It was described once as “a magic place where the moon doth rise with a dragon’s face.”
For centuries, the mysteries of the enduring man-made rock formation known as Stonehenge have confounded researchers, and now it appears that a new question has been raised about the origin of the site that some believe has mystical properties.
The “Altar Stone” that sits at the formation’s center has had its origin located, and strangely it didn’t come from anywhere near the site of the ancient monument, according to a new study published in the scientific journal Nature.
Anthony Clarke, the study’s lead author, told NPR that the chemical characteristics of samples of the Altar Stone were analyzed to determine where it came from.
“When you take this profile — this fingerprint, in a way — of the rock, we can forensically compare it to potential source areas all over the U.K.,” he says. “And when we did that … it was strikingly similar to Orcadian Basin sedimentary rocks.”
And the Orcadian Basin is in the northeast part of Scotland, over 450 miles away – remarkable because the monument was erected before the wheel was invented.
“When we first got the first kind of batch of data, I looked at it and I said, ‘There’s no way that this can be so distinctly Scottish,’” Clarke adds. “So we did more analysis … and time and time again, it was just so distinctly not from southern Britain, and it pointed towards it coming from this Orcadian Basin. It's just remarkable.”