Early Spring outing

[PeterW]

Hi all,
We've been having some bright, if frosty, mornings down here in Kent, so as John and Wendy are both on a week's holiday we decided this morning to have a family outing to Trosley Park about 25 miles away. It's a large area of beautiful downland and woodland maintained by the Kent County Council. As a change from humping around a big camera bag I decided to take just my Epson Photo PC 850Z digital - all 2.1 megapixels of it. Here's a couple of the pics I took. Nothing startling, but I thought you might like to see them


This is Luke with his Dad receiving instructions from one of the foresters on how to weave a willow wand. Sorry about clipping the guy's head. I was using the viewfinder, not the screen, and forgot about parallax!


The are the Coldrum Stones, the remains of the entrance to a Neolithic Longbarrow burial chamber which dates somewhere between 4000 and 2500 BC - around the time the Ancient Egyptians were building pyramids. It's at the top of a large hill with a very muddy path up to it. In 1910 about 20 skeletons were unearthed here which showed that these Neolithic (New Stone Age) people were quite short and stocky but quite powerfully built. They were one of the earliest peoples to cultivate the land and grow crops. The largest of the stones here is about eight feet tall, and you wonder how on earth these early people managed to erect them right on the top of a hill.

PeterW

[doubs43]

Darn, Peter...... I'm having trouble accepting those beautiful shots as coming from a lowly 2.1MB camera! I think they're better than anyone has a right to expect. Well done.

The "History Channel" on TV here often deals with ancient engineering feats that simply boggle the mind. A fact that I've accepted is that for all of their superstitions and lack of knowledge in many fields, the ancient peoples of the world weren't exactly stupid. In fact, many were absolutely brilliant. From existing remains it's obvious that Egyptian and Roman Engineers were amazing. Apparently the ancient peoples of Central and South America also had Engineers of note. We can only speculate what they might have done with the advances we have in the engineering fields today.

Walker

[nikonbob]

PeterW

Glad you had an enjoyable outing in what I remember as the beautiful Kent countryside. As Walker says very respectable for a 2 meg camera. A friens sent me a link to someone who can move heavy objects by the simplest of means. It is entertaining, so if you are interested here is the link j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/moving_big_rocks .

Bob

[GeneW]

Peter, yes, that 2mpx digicam is very respectable. And plenty of resolution for web images. The stones on the burial mound are fascinating. As Walker says, they had a lot of knowledge -- just different knowledge than we have today. The peoples then were expert at reading the encyclopedia of their environment, something we've lost..

Gene

[PeterW]

Thanks, Walker, Bob and Gene.

I've bought my Epson 850Z when it first came out in December 1999 because the publisher that John and I were writing a book for at the time wanted all the pics, about 200 of them, in digital format. It wasn't cheap at the time, about the price of a quite decent digital SLR today, but the publisher advanced the money to buy it and deducted it from the first royalty payment. After reading all the reviews the Epson came out top of the heap so we chose it.

It's not a small camera, slightly larger than an OM1, but it doesn't have interchangeable lenses. Set on manual it gives you control of just about everything, even manual focus if you want it. It's got quite a nice viewfinder, unfortunately without parallax markings, but it has a diopter adjustment and the finder zooms with the lens.

Bob, I found the video to which you gave the link very entertaining. It still doesn't solve the problem of how they got those blocks of stone up that darn great muddy hill though.

The ancients, neolithic people in Europe and North and South America 4000 to 5000 years ago, knew a lot more than most people today give them credit for. I read somewhere that in their building they had a fair grasp of mathematics, including the 3-4-5 principle of a right angled triangle, forgotten and rediscovered centuries later by Pythagoras - remember his square on the hypotenuse?

The 3-4-5 principle says that if you have two sides of a triangle, one 3 units and one 4 units, and make the third side 5 units, it has to be a right angled triangle. 3 squared =9, 4 squared = 16. Adding them gives 25 which equals 5 squared. I also read that they had a fair grasp of astronomy and the planets, and knew that the earth was round and not flat.

I wonder how much else they knew that was rediscovered after being lost for centuries? The principle of the lever, using rollers cut from young tree trunks, and maybe lots more for lifting and moving heavy weights? They lived in timber houses, cleared wooded areas and scrubland, tilled the ground for crops and built fences to enclose their livestock, all with flint-edged implements. They must have had some sort of social structure and pecking order in their communities. They knew how to make a fire for cooking, and baked clay pottery.

According to the UK History Channel a few years ago they also built boats and seemed to have a fair grasp of astronomy for navigation across the Mediterranean and the North Sea, and knew the world was round and not flat. A far cry from primitive, grunting half-humans living in caves as some people believe.

I wonder how much more advanced we'd be today if their civilisations hadn't died out long before the Greeks and the Romans, and everything they knew had to be rediscovered.

PeterW

[doubs43]

Peter, I once read an article in Reader's Digest authored by a college Professor. She assigned her students to read the diary of a Roman General written more than 2,000 years ago. The article included some of the diary entries. The problems he faced were much like those a military man would be confronted with today but the impression I got was that the man was extraordinarily intelligent. As I recall, that was the Professor's goal when she assigned the reading; to illustrate that intelligence is far from belonging solely to modern generations.

Walker