New research has unlocked secrets behind the origins of Britian's fabled prehistoric monument, Stonehenge. The WA led study has cast doubt over where its iconic Altar Stone came from.
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00:00Anthony Clark first visited Stonehenge in southern England when he was just one, and
00:06like the rest of the world, he remains baffled by the question of how it came to be.
00:11He went on to research the man-made structure, only to find there was more to the mystery
00:15of its origins.
00:16We found out that the central six-ton stone at the heart of Stonehenge, the altar stone,
00:22actually comes from north-east Scotland and not Wales.
00:25It's a discovery raising more questions than answers.
00:28We thought for the longest time that the altar stone came from Wales, which is only
00:31a few hundred kilometres away from Stonehenge.
00:34But this discovery, that it came from north-east Scotland, at least 700 kilometres away, is
00:38going to have big implications for how we understand movement and the transfer of people
00:43in Neolithic Britain.
00:44So all this material is being carefully chosen and being brought together.
00:48So the question really now is, you know, how did these early Britons bring all this material
00:55together and, indeed, why did they bring all this construction material together?
01:00The same tools used to analyse WA's resource-rich north-west helped scientists examine the altar
01:05stone's fingerprint using the grain-like crystals in the sandstone.
01:08And we analysed the age and chemical composition of these grains and that gives us almost like
01:14a fingerprint that we can then compare to other rocks throughout Britain and Ireland,
01:18kind of like a barcode.
01:20The next step is to find out precisely where the stone came from 5,000 years ago.
01:25So we've narrowed it down to a restricted area in Scotland, but there is a huge amount
01:29of mountains and quarries that it could have come from, so the hunt really has now commenced.
01:34A hunt for answers to unravel an ancient mystery.