Ancient stone monolith may have marked changing seasons

Space.com : A monolith located in Manchester, UK, is thought to have been erected by Neolithic people around 2000 BC as an astronomical tool to mark the changing seasons, writes Clara Moskowitz for Space.com. When Daniel Brown of Nottingham Trent University and colleagues recently surveyed the site, they discovered a high density of packing stones on one side, which indicates that the triangular-shaped stone was intentionally oriented to face a particular direction. The researchers used three-dimensional computer modeling to analyze how the stone would have been illuminated throughout the different seasons four millennia ago, given that the tilt of Earth’s axis has changed over time. Their model showed that the slanted side of the stone would have been brightly lit at midsummer and in shadow during the winter. According to Brown, “The stone would have been an ideal marker for a social arena for seasonal gatherings. It’s not a sundial in the sense that people would have used it to determine an exact time. We think that it was set in position to give a symbolic meaning to its location, a bit like the way that some religious buildings are aligned in a specific direction for symbolic reasons.” Although the use of shadow casting in monuments was rare during that period of time in England, examples have also been found in Ireland and Scotland.