Anthropology

search out "Standing with Stones" on You Tube, it's a 2 hour documentary/speculative history from the Beeb that makes a lot more sense than Hancock does. In addition, it's a great travelog of megalithic sites around western Europe.

Of course, one of the earliest megalithic sites is Gobeckli Tepe in Turkey. At least they've mostly stopped calling it a temple. I've wondered about traces of paint that might have been in the lowest parts of the excavation, those carvings just cry out for paint, IMO, and we know there had already been a long history of that by the time the first circle had been erected there.

I honestly see a lot of early megaliths, the simple standing stones, as the way neolithic farmers decreased the footprint of large boulders that were in the way of easily planting an area--dig a hole at one end, get the lads together with poles to lever the boulder into the hole, then wedge it upright and mostly out of the way, useful as landmarks and later as gnomons and perhaps leading to the circles that were used as observatories.

Then again, I see them as mostly practical people who needed to eat.