Artificial islands ain’t what they used to be. These days, they’re often billionaire playgrounds in Dubai or airports that look like Bond villain headquarters. But humans have been building fake islands for thousands of years, and some of the oldest examples have been resting under Scottish lochs since the Neolithic era. What they were used for, researchers don’t know yet, but we recently learned more about them than we ever have before. A recently published paper in Advances in Archaeological Practice focused on these so-called “crannogs,” which are small human-made islands built from wood, stone, and brushwood. They can be found all across Scotland. Archaeologists studying a crannog at Loch Bhorgastail on the Isle of Lewis discovered the site is more than 5,000 years old, putting it in the same age range as Stonehenge, killing the assumption that most crannogs were more of an Iron Age thing. Videos by VICE The island itself started as a circular wooden platform roughly 75 feet across.…