SCIENTISTS SOLVE STONEHENGE MYSTERY
Study suggests builders of monument came from Wales
DESPITE a century of scientific scrutiny, the 5,000-year-old Neolithic monument in southern England known as Stonehenge has yielded few secrets about the people buried amidst its ring of towering rocks.
Most of their remains were cremated, leaving only ashes, a few bone fragments, and an archaeological dead-end.
But a eureka moment of discovery by Christophe Snoeck, a University of Oxford graduate student at the time, revealed that many probably came from as far afield as Wales in western Britain, source of the bluestone used to carve Stonehenge’s mysterious and entrancing monuments.
Some of these prehistoric wayfarers — who may have helped transport the massive stones — were cremated before their ashes were laid to rest, Snoeck and colleagues reported in a study published on Thursday in Scientific Reports.
What Snoeck discovered in the lab is that strontium, a heavy element found in bone, resists the high temperatures of a funeral pyre, which can top 1,000°C.
For scientists trying to tease out data from human remains burnt to a crisp, this opened up a gold mine.
Cremation destroys all organic matter, including DNA.
“But all the inorganic matter survives, and there is a huge amount of information contained in the inorganic fraction of human remains,” Snoeck explained.
By measuring traces of strontium, he said, “it is possible to evaluate the origin of the food we eat, especially the plants”.