What Do Stonehenge and Japanese Stone Circles Have in Common?

[wnylib]

11. I looked up some information about stone circles

and found that the oldest ones in the world are at Gobekli Tape in Turkey. They are 11,000 years old (9000 BCE). They precede iron tools, pottery, and agriculture. These circles were ceremonial sites. There is no indication that people lived at the sites.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gobekli-tepe-the-worlds-first-temple-83613665/

Stonehenge and the Japanese site of Oyu are both from around 2500 BCE. The location of Stonehenge was used as a ceremonial site as far back as 5000 BCE, but the stones were not erected until 2000+ years later. So, coming from the same time period, it is unlikely that either of the two cultures, thousands of miles apart, copied from the other.

But the idea of stone circle monuments might have spread from Turkey to other places. There are stone circles in several countries on the European mainland, so the idea might have spread from someplace like France to the British Isles, in England, Scotland, and Ireland.

How the idea for stone circles reached Japan is a mystery. Maybe they are not from outside Japan but were independently developed by the Jomon culture in Japan.