Stonehenge’s construction some 5,000 years ago is widely considered one of the most impressive feats of engineering in the Neolithic world. Now, new evidence suggests that the English monument actually dates back to an even earlier time—and an entirely different location.
The findings, published in the journal Antiquity, indicate that prehistoric people first erected a near-identical monument containing at least some of the same towering stones in Wales. Only later did they move the stone circle to its current location in southwestern England, roughly 150 miles away.
“I’ve been researching Stonehenge for 20 years now and this really is the most exciting thing we’ve ever found,” lead author Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeologist at University College London, tells the Guardian’s Dalya Alberge.
Researchers had already known that ancient Britons mined the famous 6- to 10-foot-tall “bluestones” of Stonehenge in the Preseli hills of what’s now Pembrokeshire on the Wales coast. British geologist Herbert Thomas first suggested the hills as the likely source of the stones around a century ago, and more recent research has narrowed the location down.
