Stonehenge’s Mysterious Altar Stone May Have Come From Scotland, Not Wales

Researchers at the University College London published a study on Wednesday in the journal Nature, which claims the 6 ton “altar stone” in the center of the Stonehenge was transported more than 450 miles from the Orcadian Basin in northeast Scotland. “It completely rewrites the relationships between the Neolithic populations of the whole of the British Isles,” Rob Ixer, an honorary senior research fellow at University College London, told The Guardian of the discovery. Ixer added that stones may have been transported from as far north as the Orkney Islands, some 680 miles away from the Stonehenge. Researchers were able to identify the origin of the rock by examining the mineral and chemical composition, which matched red sandstone found in Scotland. “With that age fingerprint, you can match it to the same sort of rocks around the UK–and the match for the age fingerprint was a dead ringer for the Orcadian Basin in Northeast Scotland,” Nick Pearce, one of the report’s co-authors, told The Guardian. Researchers previously believed that the stone had been transported from Wales, nearly 125 miles away.