At https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/01/250116134101.htm … we are told that around 2900BC, Neolithic people in Denmark ‘sacrificed’ hundeds of stones engraved with sun and field motifs. Archaeologists now claim these ritual ‘sacrifices’ coincided with a large volcanic eruption, in collaboration with climate scientists, that made the sun disappear throughout northern Europe. A bold idea. Has it any downsides. I might ask if they have heard of the Piorra Oscillation. This period of climate downturn lasted for almost 200 years. Normally, certain kinds of volcano can cause low growth tree ring events over a period of 2 or 3 years. Low growth tree rings are basically consistent with the idea of cooler than normal summer months. Trees in the north do not grow in the winter, or very little. How could a volcano cause a cooling of 100 to 200 years? Look up the Piorra Oscillation on the Wiki.
How do they know the so called sun stones have anything to do with the sun? That is an assumption on which the rest of the argument rests. There are alternative ideas around so called sun symbols as many of them are consistent with symbols representing comets or meteors. Flashes of bright light. Patrick McCafferty and Mike Baillie in their book, ‘The Celtic Gods: comets in Irish mythology‘ Tempus:2005, have a quite different explanation for such symbols. Mike Baillie was also a dendrochronologist involved in the creation of the Belfast tree ring chronology and is the author of numerous academic articles. Bringing a solar alignment at Stonehenge into the argument is also possibly a false flag as the alignment is not exactly to midsummer day but a general alignment in that direction. It could equally represent an alignment with the June Taurids which occur roughly at the same time as midsummer day – give a couple of days leeway before or after. Clube and Napier argue that the Taurid meteor streams represent periods of intense discharge of material from a large comet – and this took place over a long period of time. There are a lot of separate Taurid streams – which is why it is called, by astronomers, a complex. What then was going on at the time of the Piorra Oscillation? A volcano or an encounter of the orbit of the earth with one of these meteor streams – with an origin in a comet much larger than your average run of the mill cosmic object. Each time it passed round the sun it would have released a lot of material creating a stream of debris that gradually, over time, dissipated further and further outwards, becoming less and less a threat to life on earth. This appears to be the situation nowadays. There is no threat anymore. However, if the sun stones were deposited at a period in which a newly created dense stream of material had interacted with the atmosphere one can see why people felt a need to make some kind of ‘sacrifice’. That is assuming they represent some kind of ritual depositon and burial. Presumably after the threat had passed.
We may also note the article was published in Antiquity, a journal that was averse to the idea of solar and lunar alignments for a long time – and in particular to the ideas of Alexander Thom who was regarded as an interloper into the field of archaeology by his interpretation of stone circles in Scotland – and other parts of the UK. One can see that this journal would favour a volcanic connection and would stick rigidly to a solar motif of the symbols. Anything to do with ideas by astronomers, whatever their standing in the astronomical community, would be rigorously opposed, just as they opposed the ideas of Thom, a professor of engineering with a mathematical skill far in advance to your average archaeologist. I wondered at the time if these people actually understood the arguments made by Thom as his two books were pretty dense and involved a lot of measurements and theory. Not only that, the date around 3000BC is significant in ancient Egypt. It marks the dividing line between the Pre-dynastic period and the Old Kingdom – which witnessed a period of upheaval involving the bull of heaven. It is also a fact that a bull of heaven became prominent at the same time in Sumeria. In Egypt it was located in the north and regularly defecated over the people on earth. I can’t see the sun doing that.