Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Really old tomb

It rained most of the day today, no bicycling.

I just don't know what I was thinking yesterday. I like those Paris cemetery pictures so much that I completely blanked on the really, really old tomb that I have pictures of.

The Dolmen de la Madeleine at Gennes in the Loire Valley:Dolmens are megaliths generally considered to have been tombs, constructed with several large stones supporting a "capstone". They were erected by pre-Celtic people in Brittany and also in Britain before recorded history, making them quite literally pre-historic. This construction stands without pretension, without fences, without tour guides, without interpretive assistance, in an open field at the edge of a small town near the Loire. Dolmens of this sort are dated to between 4000 and 4800 B.C., nearly 7,000 years ago. These are way older than the Pyramids (constructed about 2600 B.C.), slightly older than Stonehenge (standing stones erected about 2200 B.C. but other parts of the site are older, perhaps 4000 B.C.), older than the Great Wall (500 B.C.), older than just about anything man made still in existence on the face of the planet.

Babe for scale.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Really nice tomb of stone. TT

Anonymous said...

You get an A+ for this one. SS

Anonymous said...

And why aren't you a history teacher/professor? With our family's obvious love of anything historical, will that profession be adopted by any of us? ~NM