# https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W88gjGCTe9g
# by @ThePrehistoryGuys

2025-01-10

@JorgeStolfi
2 weeks ago
Sigh.  The new facts on the provenance of the Altar Stone only prove that the picture of British Neolithic built by British Archaeologists is mostly a romantic fantasy.
Yes, the Altar stone was brought from North Scotland, and the bluestones were brought from Wales.  But not by humans! They are quite obviously erratics deposited in Southern England by glaciers and icebergs, tens or hundreds of millions of years ago.  Glaciers are known to have flowed down the Irish sea and then southeast over Wales and Southern England.  The bluestone pillars were picked up from the Wales "quarries" as the ice flowed over them. 
As for the sarsens, they came from a layer of river-deposited sandstone that overlaid the current limestone bedrock, and broke down as the chalk was eroded under it.   There are thousands of sarsen blocks scattered over several places in Southern England, including in a patch that includes the alleged "quarry" a few miles away, but in fact surrounds Stonehenge on all sides.
Neolithic people did not bother to quarry their monoliths.  They had no reason to. They only moved and erected the boulders that littered the landscape at the time, often with little or no shaping and dressing. 

And the most obvious part of Stonehenge -- the outer ring of sarsens with lintels and the trilithons -- were later additions, whose construction was apparently abandoned halfway.