Thunderstones
Stones believed to fall with lightning, and why scholars long refused to believe in meteorites.
Key facts
- People and tradition
- Europe, Asia and Africa
- Region
- Worldwide
- When
- Ancient times to the 19th century
The story
Across much of Europe, and in parts of Asia and Africa, people believed that lightning could hurl stones to the ground. Farmers who found smooth stone axe-heads in their fields, or bullet-shaped fossils, called them thunderstones, ceraunia or 'thunderbolts', and kept them as charms against fire and lightning. Some were built into walls or hung in houses for protection.
Real falling stones fitted into this belief too, and many early records of meteorite falls describe them as stones that came down 'with thunder'. That was in fact accurate, because the sonic booms of a large meteor do sound like thunder.
What science says
Most thunderstones were not from the sky. The axe-heads were tools made by Stone Age people, and the bullet shapes were fossils of belemnites, extinct relatives of squid. Their link with lightning was one reason scholars in the 18th century dismissed reports of stones falling from the sky as superstition. Only after the physicist Ernst Chladni argued in 1794 that they came from space, and after chemical work and the great fall at L'Aigle in 1803, did scientists accept that meteorites are real.
Did you know?
Lightning does make a kind of stone: fulgurites, glassy tubes formed where it strikes sand or rock.
The booms that accompany a large fireball can be heard up to about 100 km away.