A "jaw-dropping" study has revealed that one of Stonehenge's central megaliths was transported to the site from from the north-east corner of Scotland, a distance of at least 750km.
Archaeologists have known for more than a century that some of the stones came from modern-day Wales and were somehow transported around 200km to the site of the Neolithic monument on Salisbury Plain in England.
However, in a discovery described by one of the scientists involved as "genuinely shocking", analysis found the largest "bluestone" at Stonehenge was dragged or floated to the site by prehistoric people from at least as far as present day Inverness and potentially from the Orkney islands.
Study co-author Rob Ixer said it "doesn't just alter what we think about Stonehenge, it alters what we think about the whole of the late Neolithic".
He told the Guardian the findings "completely rewrite" the relationship between Neolithic populations and the British Isles.
"The science is beautiful and it’s remarkable, and it’s going to be discussed for decades to come … It is jaw-dropping."
The 5m-long, 6-tonne sandstone block is not one of the famous trilithons at the prehistoric monument. Those immense, lintel topped sarsen stones have been found to originate from just 25km away and form the outer circle.
Rather, the stone in question lies flat and semi-buried in the centre of the monument, trapped under two fallen sarsen stones and barely visible to visitors.
Made of a sedimentary rock called old red sandstone, the new study involving experts from Curtin University in Perth, the University of Adelaide, Aberystwyth University and University College London, aimed to find out more about the block by examining its chemical composition and the age of minerals within it.
This allowed experts to create an "age fingerprint" for the sandstone and narrow its origin to a triangle of land in the north-east of Scotland including the Orkney islands.
However, the biggest question not explored in the paper is how did Stonehenge's prehistoric builders transport the gigantic stone almost the entire length of Great Britain?
Archaelogist Mike Pitts, who was not part of the study, said he believed the stone was more likely to have been dragged overland than floated by sea.
"If you put a stone on a boat out to sea, not only do you risk losing the stone – but also nobody can see it."
A land journey would engage en route and perhaps took many years, but was not impossible and "easily within the reach of Neolithic technology", he said.
"[The study] is exciting and it’s so significant.
"It’s long been known that the bluestones come from Wales, but this identifies links with a quite different part of Britain, and significantly more distant from Stonehenge.
"It suggests that the site was known not just to people in the south, but over a much wider area – and that opens suggestions for the whole way we think about Neolithic Britain."
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