14 DAY TRIAL // On the European plains, mysterious giant stones are found, forming alleys, circles or giant tables called "dolmens". They are the first monuments built by the mankind.
A granite forest of dolmens and menhirs covers the Menec Field, near Carnac (French Brittany). In total, there are about 1,169 stones, with an average height of 3 m (10 ft). Also in Brittany, at Plouarzell (close to Finistere), an immense block is raised in the middle of the plain. It is about 10 m (33 ft) tall and weighs over 150 tonnes.
There are over 50,000 Dolmens throughout the Europe, from England to Spain and Malta, in the Mediterranean. In the Breton language, dolmen means "stone table" while menhir is for "raised stone". These types of prehistoric monuments are also called megaliths (from Greek for "large stones").
The oldest megaliths found in Brittany are 6,800 years old, thus being 2,000 years older than the Egyptian pyramids. This is the Neolithic period. Today, dolmens and menhirs are, of course, just ruins of what they used to be.
7,000 years ago, the Europeans started to practice agriculture. The crops meant they did not have to be in a continuous movement in search for the game. People made the first villages, practiced the cult of the dead and the first graveyards appeared.
The epoch of the megaliths started. Using vines and ropes made of roots, the men dragged blocks of rock up to several tons in weight, on distances of kilometers. In several months, they built the alleys of dolmens. The dolmens were covered by soil mounds to form a type of artificial cavern called tumulus. In that place, at the light of the torches, people paid homage to the dead. Today, only the framework of the tumuluses remained - the megaliths. Even so, many megaliths were used in constructions by subsequent populations.
Agriculture is an occupation that requires a precise measuring of time. 4,000 to 3,500 years ago, Europeans are supposed to have raised the menhirs for understanding the movements of the stars and the seasonal rhythm. The menhir circles of Stonehenge date from this period. They are orientated depending on the sunrise hours and the winter and summer solstices. These pre-Indo European populations used to bury their dead in the tumuluses and practiced a cult of the Sun, involving huge menhirs (like in the case of Stonehenge) in their rites.
3,500 years ago, with the start of the Bronze Age, Europeans stopped building the megaliths. The villages turned rich and fortified. Perhaps this time war counted more than raising dolmens.