- Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 - Part 9 - Part 10 - Part 11 - Part 12 - Part 13 - Part 14 - Part 15 - Part 16 - Part 17 - Part 18 - Part 19 - Part 20 - Part 21 - Part 22 - Part 23 - Part 24 - Part 25 - Part 26 - Part 27 -
Broken dolmens
Surely, the above has raised a number of serious questions:
- Are there man-made megaliths in the North Caucasus, structures made of them, and traces of the extraction of building stone?
- Where did such a multitude of stones of regular geometric shapes come from in the mountains, and even structures that look like man-made ones?
I will try to answer these questions in the most accessible, simple language:
To begin with, consider the traces left by stone cutters. There are many of them, and they all have common features. There are no outstanding ones among them, therefore it is enough to demonstrate only one object. It is located right next to the road, in the place where the path begins, along which we climbed the Planic rocks:
These stones have the correct geometric shape, and traces of mechanical impact by hand tools. This is how building stone was mined in the distant past, and it is mined in a similar way today. Perhaps, the tool of stone miners has become more perfect.
Promotional video:
The essence of this ancient method of stone mining is as follows: In order to break off a piece of rock of the required size and shape from the monolith, holes were punched in the right places, into which dried wooden wedges were then driven into. After that, the wedges were watered with water, and swelling, the wood increased in volume, and along the line on which the wedges were driven in, a crack appeared in the rock. Further, everything is simple. It remained to separate the extracted piece from the monolith, process it, if required, and take it to the construction site.
But the point is that these are traces of primitive prey. This is how the foundation stones for the foundations of houses from adobe bricks were produced, which were built by settlers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But this is not the only way to extract simple building materials. It is much more cost-effective not to waste time and energy on chipping off the stone for its subsequent chipping with a hammer and chisel, but simply to collect ready-made stones of the correct shape suitable for construction in the mountains.
This explains the fact that there are not so many such stones left in accessible places, next to roads and along river banks. But in the mountains, where it is impossible to fit a cart for loading and transporting natural stones to the construction site, there are simply countless of them. Where do they come from? Everything is very simple:
This is how mountain stratification looks like (from the word "stratum", which in Latin means - layer, layer). Scientifically speaking,
Mountain stratification is: - formation, accumulation or deposition of rocks in the form of layers; especially layered distribution or arrangement of sedimentary rocks or volcanic rocks formed from lava flows and fragmentary volcanic deposits. The divisions between the individual layers are called bedding planes. They correspond to the layers that they link; for flat layers they are horizontal, and on slopes they are inclined.
And if it's simple, then we have a kind of cake "Napoleon". Forget about lava and siliceous rocks, which are practically absent in the North Caucasus, and imagine a kitchen mixer in which water and carbon forms of minerals such as lime, sand and clay are mixed.
In our case:
- Lime is a carbonate rock clayey limestone CaCO3 with admixtures of oxides of calcium, magnesium, iron and other metals in the form. They are called dolomites and marls.
- Sand - fine-grained loose sedimentary rocks of quartzites.
- Clays are a finely dispersed aqueous solution containing kaolinite, montmorillonite, halloysite, serpentine, hydromica, chlorite and palygorskite to a lesser extent.
All these rocks have different sizes and weights of individual particles. In principle, clay is the same sand, only finely ground. They differ from each other in the same way as refined sugar differs from sifted flour or starch. And adults do not need to explain why in our mixer, after turning off the electric motor after settling, a "puff cake" of mixed components will turn out. The heaviest and largest particles will precipitate first, and the lightest and finest will be on top. So after a while we will be able to observe through the glass of the kitchen appliance a layer of lime at the bottom, a layer of sand on it, and a layer of clay on top.
The same thing happens during floods and mudflows. Stream after stream brings in the dispersion of suspended rocks, interspersed with pebbles, marine animals and shellfish. And each of these tides is defended, leaving its own piece of the "pie" of two, three, or more layers. Then the water leaves, the clay sedimentary rocks lose moisture and petrify. At the same time, the clays remain monolithic, but the limestones crack. Then, under the influence of lithospheric, geological and tectonic processes, such "pies" tilt and may even stand upright.
At the same time, hard cracked layers, having lost their connecting strata, become available for extraction. A person can only collect them in the forest, like mushrooms or berries. Some "bricks" are immediately ready for use as a building material, and some require minimal processing. And sometimes, as a result of weathering, the harder rocks remain in place, while the soft ones crumble, and walls are obtained that are almost impossible to distinguish from man-made ones. And a person often uses them, attaching his own buildings to them.
It also happens that vertically standing layers fall to the ground, and then the following formations are obtained:
In the vicinity of the village of Kamennomostkiy, in Adygea, we were shown an “ancient pavement”.
And really, what else could it be like? But the point is that it only looks like paving stones. It's just that a person is so constructed, when he sees something for the first time, he searches in memory for objects of a similar type and structure. And if the stones lie under your feet, he immediately concludes that someone has paved a road or square here. In fact, everything is much simpler, and there is no reason for building speculative conclusions. Before us is a fragment of mountain stratification. More precisely, one of its hard layers, formed by cracked sandstone, devoid of a fertile layer on top. It either overturned, taking a horizontal position, or initially it was lying like that, which is most likely.
This "road" led nowhere, and did not lead anywhere. But local ethnographers tell tourists a fascinating story about some evil Turks who robbed silk caravans going from China to Europe bypassing the Iron Gates of Derbent. Here, they allegedly had a slave market, where they traded captured "Chinese tourists". Beautiful but implausible. The Turkish bazaar could actually exist, in theory. And there was a way from Persia through the Lesser Caucasus.
But a bazaar could hardly exist in the mountains. They hide in the mountains, not trade. Any of the merchants will confirm this to you. After all, even prohibited goods are sold where there are buyers. Therefore, bazaars, including slave bazaars, were set up in places accessible to large masses of people. And we see only natural formation without a certain configuration. The usual exposure to the surface of one of the sedimentary layers.
* Road * to nowhere. the village of Kamennomostsky. Adygea.
A beautiful place, and it makes sense to see everything with your own eyes. Moreover, the cordiality and hospitality of the inhabitants of Adygea has no boundaries! But we need to find an answer to one more important question, which is associated with man-made structures made of natural stone. And yes. There are those here. Of course, dolmens are of the greatest interest. Their origin does not come to anyone's mind to question. Of course, these are man-made structures, but there is very little reliable information about them. We have studied one of the dolmens of Adygea, and this is what I have to tell you.
There is a village in this wonderful republic called Guzeripl. Its main attraction is the Nature Museum of the Caucasian Reserve, which is located on the right bank of the Belaya River. And the main exhibit of the KGPBZ (Caucasian State Natural Biosphere Reserve) is a giant dolmen.
The huge front slab of a trapezoidal dolmen is 245 cm long at the base, its height is 210 cm, and its thickness is 57 cm. An irregularly rounded hole located almost at the ground has a size of 40x38 cm. Officially, it is believed that the dolmen was built by ancient stonecutters in II - 1st millennium BC Besides, it is called unfinished.
But I am deeply convinced that there is not a single word of truth here. Nobody knows who and when built these structures, and most importantly - why! The version that dolmens are burial structures amuses even official historians. But other versions are not even considered by science. But let’s first take a close look at what we see with our own eyes, and not what people tell us, who tend to be mistaken, and take on faith the words of authoritative scientists and researchers.
Left view:
Right view:
Back view:
View from above:
I see a pile of dolomite slabs, handled in a very primitive way, carelessly folded in the form of a structure. This is clearly not the result of the work of stone cutters. The slabs were most likely processed even when they were not fossilized layers of clay. Exactly like the steps in the Dante Gorge of the Hot Key. This could be done successfully even with a wooden instrument.
The second thing that immediately comes to mind is the assumption that the dolmen is not in the place where it was created. This is supported by the fact that now he is leaning on a pillow of stones and pebbles, which was clearly created not so long ago. In addition, it is impossible to get rid of the feeling that the "crypt of the Adyghe prince" was dismantled and then assembled extremely carelessly. Everything suggests that the builders who assembled the dolmen had no idea what it looked like initially. Look at the corners at which the side plates mate, with the frontal and horizontal:
Do you see this keyway on the upper edge of the left wall? So: the frontal wall has such dimensions that completely coincide with the dimensions of the protrusion on the side edge of the dolmen, and it is quite obvious to me that initially there was no niche in front. The facade was made flush, and looked like a regular rectangle. And the "roof" did not overlap, but fell into the grooves of the side walls. The builders, due to their illiteracy, installed a horizontal slab as it is now located, and because it was not inserted into the grooves of the side walls, the load on it under the influence of its own weight was unevenly distributed. That is why the "roof" and cracked in the middle (see photo "top view").
Inside, we did not find anything remarkable, except for river pebbles and boulders from rounded basalt, brought for the construction of a dolmen "pillow", at least five hundred kilometers away.
True, the readings of the dosimeter inside the dolmen baffled us. The level of natural background radiation, contrary to all the "rules", inside the dolmen is more than two times lower than outside.
And this is the reason for creating another version of the purpose of such structures. It is very tempting to assume that dolmens were shelters from strong radiation. True, the question arises about how people got into it. After all, we entered the dolmen through a gap in its right wall. And the hole in the front wall is suitable, perhaps, for the penetration of a small child, and the cork of this "taphole" locked the dolmen from the outside. Most likely, this version is not consistent.
And the “icing on the cake” turned out to be scanning the dolmen with a metal detector. Their results were not that overwhelmed, but caused quite a lot of conflicting emotions.
Geophysicist Dmitry Gorkin examines the structural elements of the dolmen for the presence of metal parts in them.
The first metal "detail" turned out to be a modern ten-kopeck coin at the bottom of this hole, which was drilled, most likely, by builders, who were assembling the dolmen on the spot, from the brought slabs and blocks:
And when examining the dolmen itself, it turned out that it was literally stuffed with parts made of ferrous metals, most likely from carbon steel, from which construction fittings are made. The largest of the steel rods is laid in the upper part of the front slab, and its trunnions extend 25 centimeters into the thickness of the side walls. Other pins, about 40 centimeters long, fasten all structural parts at their junctions, which do not have through slots.
Thus, the verdict of the expedition is unambiguous: - The Guzeripl dolmen is a fake and a remake. It is assembled using modern tools and construction equipment, using modern technologies. But the paradox lies in the fact that modern builders were unable to recreate the dolmen with the same quality level with which it was built by those "ancient" builders who built dolmens without mortar, reinforcement and lifting mechanisms. Those. the primitivism of dolmens, clearly apparent. And this is consistent with the fact that we cannot understand the purpose of these structures.
The creators of dolmens did not possess the technologies available to us, but their knowledge was many times higher than our modern ones. Personally, it reminds me of this:
A radio receiver assembled by handicraft using improvised items.
I hope the point is clear. It looks very much like dolmens are high-tech devices assembled "on the knee" from what is at hand. Whether this is true or not, we do not know, but it is obvious that dolmens, structures are very complicated, and their age is quite comparable with the time of the flood that washed up mountains of lime sand and clay in the North Caucasus. Scientists claim that dolmens are the oldest man-made structures in this region. Is this so? Let's see what else is hand-made here.
Continued: Part 29
Author: kadykchanskiy