Drones Find Second Stonehenge?

Using drones, scientists have discovered a second Stonehenge in the western Brazilian rain-forest. Unmanned aircraft captured images for hundreds of enclosures resembling and dating from the same era as the prehistoric structure. While it’s too soon to know the purpose of the structure, the Sao Paulo Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography believes it’s functions mirror that Stonehenge and was erected at roughly the same time. The revolutionary finding has brought an epiphany in our understanding of prehistory..as well as a fight.

“It’s likely that the geoglyphs were used to similar functions to the Neolithic ..enclosures..public gathering, ritual sites..” Postdoctoral researcher Jennifer Watling noted. “It is interest to note that the format of the geoglyphs, with an outer ditch and inner wall enclosure are what classically describe henge sites. The earliest phases at Stonehenge consist of a similarly lay-out enclosure..”

So what’s the fight? You wouldn’t believe it. Archaeologists have cited the finding of prehistoric evidence of people in the america’s controlling and managing the Amazon around them. The opposing wing are using the findings to justify deforestation, claiming that the finding challenges the view of the Amazon as a ‘pristine ecosystem’. Their reasoning comes from the fact that it’s being learned that the forest around the enclosures seem to have came about as a result of the activity of man and the people that erected the geoglyphs. At a scale of now 450 sites discovered since the finding, there’s a lot on the table to discuss.

To the latter, Dr. Jennifer Watling is swinging back. “Our evidence that Amazonian forests have been managed by indigenous peoples long before European contact should not be cited as justification for destructive, unsustainable land-use practiced today...It should instead serve to highlight the ingenuity of past subsistence regimes that did not lead to forest degradation, and the importance of indigenous knowledge for finding more sustainable land-use alternatives.” While the land use debate heats up, our eyes are on sky, because the following is what we believe the real lesson is.

Digitized hardware, in the form of drones, have long allowed us to get a glimpse of the hard-to-reach-spots of the earth as well as our human history. With the growing application of drone mapping, expect a windfall of new insights that will blow away our understanding of ourselves historically and beyond.