Stonehenge’s 6-ton altar stone may have traveled from Scotland by glacier

Stonehenge’s six-ton Altar Stone may have been carried from Scotland to Dogger Bank by glaciers before prehistoric people transported it hundreds of kilometers to Salisbury Plain. The possible multistage journey suggests remarkable organization and raises the possibility that the stone was valued long before it became part of Stonehenge. Stonehenge’s 6-ton altar stone may have traveled from Scotland by glacier.

A team from Sheffield Hallam University and Curtin University, Australia, analyzed ancient ice movement and found that glaciers during Britain’s last ice age may have transported the stone from Scotland’s Orcadian Basin as far as Dogger Bank in the North Sea. From there, however, people would still have had to move it hundreds of kilometers to Salisbury Plain. Stonehenge’s central Altar Stone is a six-tonne sandstone megalith that researchers now believe came from northeast Scotland, roughly 700 km (435 miles) from Stonehenge.

Its distant origin has raised one of the monument’s most intriguing questions: how did such an enormous stone travel so far. Tracing the Altar Stone From Scotland To reconstruct the possible route, researchers combined mineral grain dating with computer models of ancient ice sheets. This allowed them to investigate both where the stone originated and whether glaciers could realistically have carried it south.