From Peter Turner, Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia
Laura Spinney reports Carl Lipo's theory that the construction of ancient monuments at Poverty Point, Stonehenge, Göbekli Tepe and other sites were “team-building” exercises (13 January, p 38). Another recent explanation of these structures also involves hunter-gatherer communities coming together cooperatively, under the leadership of their elders, the holders of enormous amounts of essential knowledge that enabled these non-literate societies to thrive.
In The Memory Code , Lynne Kelly addresses how such peoples learn extraordinary amounts of information using landscape features, song and dance. She argues that as agriculture slowly developed, indigenous cultures needed local structures that could be used as memory aids, and that features of monuments could be used in place of the landscape features that appear, for example, in Aboriginal Australians' practice of “songlines”.
