excavating old fossils

 The broadcaster/author/journalist Brian Byrne writes today on his Kilcullen Diary website: "..it was a great privelege for many people around the world to see the sun come through the roofbox at the entrance to Newgrange and gradually walk its way through to the back of the passage tomb... The hugely significant solstice sunrise event was live streamed from within the chamber from 8.45am today and if weather permits, it can also be seen tomorrow, Monday 21st and Tuesday 22nd. Some 5200 years ago, the builders of the Newgrange tomb had an extraordinary knowledge of the heavens and of buildings measurement to make this happen. That's a humbling thought. If you missed it, have a look again tomorrow here. (He publishes a link.) Recordings of the three mornings will be available on the Office of Public Works youtube channel."

James Healy writes today right here right now: "The Newgrange solstice effect dates from the 1960s that is to say, it is fifty years old not 5200 years old. The Newgrange burial site was completely and creatively (some would say fraudulently) reconstructed by Professor MJ O'Kelly of Cork University between 1964 and 1967. Professor O'Kelly claimed to have discovered a previously unknown feature at the site which he called "the light box." He then installed the light box on the roof of the monument which he had completely rebuilt from his imagination in such a way as to create the light effect Brian Byrne believes dates from 5200 years ago. Even archaeologists Geraldine and Matthew Stout who are apologists for Professor O'Kelly and his shenanigans admit in their new book on Newgrange that he took 'liberties with some of the key features including the roof box,' that is to say gentle travellers of the internet that Professor O'Kelly and his volunteers and the Office of Public Works built Newgrange from their imagination, contriving a fantasy of what a megalithic tomb might look like if they'd had groovy hippies with degrees from polytechnic universities in 3000 BC. Professor O'Kelly and his team (of fraudsters) having manufactured a light box feature and installed it on the roof of the Newgrange monument which they'd just built from rubble, then straightened the paassageway into the monument which they had just built from rubble to provide the illusion of an ancient solstice harnassing apparatus devised by mysterious megalithic druids 5200 years ago. So the ancient megalithic tomb at Newgrange was constructed using incredible knowledge of astronomy and engineering science by a bunch of 1960s hippies who like Brian Byrne would have been better off going to church. Their knowledge was incredible because they were so high on drugs most of the time that most of them didn't even know their own names, never mind in which direction the sun would rise on the Winter solstice. People who stop believing in God, don't believe in nothing. They end up believing in anything. The claim that Newgrange was built a thousand years before Stonehenge is evidenceless pap as is the dating of Stonehenge incidentally. To be quite clear. The Newgrange monument was built by MJ O'Kelly in 1967. I am reminded of the ancient stone circle monument discovered in the wilds of Scotland in late 2018 and touted by Aberdeenshire Council and archaeologists as evidence of an ancient civilisation dating from 4500 years ago. The megalithic fantasy collapsed on itself when a red faced local farmer (I postulate his face was red because he was laughing so hard) phoned the authorities and revealed that he had built the stone circle for decorative purposes on his farm in the 1990s. It was twenty years old not 4500 years old. Aberdeenshire Council released what was meant to be a face saving statement saying that it was interesting that knowledge of ancient building methods should have been preserved by local people in the area. That's not the statement I would have released. That statement required a few F bombs and a few Cee words to do justice to the rarified idiocy that had been perpetrated by Arberdeenshire Council and its expert archaeologists. And of course the farmer hadn't used fiendishly cunning arcane ancient building methods. He had dragged ten boulders into a rough circle on his land and left them there."