So, hey, kind of slow day for the kind of news that I want to write about and you want to read, but this sounds interesting:
As the last Ice Age tightened its hold on Europe, a group of people living near the Don River piled dozens of mammoth bones into a 12.5m (30ft) wide circle. They may have lived in the shelter of the mammoth bones for a while, huddling around fragrant fires of conifer wood and mammoth bone and making stone tools. But the traces they left are so light that it seems they didn’t stay long—or maybe they only visited occasionally.
[snip]
Fragments of charcoal from inside the circle, along with samples of mammoth bone and ivory, radiocarbon-dated to around 20,000 years ago, during the coldest stage of the Last Glacial Maximum. Ice sheets several kilometers thick stretched southward across most of northern and western Europe. But people somehow made a living on the cold, inhospitable steppes just southeast of the glaciers. They also built huge circles out of mammoth bones—archaeologists just aren’t sure why.
I’m gonna just assume that it was some kind of Ice Age Conanesque magical circle, because they really don’t know what the circle was used for. It’s apparently a clean site, archaeologically speaking. In that case, I feel that we should just make up an answer that sounds cool and use that until science comes along with a boring answer.
So: Ice Age wizard’s circle. Clearly.
Obviously these are the remains of the cult that kept the ice age going. They had to be sure that the alien invaders well well and truly destroyed under the ice sheets.
See? You’ve got a story there. So write it. 🙂
The use of bone suggests tribal shamans howling at the Northern Lights to me but wizards work too.
That works.
The myth of the elephant graveyard predates history.
.
This being “beyond the North wind”, in the distant past, I feel it necessary to invoke the Hyperborean Age.
I wonder what Conan would have thought.
He would have grunted, peered at it intently, and waited with barbarian patience for it to try to eat him.
As he finished his masterpiece, Grog turned to Hurk said “Get it? Anyone who comes here later is gonna Freak. Out. You know, impart some deep cosmic meaning, wonder what dark secrets lie hidden here, maybe start a whole cult.”
More tired from the extra work than impressed, Hurk sighed, “But Grog, we’re just two blokes the elders told to take out the garbage.”
Grog looked offended. “Hurk,” he proclaimed, “this is not garbage. This is ART! Maybe we should start a cult anyway.”
People. Write these stories!