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Evidence Says that Stonehenge May Have Been Erected in Wales First

By Kanika Gupta | Update Date: Dec 08, 2015 01:29 PM EST

Archaeologists mining the Stonehenge's bluestones provides staggering evidence that the England's greatest monument belonging to the prehistoric monument may have been erected in Wales. It has been known that the inner horseshoe belongs to the Pembrokeshire's Preseli Hills located 140 miles away from the Salisbury Plain. However, the scientists have found the similar bluestones that belonged to the Stonehenge, in same size and shape, towards the north of these hills in the nooks of Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin. They have also discovered stones that look similar to what the prehistoric builders may have left behind and also a loading bay that would have been used to drag these huge stones away, reports The Guardian

Prof Mike Parker Pearson, director of the project and professor of British later prehistory at University College London (UCL), said that these finds were enlightening and amazing. "We have dates of around 3400 BC for Craig Rhos-y-felin and 3200 BC for Carn Goedog, which is intriguing because the bluestones didn't get put up at Stonehenge until around 2900 BC," he said. "It could have taken those Neolithic stone-draggers nearly 500 years to get them to Stonehenge, but that's pretty improbable in my view. It's more likely that the stones were first used in a local monument, somewhere near the quarries, that was then dismantled and dragged off to Wiltshire," says Science Alert

The discovery has been published in the published in the journal Antiquity, offering exciting information about how the bluestones made it to Stonehenge. "They only had to insert wooden wedges into the cracks between the pillars and then let the Welsh rain do the rest by swelling the wood to ease each pillar off the rock face," explains one of the researchers, Josh Pollard, from the University of Southampton. "The quarry-workers then lowered the thin pillars onto platforms of earth and stone, a sort of 'loading bay' from where the huge stones could be dragged away along trackways leading out of each quarry."

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