“Oh, how they danced, the li’le children of Stone’enge!” This Neolithic ceremonial site has been the object of so much scientific investigation, mystical speculation and such since it first entered recorded history in 1130AD. Who built it? How did they build it? Was it space aliens? Druid wizards?
The latest scientific study, published in the scholarly journal Nature, analyzes sand residue in nearby rivers and determines that the mega-ton monoliths that comprise its most imposing structural elements were indeed NOT carried to the area via the movement of glacial ice, suggesting that they were transported solely through human agency. The abstract reads:
How Stonehenge’s building blocks arrived on Salisbury Plain remains debated, with glacial and human transport mechanisms proposed. Here we test the possibility of Pleistocene glacial sediment input using grain-scale U–Pb fingerprinting of detrital zircon and apatite from modern stream sediments surrounding Stonehenge. Zircon ages span 3396–285 Ma, with age peaks at ~1090, 1690, and 1740 Ma, matching the Laurentian basement of northern Britain. Salisbury Plain detrital zircon ages match those of southern British rocks sourced from the London Basin, implying local sediment recycling rather than glaciogenic transport. Apatite ages of ~60 Ma reflect post-depositional U–Pb resetting, consistent with the distal effects of the Alpine orogeny. Collectively, our data show Salisbury Plain remained unglaciated during the Pleistocene, making direct glacial transport of Stonehenge’s megaliths unlikely.
Read the whole paper
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-03105-3
Thanks to Soror Amy for the tip!
