Ancient Britons likely transported Stonehenge’s Altar Stone 700 kilometers from Scotland
Stonehenge has always invited big questions, but one of its most stubborn mysteries sits low to the ground. The Altar Stone, a six-ton sandstone block at the monument’s center, appears to have come from northeast Scotland, about 700 kilometers away, and new research suggests that even ice could not have finished the job. That matters because the stone’s journey has often been pulled between two explanations. Either people moved it across Britain, or glaciers did most of the work during the Ice Age. The new analysis does not entirely erase ice from the picture, but it sharply narrows what glaciers could have done and leaves human effort at the center of the story. The research team, led in part by Curtin University, combined two approaches to revisit the puzzle. One traced the stone’s likely birthplace by comparing the ages of mineral grains inside it with rock samples from across Scotland. The other used ice-sheet modelling to test whether shifting glacial flows could have carried a massive sandstone block south toward Salisbury Plain. Their answer is …
