we could see that time and time again, he slightly changed this — or let 's
say he forgot," Ixer told Live Science._

One of these is a far more serious charge than the other. Scientists don’t
fabricate data. At least, not if their work matters. And even then, the
fabrications are usually discovered.

I guess the article feels strange because it’s stopping short of saying he was
an outright fraud, but strongly hints at it. And that kind of conclusion seems
to require more substantive evidence than they showed.

Old work is mistaken and superseded constantly. In physics, it’s only possible
to falsify a theory, not to prove it’s true. So scientists can only be sure
they’re wrong (or approximately correct, if you’re feeling glass-half-full
about it).

But creating fake data reduces science to nothing more than an efficient
method of converting money into mistaken ideas. It undermines everything
science stands for.

Could anyone dig into the paper to find out whether he did in fact make
changes to any data? Either he did and was lying, or didn’t and was mistaken.
It’d be interesting to know precisely which.

~~~
l0b0
Upvoted, but citation needed for "the fabrications are usually discovered."
Basically the state of any research that nobody has tried to replicate yet is
unknown.

~~~
coldtea
It's also a logical impossibility to really determine whether "fabrications
are usually discovered" or not.

We can only know about fabrications after they have been discovered -- so
there could be 2x or even 10x as much that we don't know about and count among
the "non fabricated" work.

~~~
tlb
It's not impossible. We know how many fabrications are discovered. You can
take a random sample of papers and analyze them in depth to estimate the
number of papers that are fabricated.

~~~
coldtea
> _You can take a random sample of papers and analyze them in depth to
> estimate the number of papers that are fabricated._

That assumes that the fabrications in those papers will be revealed upon
further analysis.

And, what's worse, that such analysis is economically feasible.

Most metastudies don't even verify the original results, just assume them as
fine.

~~~
tlb
That's makes it merely expensive, not impossible.

The Reproducibility Project got a long way on a modest budget. They replicated
100 studies, got similar results on only 35%, for $15M.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility_Project).

------
YeGoblynQueenne
The tone of the article is aggravating - "debunking" and "debunked" are
continuously used to say that, basically, modern researchers used modern
techniques to prove older results partially wrong. As if this is something
uncommon, in the sciences!

I am very surprised that the accusations of potential fraud come from the
researchers themselves, despite the fact that they admit the use of tools
unavailable to the older researcher.

It make me wonder whether all this talk of "debunking" and "myths" would be
the case if this was not about Stonehenge, a subject that tends to attract
lots of attention from quacks and loons of all stripes.

------
m0nty
> "Nobody would drag the stones up the Preseli Hills only then to drift them
> down south to Milford Haven," Ixer said. And going to the sea from the
> northern slopes isn't ideal, either. "You've actually got to make a long sea
> journey all the way around the south coast of Wales," he said. "So, it seems
> a pretty unlikely suggestion."

I'm not sure about this. It was a massive effort to move the stones in the
first place, maybe if you could do most of the moving by boat or raft rather
than dragging them all the way, it might have been a worthwhile trade-off.
It's a long way from Newport (West Wales, not the one nearer to England) to
Salisbury, and the terrain is hard going all the way.

We're talking here about people who reshaped Maiden Castle in Dorset by hand,
using (as far as we know) tools made from antler and moving the earth in
baskets. Who built Silbury Hill using similar methods. Who thought it
worthwhile moving these massive stones (and hundreds like them) across the
country at a time when any journey was far more difficult and dangerous than
today. They were not like us.

------
lifeisstillgood
>>> Such a monumental procession would have been akin to transporting the
space shuttle Endeavor in a parade, for all to see and celebrate, the
archaeologists said.

This is another one of those "sounds good" ideas that the article is
complaining about. The total population of the UK would have varied from
40,000 lower bound to 200k in this period (see below - figures really hard to
find) Basically that's empty.

It's like the pyramids - at some point the labour force needed looks like
"everyone" \- processions did not go "past" anyone - there was basically no
one to go past. And at some level of population, there was no one to go past
because they were all pushing huge slabs of stone.

It's worth noting this took hundreds of years to achieve as well - this was
socially deep - and we understand nothing about it ... weird

[https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...](https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1060&context=humbiol)

~~~
tlb
You can never have all the people pushing the rock. Women, children, and the
elderly wouldn't. And you need a large supply chain to feed and shelter the
rock pushers along the route.

As a benchmark, 31% of Germany's population were in uniform in WWII. That's
probably the greatest fraction a society can devote to a project.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Everybody should have been in air-quotes - but whichever percentage you choose
(I have heard upto 90% of all able bodied workers in Egypt were on the
pyramids until harvest time) at some point it is mind boggling - how were
there enough people in the UK - stonehenge was a multi-generational project on
a scale that dwarfs St. paul's cathedral and similar projects - hundreds of
years long and involving such a fraction of the population for what? A petrol
pump for visiting space aliens would have made more sense than fifth aveneue
style sunsets.

------
mettamage
Wow, this story leaves quite an impression on me on what it means to be a
celebrated expert who is quite uncontested. You can basically meddle with the
knowledge we humans have on that front and it will take quite a while for
people to uncover it. I feel immediately more critical on our scientific and
academic leaders and more responsible myself -- despite having no position in
academia.

~~~
boomboomsubban
The expert was largely uncontested as the explanation he gave was adequate
given the question being asked. More evidence was needed for a better
explanation, and there wasn't a strong push to fund more research to answer
"where did the stone for Stonehenge come from?"

Though there can be some examples of scientists unwilling to question past
experts, the bigger obstacle is the limited amount of evidence that scientists
are able to collect.

~~~
vlz
Yes, and I would emphasize the funding aspect. Archaeology is not a discipline
we spend tons of money on anyway. I would expect errors to live on longer here
than in say cancer research.

------
extralego
_Thomas was so widely respected that nobody questioned his work for decades._

We naturally encourage questioning honorable confidence _in the abstract_ but
rarely in concrete actions.

Serious question: Is there a field, or even a social context, in which doing
so would actually be rewarded?

And sort of related: Is a system for such questioning a necessity for a
meritocracy or can a be meritocratic system still exist at the same time? I
guess I just assume that, for example, companies claiming meritocracy were
just actively ignoring organic social structures responsible for most of the
honor hierarchies in the first place. I always thought social paradigms
associated with enlightenment we’re essentially anti-structures to contend
with this sort of thing. But doesn’t meritocracy in tech somehow seem to take
those efforts for granted? I have never worked at these companies so I am
really curious.

~~~
DanBC
> Serious question: Is there a field, or even a social context, in which doing
> so would actually be rewarded?

Health care is putting considerable effort into creating _psychological
safety_ and _just culture_ , in front line staff and in the board, to create
the ability to question what happens.

This is to prevent things like the Argon Beam Liver Tattoo doctor from
carrying on without being stopped; or to ensure boards question the serious
incident reports they get.

So far it's had a limited effect, but culture takes a long time to change.

------
j1vms
Not related to the geological aspects, but Spinal Tap's account of what
happened at Stonehenge is the most plausible.

[https://youtu.be/qAXzzHM8zLw](https://youtu.be/qAXzzHM8zLw)

