Scotland's 5,000-year-old carved stone balls shrouded in mystery

By Jane Bracher, for CNN

Updated 1414 GMT (2214 HKT) July 26, 2018

More than 500 of these 5,000-year-old carved stone balls have been discovered, mostly in Scotland, but their purpose remains a mystery.
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More than 500 of these 5,000-year-old carved stone balls have been discovered, mostly in Scotland, but their purpose remains a mystery.
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Featuring knobs and intricate markings of spirals and lines, these stone balls date back to around 3,200 BC to 2,500 BC.
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Featuring knobs and intricate markings of spirals and lines, these stone balls date back to around 3,200 BC to 2,500 BC.
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The Towie ball, seen here as a 3D image, is perhaps the most beautiful example. It is on display at the National Museums Scotland, in Edinburgh.
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The Towie ball, seen here as a 3D image, is perhaps the most beautiful example. It is on display at the National Museums Scotland, in Edinburgh.
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Some of the balls were found in the remarkably preserved Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae, in the Orkney Islands, off the northern coast of Scotland.
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Some of the balls were found in the remarkably preserved Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae, in the Orkney Islands, off the northern coast of Scotland.
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The carved stone balls were created during an era when people transitioned from hunter gatherers to farmers, in settlements such as Skara Brae.
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The carved stone balls were created during an era when people transitioned from hunter gatherers to farmers, in settlements such as Skara Brae.
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To gain a better understanding of the carved stone balls, and to bring the collection closer to the public, Hugo Anderson-Whymark, curator of National Museums Scotland, created 3D images of 60 balls from the museum's collection.
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To gain a better understanding of the carved stone balls, and to bring the collection closer to the public, Hugo Anderson-Whymark, curator of National Museums Scotland, created 3D images of 60 balls from the museum's collection.
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Using a technique called photogrammetry, Anderson-Whymark took hundreds of 2D images from every angle to create very detailed 3D renderings of the stone balls. The resulting 3D images revealed previously unseen details in the design.
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Using a technique called photogrammetry, Anderson-Whymark took hundreds of 2D images from every angle to create very detailed 3D renderings of the stone balls. The resulting 3D images revealed previously unseen details in the design.
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For instance, this 3D image of a carved stone ball from Buchromb, Banffshire, showed evidence that the large knob was reworked into smaller ones over time, suggesting a process of modification that was not known before the 3D images were made.
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For instance, this 3D image of a carved stone ball from Buchromb, Banffshire, showed evidence that the large knob was reworked into smaller ones over time, suggesting a process of modification that was not known before the 3D images were made.
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It's unclear what modifying these carved balls over time could mean, but Anderson-Whymark said that at the very least it opens the door to other possibilities about the balls' purpose and significance to people of that era.
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It's unclear what modifying these carved balls over time could mean, but Anderson-Whymark said that at the very least it opens the door to other possibilities about the balls' purpose and significance to people of that era.
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(CNN)Hundreds of elaborately carved stone balls dating from Prehistoric Scotland have been discovered over the centuries, but their purpose remains a mystery.

More than 500 of the stone balls have been found in total, most sized to fit neatly into the palm of the hand. They have been shaped so that a number of knobs protrude from the surface and some have beautiful, intricate patterns incised onto them.
So elaborate are the carvings that early archaeologists didn't believe it was possible for them to have been made using flint tools, so they dated them to a later period. But we know they were indeed carved using flint and date back to around 3,200 BC to 2,500 BC, a time when people in Scotland were leaving their lives as hunter gatherers and settling into life in farming communities.
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      What were they for?

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      Although no hard evidence exists to definitively determine their function, many have speculated as to the stones' purpose.
      Some believe that they were part of a weighing system for primitive scales, but others argue that their weights vary too much for that to be practical. They might have been used to weigh down fishing nets, or as bearings to move bigger rocks, but then why would they be carved so elaborately?
      Australian author Lynne Kelly has proposed that the stone balls served as "memory devices" that could have been used as mnemonic aids to the oral history of the times, much like Australian Aboriginal cultures used rock art and their surroundings.