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gjm comments on Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015 - Less Wrong
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Somebody should explore if Stonehenge, Carnac stones, and other megalithic formations were banking and payment systems.
More recently, in the isle of Yap, they used big Rai stones as money.
Many megalithic buildings are tombs, places of worship, or served as calendars, but many big stones aligned in open spaces have no conclusive explanation.
I suggest they could have been a way of storing value and were used for payments too. There is evidence that there was trade across the European continent and into the middle east in those times (~6000 BC). Central marketplaces where they raised the stones and met to trade could have been a use case. The stones obviously stayed there, with a consensus of who owned them, and the next season of trade they would use them as money again.
To move huge stones and align them takes a lot of time and effort, but greed may be a strong incentive to have built those formations.
If you can have a stable consensus of who owns which (or how many) stones, why bother transporting the enormous stones across the country at all?
What's the purpose of setting them up in formation rather than just having a big pile? (To make it easier to spot if one has been stolen? But if you've got someone watching the stones then it surely can't be much extra effort for them to count them every day.)
[EDITED to add: Hi, downvoters! I see this is at -2. I honestly can't see what's wrong with it, so if this comment was downvoted on its merits rather than because I said something elsewhere that disagrees with your politics, please let me know what was wrong so I can improve. Thanks.]