{"id":694073,"date":"2026-06-09T19:22:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T19:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/694073\/"},"modified":"2026-06-09T19:22:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T19:22:12","slug":"research-backs-human-muscle-in-stonehenge-construction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/694073\/","title":{"rendered":"Research Backs Human Muscle in Stonehenge Construction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"storyParagraph\">&#13;<br \/>\n                                        Stonehenge&#8217;s biggest mystery rock likely wasn&#8217;t a free ride from the Ice Age. New research leans hard toward human muscle and planning over glacial help in getting the site&#8217;s 13,000-plus-pound altar stone more than 450 miles from northeast Scotland to southern England, per <a href=\"https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/smart-news\/how-did-stonehenge-get-its-altar-stone-new-research-reveals-evidence-adding-to-the-debate-between-human-effort-and-glacier-transport-180988918\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Smithsonian<\/a>. In a new <a href=\"https:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/full\/10.1002\/jqs.70080\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Journal of Quaternary Science<\/a> paper, scientists who previously determined the stone <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newser.com\/story\/354492\/stonehenges-altar-stone-came-from-scotland.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">came from Scotland&#8217;s Orcadian Basin<\/a> modeled ancient ice flows to test whether glaciers could have ferried the sandstone boulder to southern England during the last Ice Age.&#13;\n                                    <\/p>\n<p class=\"storyParagraph\">&#13;<br \/>\n                                        They found no direct glacial path to Stonehenge and concluded that any scenario involving ice would require an unlikely chain of events, including people rescuing the rock from a now-submerged Dogger Bank, about 250 miles from Stonehenge, thousands of years before the monument&#8217;s construction. That makes a purely glacial assist challenging to defend, the team writes. Instead, they argue Neolithic communities probably dragged and floated the 16-foot stone in stages across land and waterways\u2014evidence, they say, of sophisticated coordination over long distances. Why pick a stone from so far away remains unknown, but study co-author Anthony Clarke likens it to our modern taste for imported marble, per <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/2529005-stonehenges-altar-stone-probably-wasnt-transported-by-a-glacier\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">New Scientist<\/a>.&#13;\n                                    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"&#13; Stonehenge&#8217;s biggest mystery rock likely wasn&#8217;t a free ride from the Ice Age. New research leans hard&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":694074,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[9333,63060,79,69621],"class_list":["post-694073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-england","tag-ice-age","tag-science","tag-stonehenge"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=694073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/694074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=694073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=694073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=694073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}