It's a great day to be a pagan.
At 9:42 p.m. last night, the Earth's maximum axial tilt toward the Sun was 23.44 degrees. We call it the Summer Solstice, and for thousands of years, the solstice has been celebrated by humans as the beginning of the warmest season.
Warmth and sun mean crops can grow, thus staving off starvation for another year. While superstitious, Neolithic humans (7,000 to about 1,700 BC) weren't stupid. They might have thanked the gods for bringing summer back from winter's icy grip, but they were intelligent enough and observant enough to figure out complex astronomical problems.
This isn't surprising. Their lives depended on it.
The sun moves across the sky throughout the year, and determining its position on a specific day requires a certain level of observational sophistication. The remarkable thing is that different human societies throughout the world discovered the significance of the solstice at approximately the same time. Some of that was due to cross-cultural contacts, especially in Europe and Asia. However, the discovery of the significance of the solstice appears to have coincided with the emergence of agriculture. Once people could reliably determine when to plant and harvest their crops, human societies began to thrive.
While we see the summer solstice as the "official" beginning of summer, many cultures see it as the middle of summer, or "midsomer," as the Celts and Druids called it. For roughly 10,000 years, the day has been celebrated with festivals and all sorts of merriment, as the gods showed favor on the clans.
Around 5,000 years ago, migrants believed to have originated from Turkey constructed the first simple structure on the Salisbury Plain in southern England: a crude, circular design enclosed by a ditch. Today, we call it Stonehenge, with "henge" meaning "stone" in Old English. (Yep. "Stone stone.")
Other societies continued to add to the monument for the next 1,500 years, including the erection of massive stones that weighed around 25 tons and reached up to 13 feet high. They're arranged in a circular pattern, with some forming a horseshoe shape inside. Bluestones, added later, were placed inside the sarsen stones.
Stonehenge is just one of hundreds of henges throughout northern and eastern Europe. While their exact function is still unknown, they likely served as a burial site at first, and later as a gathering place for religious rites.
A record crowd gathered at Stonehenge to witness the dawn as the sun peeked through two of the sarsen stones.
About 25,000 people have celebrated the summer solstice at Stonehenge - a record breaking crowd.
The event is one of the few occasions people can walk next to the stones at the ancient site near Salisbury in Wiltshire.
It comes on what could be the UK's hottest day of the year so far with temperatures predicted to peak at 34C.
Stonehenge's operations manager Julia Richardson told the BBC it had been a peaceful event with an "amazing atmosphere".
She added it was a "perfect combination" of the warm weather and solstice falling on a weekend that brought the crowds out.
Jennifer Wexler, Stonehenge's curator of history, said the sunrise had been "amazing".
"It's a really wonderful way to come and mark this seasonal moment in time," she added.
We tend to think of these early societies as ignorant, backward, and violent. The truth is, they possess the exact same cognitive abilities as modern humans. The difference is knowledge.
There are 5,000 years of discovery, experimentation, flashes of inspiration, and pure, dumb luck that have added to the human knowledge bank between those Neolithic men and women and us. Perhaps the best way to acknowledge the solstice is give a tip of the cap to those early societies upon which our modern society was built.
