Platonic solids, 1500 years before Plato

My next post was scheduled to be my long review of The Trouble with Physics, almost finished by now, but I saw this in John Baez's last This Week's Finds column and thought it was too cool not to post it. The Neolithic inhabitants of what now is Scotland were familiar with the five Platonic solids already by the year 2000 BC or so, as evidenced by these stone carvings dating from that period:




Baez points to this paper for more on regular polyhedra in different areas of science, and to this great talk by himself on the dodecahedron.