2007-09-01, Irish Mystery 爱尔兰的秘密（在线收听）

Out of the mists of the Stone Age, this structure has stood since the dawn of recorded history. This rounded tomb called Newgrange has stood on the bend of Ireland's River Boyne for more than 5,000 years. It is massive, distinct and very mysterious.

The mound of earth covers a rock passageway, which leads to a central chamber where the ashes and bones of the dead were placed. Long thought to be just a tomb, in the late 1960s, archeologists uncovered an amazing secret that shed new light on this ancient structure. On the winter solstice , the longest night and shortest day of the year, a shaft of light enters a perfectly positioned window and lights up the 60-foot corridor that leads to the basin of ancestral bones, an impressive feat of engineering, considering its Stone Age builders possessed only rudimentary technologies.

It's particularly important, because it's been proven without doubt that it was very deliberately aligned to sunrise at the winter solstice.

Its facade is a white quartz, restored by archeologists who believed the mound was originally covered in a smooth stone that reflected the light. The massive stones in the interior were perhaps pulled from the river. The builders probably moved the boulders into position by rolling them on logs. Archeologists believe it took decades to construct Newgrange. And since life expectancy was short, only about 40 years, the project likely was handed down from generation to the next. Little is known about the Neolithic farming community that created this structure. Why they built it is still a mystery. Perhaps the mound was a place of worship. Historians admit they just don't know.

We know they were used as burial places, but we also think they would have been used as places for ritual gatherings, or a pla(ce), a focus for community gatherings, and place to and honor the ancestors.

For more than 5,000 years, Newgrange has captured the rising sun of the winter solstice. It's a lasting monument to human ingenuity and to a desire as old as mankind. Even then people strove to understand great forces of nature and to harness them even if only for a brief moment in time.
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