![]() ![]() These artifacts could be evidence left by the people who quarried there for Stonehenge, he said. Two outcrops, called Craig Rhos-y-felin and Carn Goedog, have evidence of Neolithic activity, including shallow ditches, stone tools and charcoal deposits that date to the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age, Pollard said. Pollard is part of The Stonehenge Riverside Project, whose members have studied the rock outcrops in Pembrokeshire that match the stones at Stonehenge. And it's inherently unlikely that Neolithic communities would have entirely picked over and removed all deposits of glacial. "We just don't find evidence of glacial deposits with big chunks of bluestone anywhere near Stonehenge. " is looking increasingly untenable," Josh Pollard, a professor of archaeology at the University of Southampton in England, told Live Science. ![]() Humans hypothesisĪrchaeologists, to put it mildly, disagree. This fits a pattern seen in other ancient stone monuments in the United Kingdom, in which stones were collected locally, not from far away, he said. He also noted that Stonehenge looks unfinished, likely because the glacier didn't drop enough bluestones nearby for people to complete it. When employing Occam's Razor, the idea that the simplest explanation is often the correct one, it makes sense that a glacier brought over the bluestones, rather than people finding and bringing the megaliths over, John said. Meanwhile, he said there's no evidence that humans carried, pushed or boated the boulders to Stonehenge (archaeologists disagree). It's not yet clear how far this glacier extended, "but it's a reasonable assumption that since it was such a big glacier, it may well have reached the edge of Salisbury Plain and possibly even to Stonehenge," John said. Moreover, about 500,000 years ago, the Irish Sea Glacier covered parts of the United Kingdom. John looks at it this way: Most of the bluestones aren't well-carved pillars but rather "boulders and slabs and rather clumpy bits of stone" that are characteristic of rocks caught up in glaciers. "We all love heroic tales, and I think that's why people have just accepted this, more or less, at face value without any questioning of the evidence on which it's based." "People have loved this story … all of the heroic ancestors slaving away, collecting up these stones from west Wales and then carrying them all the way to Stonehenge," he said. "Archaeologists, in general, have assumed that if the ice couldn't have carried them, therefore they must have been carried by human beings."īut this interpretation is mistaken, John said. "Since 1923, people have taken that statement as more or less definitive," John told Live Science. But a seminal 1923 paper by British geologist Herbert Henry Thomas - who linked the bluestones to rock outcrops in Pembrokeshire in western Wales - dismissed the glacier idea. This glacier hypothesis isn't new it was first proposed in 1902 in the journal Archaeologia. John is a geomorphologist, a scientist who studies how landscapes change over time, and works as an independent consultant in the United Kingdom. In his new, self-published book, "The Stonehenge Bluestones" (Greencroft Books, 2018) - due out June 1 - Brian John argues that glaciers picked up the bluestones in western Wales and dropped them off in Salisbury Plain. Just how these bluestones got to Stonehenge is up for debate. They weigh up to 4 tons (3.6 metric tons) and are made up of about 30 types of rock that come from several locations in western Wales, a distance of about 140 miles (225 km). The bluestones (named for their bluish tinge when wet or broken) are considerably smaller. ![]()
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