Humans, not glaciers, carried Stonehenge’s megaliths across Britain and to their current location in southern England, a new study has confirmed.
Scientists have believed for decades that the iconic stones of this 5,000-year-old monument came from present-day Wales and as far away as Scotland, but there is still debate as to how the stones ended up on Salisbury Plain in southern England.
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“Previous studies have cast doubt on the theory of glacial transport, but our study goes a step further by applying state-of-the-art mineral fingerprinting to trace the stones’ true origin,” study authors Anthony Clark, a research geologist at Australia’s Curtin University, and Christopher Kirkland, a professor of geology at Curtin University, wrote in The Conversation.
Stonehenge’s bluestone, so-called because of its bluish hue when wet or freshly cracked, comes from the Preseli Hills in west Wales, where people may have dragged Stonehenge 140 miles (225 kilometers) to the site of the prehistoric monument. Even more surprising, researchers believe that the altar stones inside Stonehenge’s central circle came from northern England or Scotland, at least 300 miles (500 kilometers) from Salisbury Plain, and may have required a boat.
The glacial transport theory is a counter-proposal to the idea that people moved stones from other parts of Britain to build monuments on Salisbury Plain, and instead used stones that had already been transported by natural means. However, archaeologists dispute this idea, as Stonehenge’s rocks show no evidence of glacial movement and the southern extent of Britain’s former ice sheet remains unknown.
To investigate further, researchers behind the new study used known radioactive decay rates to date small flecks of zircon and apatite minerals left behind from ancient rocks in river sediments around Stonehenge. The age of these spots can reveal the age of rocks that once existed in the area, which can provide information about where these rocks came from.
Different rock formations have different ages, so if the rocks that became part of Stonehenge were dragged across the land by glaciers, these small traces could be left around Salisbury Plain, matching rocks from their original location.
The researchers analyzed more than 700 zircon and apatite particles, but found no significant matches to rocks from west Wales or Scotland. Instead, most of the zircon grains examined date to between 1.7 billion and 1.1 billion years ago, coinciding with a time when much of what is now southern England was covered in compacted sand, the researchers write in The Conversation. Meanwhile, the age of the apatite grains converged around 60 million years ago, when southern England was a shallow subtropical ocean. This means that the minerals in the river around Stonehenge are remnants of local rock and not washed in from elsewhere.
The results suggest that glaciers did not extend as far south as Salisbury Plain during the last ice age, with the possible exception of ice sheets falling from the Stonehenge megaliths and subsequent use by ancient builders.
“This provided further evidence that the monument’s most exotic stones did not arrive by chance, but were deliberately selected and transported,” the researchers wrote.
Clark, Aji, & Kirkland, C. L. (2026). Detrital zircon-apatite fingerprinting challenges glacial transport of Stonehenge megaliths. Communication Earth and Environment, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-03105
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