Good post, I echo totally your second paragraph about feeling a profound sense of sorrow when meditating on these ancient sites. I didn't want to poison the well by introducing a theory of my own when I made the original post, but I agree more or less with the suggestion that the animals represent constellations and the ball in the middle is the sun, so the sun was nestled in sagittarius at the time when that map of constellations accurately depicted the night sky, which some have estimated is over 12,000 years ago. So the stone serves as a highly stylized marker to commemorate a date. Instead of just writing the date in whatever language was used at the time, they chose to represent it in a way that would be more universal and that future peoples might be able to decode. And additionally, given that the whole site was intentionally covered up in rubble and its use was discontinued right around the time where the younger Dryas event occurred, it introduces the possibility that they knew exactly what was going to happen well ahead of time. A horrifying thought. These were creative people, so if that's true, what did they do about it? I'd like to think some did try to go underground, and others attempted to spread about the globe, take their chances and hope for the best. There are ancient tunnels all over Europe, the near-east and Mesopotamia that I bet have much more of a story to tell us.