The Kochno stone is one of the most fascinating and mysterious archaeological finds in the world. Scientists still cannot come to a consensus about what is depicted on it.
This massive stone slab, measuring 13 by 8 meters, was discovered in 1887 by the Reverend James Harvey near the Scottish town of West Darbantorshire. The stone features over 90 intricate figures that are considered the finest set of petroglyphs in Scotland (petroglyphs are figures engraved or painted on a stone).
Oddly enough it sounds, but in 1965 the archaeologist Louis McLellan Mann decided … to bury the slab back into the ground! Scientists took this step to keep the unique stone intact. Residents of the surrounding area and just curious tourists left inscriptions on it, tried to cut off a piece "for memory" and without a twinge of conscience walked around the monument with a history of five thousand years!
In addition to the effects of vandals and erosion, the lines drawn by Mann himself remain on the stone. With their help, he tried to measure the object in order to understand whether the stone could be somehow related to astronomy.
In the end, Kochno was buried under a meter-long layer of turf and earth.
In the scientific community, disputes about what is depicted on the stone still do not subside. Star map? Or maybe this is a ritual altar, whose recesses were filled with wine, milk or blood?
Someone even believes that Kochno is a portal between the world of the living and the dead, on which the "instructions" for reincarnation are drawn.
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Still, most scientists agree that intricate patterns of spirals, lines and rings are a special kind of prehistoric art, examples of which can be seen in many countries of the world. Experts attribute it to the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age.
Researcher Alexander McCallum takes a different view. He suggests that the Kochno Stone is an ancient settlement map in the Clyde Valley.
The incredible drawings are reminiscent of the huge crop circles so often attributed to extraterrestrial civilizations. Interestingly, similar slabs have been found in northern Spain, Mexico, Greece, and even India.
Hundreds of theories are being built around what kind of encrypted information these strange symbols contain. Perhaps these are tribal symbols, border markers, or drawings of space objects. Or maybe these are just decorative forms that resemble paintings by abstractionists of the twentieth century.
In 2016, the stone was pulled out of the ground for three days. Scientists and experts have compiled a digital map of Kochno to try to learn as much as possible about the history and purpose of the stone, as well as about the people who created this work about 5,000 years ago.