STONEHENGE was a set of primitive percussion instruments used to keep kids busy on rainy days, it has emerged.
The Welsh bluestones make ringing noises when hit with smaller hammerstones, don’t require any care at all and are nearly impossible to break, fitting all the criteria of a school music cupboard.
Dr Mary Fisher said: “A glockenspiel, a tambourine, one of those ridgey things you run a stick along: none of these are proper musical instruments.
“They’re things that you give to small children for a bit of noisy time at the end of the day, or that Liam Gallagher plays onstage.
Stonehenge was assembled not in the hope of playing a melody to delight the gods, but to tick a box marked creative play on the Neolithic curriculum.
This explains why some of the stones are missing; they were likely removed to be thrown, or were stolen by dishonest but slightly pitiful kids with bad home lives.
More advanced musical instruments from the period, believed to include a sheep-gut violin and a prototype wooden keytar, were apparently kept locked away in a cave nobody had a key to.
Dr Fisher added: The sound made by Stonehenge would have echoed across modern-day Wiltshire, proving almost intolerable to anyone living nearby.
But there were no recorders, which shows our forebears were more humane than we had previously thought.
