The central Altar Stone of Stonehenge came from 700km away in Scotland, Australian study suggests

ABC NEWS (Australia)

New research has unlocked secrets behind the origins of Britian's fabled prehistoric monument, Stonehenge. The WA led study has cast doubt over where its iconic Altar Stone came from.

Transcript

00:00Anthony Clark first visited Stonehenge in southern England when he was just one, and

00:06like the rest of the world, he remains baffled by the question of how it came to be.

00:11He went on to research the man-made structure, only to find there was more to the mystery

00:15of its origins.

00:16We found out that the central six-ton stone at the heart of Stonehenge, the altar stone,

00:22actually comes from north-east Scotland and not Wales.

00:25It's a discovery raising more questions than answers.

00:28We thought for the longest time that the altar stone came from Wales, which is only

00:31a few hundred kilometres away from Stonehenge.

00:34But this discovery, that it came from north-east Scotland, at least 700 kilometres away, is

00:38going to have big implications for how we understand movement and the transfer of people

00:43in Neolithic Britain.

00:44So all this material is being carefully chosen and being brought together.

00:48So the question really now is, you know, how did these early Britons bring all this material

00:55together and, indeed, why did they bring all this construction material together?

01:00The same tools used to analyse WA's resource-rich north-west helped scientists examine the altar

01:05stone's fingerprint using the grain-like crystals in the sandstone.

01:08And we analysed the age and chemical composition of these grains and that gives us almost like

01:14a fingerprint that we can then compare to other rocks throughout Britain and Ireland,

01:18kind of like a barcode.

01:20The next step is to find out precisely where the stone came from 5,000 years ago.

01:25So we've narrowed it down to a restricted area in Scotland, but there is a huge amount

01:29of mountains and quarries that it could have come from, so the hunt really has now commenced.

01:34A hunt for answers to unravel an ancient mystery.

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