More than 500 of these 5,000-year-old carved stone balls have been found, mostly in Scotland, but their objective continues to be a mystery.

Have You Seen These Beautiful Carved Stone Balls Of Scotland Yet? See Pics 2

Hundreds of detailed carved stone balls dating from Prehistoric Scotland have been excavated over the centuries, but their purpose remains a dilemma. More than 500 of the stone balls have been found in all, most sized to match the same size as the palm of the hand.

Have You Seen These Beautiful Carved Stone Balls Of Scotland Yet? See Pics 3

They have been shaped beautifully from the surface and some retain beautiful, sophisticated patterns incised onto them.

The carvings are so elaborate that early archaeologists didn’t believe that it was probable for them to have been made using flint equipment, so they dated them to a later period. But we know they were certainly carved using flint and date back to around 3,200 BC to 2,500 BC, a period when people in Scotland were leaving their existences as hunter-gatherers and resolving into life in farming communities. Although no strong evidence exists to definitively specify their function, many have believed in different purposes of these stones.

Have You Seen These Beautiful Carved Stone Balls Of Scotland Yet? See Pics 4

Some believe that they were components of a weighing system for basic scales, but others complain that their weights differ too much for that to be logical. Others have indicated that they were used as weapons, either fixed to a wooden handle or simply thrown. But the maximum of the stones shows no indications of the kind of damage you’d see on a normal weapon.

To achieve more understanding, and make the stones more available and accessible to the public, Anderson-Whymark has built 3D images of the balls. He used a method called photogrammetry. Anderson-Whymark took hundreds of 2D pictures from every angle to develop very detailed 3D renderings of 60 carved stone balls.

Have You Seen These Beautiful Carved Stone Balls Of Scotland Yet? See Pics 5

The 3D images also indicated that some of the stones were altered over time, probably across generations. According to the museum, the structures on the ball are religious symbols resembling those in a passage grave in Ireland.

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