The Altar Stone at Stonehenge may have been sourced from northeasterly Scotland , at least 700 kilometers ( 434 international mile ) away from its concluding placement in southwest England . It ’s not clear how prehistoric humans managed to enthrall the 6 - ton rock to the other side of the British Isles , but the new enquiry adds further intrigue to the story of the far-famed Neolithic site .
grammatical construction atStonehengebegan around 5,000 years ago , with multiple modifications and add-on made over the following 2,000 years . It was antecedently thought that the henge was comprise of two rock ‘n’ roll case : the large iconic sarsen , likely sourced around 25 kilometers ( 15.5 miles ) off near Marlborough , plus the lowly bluestone , collected from the Preseli Hillsin southwest Wales .
For one C , it had been assume that the Altar Stone , a large sandstone auction block value 5 by 1 meters ( over 16 by 3 infantry ) buried flat in the heart of the memorial , was one of the Welsh bluestones , butrecent inquiry showedthat was n’t the caseful .
The Altar Stone is the flat stone seen here underneath two bigger fallen Sarsen stones.Image credit: Professor Nick Pearce/Aberystwyth University
To expose its mystical stock , scientist from Curtin University and Aberystwyth University read a closer look at its geochemical makeup .
When I found out that it was Scottish , my team and I thought : ‘ No way did people move this . It ’s just too far . ’ It ’s wholly unprecedented .
“ The Altar Stone is a sandstone made up of individual caryopsis , kind of like grains at the beach that have been squished together , and some of these grains are minerals that contain U . Over geological metre , atomic number 92 will decay to lead and we experience the rate at which that radioactive decay physical process occurs . So in a way , each of these grains is almost like a miniature nuclear clock,”Anthony Clarke , lead writer and PhD student at Curtin University ’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences , tell IFLScience .
“ If we date several of these grains within the Altar Stone , it allow us to build up a fingerprint of ages , like a barcode , a serial serial publication of numbers . That can be statistically compared to reservoir rocks throughout Britain and Ireland . When we did that , it was very much clearly Scots , ” he explain .
In particular , the Altar Star shares some preternatural similarities with the Old Red Sandstone found in the Orcadian Basin in northeasterly Scotland , around 750 kilometers ( 466 miles ) away from Stonehenge .
“ When I found out that it was Scottish , my team and I thought : ‘ No means did people move this . It ’s just too far . ’ It ’s totally unprecedented , ” Clarke added .
“ Even today , a journeying from Scotland [ to southwest England ] is jolly gruelling . Back then , the land was heavily forested . There were mountain range : the Pennines , the Cairngorms , the Grampians , and the Southern Uplands . It was boggy , ” he mark .
suck away by the aloofness , the team explore the possibility that the rock was moved due south across the British Isles by glaciers . However , they found that almost all the frosting course over the past 1 million years had go northwards , the polar direction of the rock ’s movement . There ’s also no sign of methamphetamine hydrochloride trend on the stone , either .
This led them to conclude that the only way the Altar Stone could have travel this huge length was by gravy boat .
plentitude of archeological evidence shows that marine transport routeswere well - establishedacross Neolithic Europe and hoi polloi had developedsurprisingly sophisticated vesselsaround this time . While the transit of the Altar Stone would be the longest record journey for any Oliver Stone used in a monument during this period , it ’s not a totally crazy idea that it was send all the way down Britain ’s coast .
“ It seems that mayhap the ancient domain was a lot more attached than we might think , ” Clarke reason out .
The new cogitation is bring out in the journalNature .
