Research Backs Human Muscle in Stonehenge Construction

Stonehenge's biggest mystery rock likely wasn't a free ride from the Ice Age. New research leans hard toward human muscle and planning over glacial help in getting the site's 13,000-plus-pound altar stone more than 450 miles from northeast Scotland to southern England, per Smithsonian. In a new Journal of Quaternary Science paper, scientists who previously determined the stone came from Scotland's Orcadian Basin modeled ancient ice flows to test whether glaciers could have ferried the sandstone boulder to southern England during the last Ice Age.

They found no direct glacial path to Stonehenge and concluded that any scenario involving ice would require an unlikely chain of events, including people rescuing the rock from a now-submerged Dogger Bank, about 250 miles from Stonehenge, thousands of years before the monument's construction. That makes a purely glacial assist challenging to defend, the team writes. Instead, they argue Neolithic communities probably dragged and floated the 16-foot stone in stages across land and waterways—evidence, they say, of sophisticated coordination over long distances. Why pick a stone from so far away remains unknown, but study co-author Anthony Clarke likens it to our modern taste for imported marble, per New Scientist.