Overview
- A Curtin University study concludes Salisbury Plain stayed ice-free during the Pleistocene, undermining the glacial-erratic explanation for Stonehenge’s bluestones and the Altar Stone.
- Researchers used U–Pb dating on more than 500 zircon crystals and additional apatite grains from nearby rivers, leveraging equipment at Curtin’s John de Laeter Centre.
- Zircon ages clustered between 1.7 and 1.1 billion years, aligning with the local Thanet Formation rather than distant Welsh or Scottish sources.
- Apatite grains dated to about 60 million years, signaling long-resident local sediments altered by regional processes rather than glacial input.
- Published January 21, 2026 in Communications Earth & Environment, the work bolsters the human-transport hypothesis while leaving the exact prehistoric routes and techniques unresolved.