Stonehenge: a transformative discovery

Neolithic people travelled much further afield than previously thought to choose the famous landmark's central altar stone

The ancient neolithic monument of Stonehenge near Amesbury, in Wiltshire, England
To identify the altar stone's source, archaeologists and geologists analysed a piece broken off in 1844
(Image credit: Getty Images_Matt Cardy)

"Even by modern standards, John O'Groats to Wiltshire is a bit of a trek," said Hannah Devlin in The Guardian. Walking a solid eight hours a day, you might cover the nearly 500 miles in ten days – and that's without dragging a huge slab of stone behind you. So the revelation that Stonehenge's central altar stone – a six-tonne, five-metre-long rectangular piece of sandstone – arrived at the site around 4,500 years ago not from south Wales, as had previously been thought, but from the far northeast of Scotland, is, by any standards, astonishing.

X-ray analysis

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