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Some of the stones are so large that the question asks itself the moment you see them. How on Earth did they move that? Across the ancient world stand structures built from blocks of staggering size, stones weighing many tonnes, sometimes hundreds of tonnes, quarried, transported, lifted and fitted together with astonishing precision. They were raised by people without modern machinery, without engines, without steel, using only what their own age provided. The results can le

On a hilltop in southeastern Turkey stand great pillars of carved stone, raised by human hands more than eleven thousand years ago. That date is worth pausing on. Eleven thousand years. These pillars were ancient before the first cities, before writing, before the wheel, before metal tools, before the pyramids by a span of time longer than separates us from the pyramids themselves. They were raised by people we long assumed incapable of such a thing, simple hunters and gather

On one morning each year, and one morning only, the rising midwinter sun sends a finger of light through a small stone opening, down a long dark passage, and into the heart of a tomb that has stood for more than five thousand years. For seventeen minutes the chamber glows. Then the light withdraws, the darkness returns, and the sun does not enter again for another whole year. This is Newgrange, in Ireland, built before the great pyramids of Egypt, before Stonehenge, by people