The bones of people buried at Stonehenge, who died and were cremated about 5,000 years ago, have given up their secrets: like the bluestones, which form part of the famous prehistoric monument, they came from west Wales, near the Preseli Hills where the stones were quarried.

The remains of at least 10 of 25 individuals, whose brittle charred bones were buried at the monument, showed that they did not spend their lives on the Wessex chalk downland, but came from more than 100 miles away. Examination of the remains showed they were consistent with a region that includes west Wales, the most likely origin of at least some of these people.



Although the team, led by scientists from the University of Oxford with colleagues in Paris and Brussels, cannot prove that the remains are of people who actually built the monument, the earliest cremation dates are described as “tantalisingly” close to the date when the bluestones were brought into the earlier ditch and bank monument to form the first stone circle.

More attention has been paid to how and when Stonehenge was built – from the earliest earth works and totem pole-like timber posts to the final creation of the famous silhouette of the post and lintel circle of the gigantic sarsen stones – than to the people who built it. This is partly due to the difficulty in extracting evidence from the early human remains.



The new discovery, published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, is the result of success in extracting strontium isotopes – which can reveal where the individuals spent the last years of their lives – from cremated bone, something which had until recently been thought impossible.



Christophe Snoeck, who led the team while studying for his doctorate at Oxford, revealed the experiments followed a test pyre built in a college backyard using a pig foot and a pig shoulder begged from a local butcher. The tests on the late Neolithic bones followed, and the results bore out Snoeck’s conviction that although so much was destroyed or altered by cremation, including the tooth enamel usually used for isotope tests, the heat of a pyre that could reach 1000C could also crystallise the bone, sealing in the isotopes



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Scientists created an experimental pyre for the cremations Photograph: Christophe Snoeck

“As a chemical engineer in love with archaeology, this looked like the perfect challenge,” Snoeck told the Guardian, speaking from a conference in Chile. “Cremation indeed destroys all organic matter including DNA, but the inorganic matter survives.”



“Clearly when it comes to light chemical elements such as carbon and oxygen these are heavily altered, but for heavier elements such as strontium – about seven times heavier than carbon – no alteration was observed. On the contrary, thanks to the high temperatures reached, the structure of the bone is modified, making the bone resistant to post-mortem exchanges with the burial soil.”



It was known that Stonehenge was used as an early cremation cemetery, but not who was buried there. The tests were all on tiny pieces of skulls which were buried in the “Aubrey holes” (named for the 17th-century naturalist John Aubrey who first spotted them), a circle of 56 pits outside the stone circle now showing only as marks in the turf. It used to be thought that the pits held timber posts, but recent excavations have found bluestone chips suggesting they may have held the first circle of the bluestones which were then repeatedly rearranged for centuries.



The bones were excavated in the 1920s by Colonel William Hawley, who re-identified the Aubrey holes, but to the chagrin of generations of later scientists he reburied them in one of the pits instead of depositing them in a museum. They were re-excavated in 2008.

The earliest bones have been dated to about 3000 BC, and then cover a range of around 500 years. John Pouncett, a lead author of the study, said: “The earliest dates are tantalisingly close to the date we believe the bluestones arrived, and though we cannot prove they are the bones of the people who brought them, there must at least be a relationship. The range of dates raises the possibility that for centuries people could have been brought to Stonehenge for burial with the stones.”



The revelation sheds new light on the people who built Stonehenge and regarded it as a special place in its earliest centuries. The huge sarsen stones were comparatively easy to deliver to Stonehenge, merely having to be dragged 20 miles across Salisbury plain. It’s known that the bluestones came from Preseli, but arguments have raged over how. Were they dragged overland, shipped around the coast, swept east by glaciers, or flown by Merlin the magician as the medieval historian Geoffrey of Monmouth insisted?



The glacier theory was abandoned when the actual quarry sites were discovered in 2015, complete with traces of the stonemasons’ cooking fires. However, the discovery added a further mystery to the already layered history of Stonehenge: the stones were quarried centuries before they arrived at Stonehenge, leading some to believe that they originally formed a monument in Wales which was then moved more than 100 miles east, with stupendous effort and for unguessable reasons.

The new discovery would have brought joy to the heart of Prof Geoffrey Wainwright, former chief archaeologist of English Heritage and a passionately patriotic Welshman, who died last year after a lifetime trying to prove that his countrymen created the monument as well as providing the stones.



In 2008 he and Prof Tim Darvill made worldwide headlines when they announced their conviction that the bluestones – spotted dolerite, blue and sparkling with quartz stars when freshly quarried – were regarded by some to this day as having healing powers and that Stonehenge therefore functioned as “the Lourdes of prehistoric Europe”.

</s>Builders Of Stonehenge May Have Been From Wales, More Than 100 Miles Away

A new study reveals that the architects and builders of Stonehenge may have been Welsh, from more than 100 miles away. The journal Scientific Reports reveals some human remains excavated at the site were from the Preseli Mountains in Wales. While many studies have focused on the construction of Stonehenge, this is one of the first to explore who the people were that built it.

The earliest bones excavated date to about 3000 B.C., and the rest span a range of 500 years, according to The Guardian. John Pouncett, a co-author of the study, says, "The range of dates raises the possibility that for centuries people could have been brought to Stonehenge for burial with the stones."

Because some of the monoliths used to build Stonehenge also come from the Preseli Mountains, it is possible that those buried there transported the stones, or were taken to Stonehenge from Wales for burial.

Pouncett adds, "The cremated remains ... and updated mapping of the biosphere suggest that people from the Preseli Mountains not only supplied the bluestones used to build the stone circle but moved with the stones and were buried there too."

The research shows the type of wood fuel used in cremation of some of the bones also was not local. In addition, the bones' cremation dates are "tantalizingly close" to the time when the stones were first erected, according to The Guardian.

Christophe Snoeck, a co-author of the study, says, "We are able to analyze [the bones] directly, and for the first time actually get information on the people buried at Stonehenge. Whether they actually constructed the monument or not is another story, but they are contemporary with the monument. The dates match, and that is a pretty good indicator that they are linked to the construction of the site."

Snoeck says analysis of "strontium isotopes" was used in determining where the human remains may have originated.

Strontium isotope composition "reflects an average of the foods eaten over the last decade or so before death," the study notes.

"Strontium isotope analysis has been used for decades to reveal the mobility of human and fauna, but exclusively on unburned material," Snoeck says, according to The Los Angeles Times, "I demonstrated that cremated bone fragments could also be used in such studies, opening the possibility to study many more sites, including Stonehenge."

Researchers identified bone fragments from 25 distinct individuals buried at the site. Bones from 10 of those people had strontium isotopes that were consistent with those found in Wales.

"We conclude that at least 40% of those buried at Stonehenge did not exclusively spend the last decade or so of their lives in the environs of the site, or indeed anywhere on the chalklands of southern England. The highest strontium isotope ratios are consistent with living on geological formations in western Britain, a region that includes west Wales, the known source of Stonehenge's bluestones. While strontium isotope ratios on their own cannot distinguish between places with similar values, this connection suggests that west Wales is the most likely origin of at least some of these individuals. Indeed, all the measurements fall between the biologically available strontium values for Stonehenge and west Wales, consistent with people moving between the two locations at different times in their lives. Finally, the results suggest that at least some 'non-local' individuals were cremated away from Stonehenge, and that their cremated remains were brought to the site for burial, perhaps in conjunction with the raising of the bluestones."</s>New chemical analysis of cremated remains unearthed at Stonehenge suggests that several of the people buried there came from farther west, possibly even from the same area of Wales as the “bluestones,” the shorter, bluish-gray stones that form the inner ring of the monument.

Over the last century, archaeologists have pored over the details of Stonehenge’s construction, but they’ve largely ignored the 58 people interred in a ring of 56 shallow pits, now called Aubrey holes, around the monument. Until recently, the cremated remains of these ancient Britons didn’t have much to tell archaeologists, because the heat of cremation tends to destroy most of the evidence about where people came from and how they lived.

But strontium turns out to withstand the heat, and it’s giving archaeologists new clues about where the people buried at Stonehenge spent the last few years of their lives.

Relatively light elements like carbon and oxygen are altered by the high temperatures, changing the isotopic ratios that give archaeologists information about a bone's history, but strontium is a heavier element and isn't changed by the heat. “Thanks to the high temperatures reached, the structure of the bone is modified, making the bone resistant to post-mortem exchanges with burial soil,” lead author Christophe Snoeck, a geochemist and archaeologist at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, told Ars.

Different types of bedrock have different ratios of isotopes of the element strontium. Strontium-87 is the radioactive decay product of rubidium-87, so a rock’s ratio of strontium-87 to strontium-86 depends on its starting amounts of both isotopes, its initial levels of rubidium-87, and its age. As the strontium in the bedrock dissolves, plants take it up through their roots. When animals (including us) eat plants, we ingest the strontium, which replaces some of the calcium in our bones. So the ratio of strontium isotopes in your bones can be traced to the area of bedrock where your food was grown (modern food supply systems are really going to confuse future archaeologists).

In tooth enamel, which is where archaeologists usually get their strontium samples, those ratios usually reflect the plants a person ate during childhood, when the teeth were forming. But in bone, they reflect the plants a person ate for about the last ten years of life.

On the Wessex chalk underlying Stonehenge and the rest of the Salisbury Plain, the strontium isotope ratios usually fall between 0.7074 and 0.7090. But 125 miles (200km) to the west, across an expanse of western Britain that includes southwestern Wales, those values are much higher, in the neighborhood of 0.7110.

So Snoeck and his colleagues took samples from skull fragments of 25 individuals. Based on other bone fragments, six of those individuals were probably female, nine were probably male, and the sex of the other 10 couldn’t be determined. Three of the 25 were juveniles, and the other 22 were adults.

Most of the strontium isotope ratios fell within the bounds of the Wessex chalk where Stonehenge stands, meaning that these 15 people spent the last decade or so of their lives eating food grown within about 9.3 miles (15km) of the monument. But 10 of the people sampled had higher ratios, suggesting that their diets in their final decade were grown in soils well to the west of Stonehenge. Several of them had strontium isotope ratios that fell somewhere in between those for the Wessex chalk and those of western Britain, so they might have lived only a few miles away, but others’ ratios were high enough to suggest that they’d almost certainly spent time much farther west, more than a hundred miles away, and somehow come to be interred at Stonehenge.

But that story may not be as simple as it looks. Strontium isotope ratios in bone only record a person’s diet for about the last ten years of life, so that’s all the data can tell us. The people who spent their final years in West Britain may have lived their whole lives there and then either moved to the area around Stonehenge or been brought there for burial, but it’s also possible they lived in Wessex, or somewhere else entirely, earlier in life. Those with ratios somewhere in the middle range may have lived and died a few tens of miles northwest of Stonehenge, or those ratios may reflect a mixture of time spent in West Britain and in Wessex, perhaps moving back and forth. There’s a lot of complexity in people’s life histories that we just can’t see in the snapshot the strontium isotope analysis provides.

But it’s clear that not everyone who was buried at Stonehenge lived nearby for their entire lives, and some of them may even have died far away from the monument at which they were laid to rest.

“It shows that being chosen to be buried at Stonehenge was not only limited to those living at/near Stonehenge and thus, the site was not used only by a ‘local community,’” Snoeck told Ars. And it suggests that people, as well as building materials, were moving around Britain regularly as early as 5,000 years ago, and those movements created social, spiritual, and apparently personal connections between regions.

And there’s some evidence in favor of the idea that, whatever their life history, the people interred at Stonehenge made the trip posthumously after being cremated back home.

Cremation, as Snoeck said, usually wipes out the carbon-13 ratios in bone, which would otherwise provide information about the person’s diet. Instead, the carbon-13 ratios in cremated bone usually reflect those in the wood used for the funeral pyre—which usually depend on how much light the trees received while they were growing. Trees from a relatively open landscape, like the chalk downlands near Stonehenge, usually have higher carbon-13 values than those grown in denser woods, like those in southwest Wales. And the bones of the people buried at Stonehenge had a wide range of carbon-13 values.

Their cremations, Snoeck and his colleagues say, probably happened under different conditions, using different types of wood as fuel, and it seems likely that they happened in completely different places. Some of the people interred at Stonehenge may have died and been cremated in West Britain and then brought the 125 miles (200km) to Stonehenge for burial. That would match 1920s archaeologists’ reports that the remains looked as if they’d originally been placed into the Aubrey holes in leather bags, giving the impression that they’d “been brought from a distant place for interment.”

At the time, the site would be hard for modern visitors to recognize; the distinctive Sarsen stones wouldn't be erected until around 2000 BCE. Inside an earthen embankment, the Aubrey Holes formed a wide circle around a central open space. Wooden posts, or perhaps the bluestones, stood in most of the Aubrey Holes, perhaps marking the cremated remains buried there. Radiocarbon dates of the remains span centuries, from 3,180 BCE to 2,380 BCE, so we know the site served as a cemetery for nearly a thousand years—though clearly not just a local one.

But we still don’t know why ancient Britons would carry some of their dead such a long distance for burial or how they chose which of their dead to bury at Stonehenge. Snoeck and his colleagues suggest that the interments may have happened in conjunction with the transport and raising of the bluestones, which is an especially interesting idea given recent suggestions that the bluestones were first erected in the Aubrey holes and would have stood atop the cremated remains.

“Looking at the spread in the radiocarbon dates (covering several centuries), I don't think this was a single event,” Snoeck told Ars.

We already know that the bluestones, a mixture of rhyolite and spotted dolerite, came from the Preseli Hills in Western Wales. In fact, for some of them, chemical analysis has narrowed down which quarries they came from: Craig Rhos-y-felin and Carn Goedog. And that region of Wales happens to fall within the area of Western Britain that matches the strontium isotope ratios in the bones at Stonehenge. But the isotope analysis alone can only point to a broad area that has similar geology. (In fact, it’s technically possible that those 10 non-local people buried at Stonehenge came from somewhere in Scotland, Ireland, or continental Europe; Snoeck and his colleagues just consider it much less likely thanks to the distance and/or water crossings involved.) So it’s impossible to say, based on the strontium data, that these people lived in Wales.

But since there’s already a connection with Western Wales, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that at least some of the people from Stonehenge came from the same place.</s>Stonehenge has been a place of myth and mystery for centuries, and theories abound on whether it was a Druid temple, an astronomical calendar or an alien creation.

A new study by a team of researchers, including a Canadian archeologist, has answered some of the questions of who likely built the imposing stone circle. The team used a novel technique – examining chemical markers on cremated material – to analyze bones from 25 bodies that were buried at the site around 3,000 years ago. They found that most of the bodies had come from western Wales, about 250 kilometres away. It’s the clearest indication yet that the early phase of Stonehenge was probably a monument for people living farther away than many experts had previously thought. It’s also a sign that Neolithic people travelled much greater distances than most other research had shown.

The discovery could change the course of research at Stonehenge and it’s the first time the new test has been used on a large scale. The technology was developed by a graduate student at Oxford University and is set to revolutionize archeology and open up thousands of years of history to new research. The Stonehenge project was so successful the technique is now being utilized at dozens of ancient burial sites across Europe.

“The advances in scientific archeology are really quite exciting,” said one of the study’s lead authors, Rick Schulting, a Canadian who is an associate professor in scientific and prehistoric archeology at Oxford.

Scientists have long thought that most of the smaller rocks at Stonehenge, known as the “bluestones,” had come from the Preseli Hills on the west coast of Wales. But they weren’t sure how the rocks got there or who brought them. The new study shows that the people buried at Stonehenge came from the same region in Wales and that they may have transported the stones, most of which are nearly four metres long and weigh almost four tons.

“Being able to link not only the stones but the people, just gives us an added level of information about the site that we never had before,” Dr. Schulting said. ”We now know that part of the reason the monument was built there was probably to serve as a marker or memorial to some kind of long-standing connection between west Wales and Wessex.”

The connection between the two communities isn’t clear and it’s not known why these people travelled so far, he added. More than 50 bodies were buried at Stonehenge, making it the largest Neolithic burial site in Britain.

“With both the stones and the people, we have the sense that this marks almost the beginnings of an international outlook for prehistoric Neolithic people,” he said. “We have had evidence of people moving around but nothing on the scale at Stonehenge where people were coming together to build a monument that persisted for over 1,000 years. We think of Stonehenge in its final form but this was a long-term project, and we’re seeing the very start of it and that connection [between Wales and Wessex] might have been one of the things that kicked it off, even though we can’t really understand the reason for that particular relationship between these two places.”

The innovative test used in the study was developed by Christophe Snoeck, one of Dr. Schulting’s former doctoral students. Dr. Snoeck, who is from Belgium, had a background in chemical engineering and a keen interest in archeology. When he began his doctorate in the science at Oxford in 2012, Dr. Schulting offered him a challenge: find a way to analyze cremated bones.

It wouldn’t be an easy task. The issue had dogged archeologists for years and had limited the study of ancient history in places where cremation had been a common way to dispose of the dead. Archeologists had developed a test for non-cremated bones and teeth that involved searching for traces of strontium isotopes, a kind of biological marker. Strontium is a common chemical element that’s found in rocks and soil, and it gets into the food chain through plants and animals. Once inside humans the chemical acts much like calcium and attaches to bones and teeth. Two strontium isotopes, which are variations on the element and contain a different number of neutrons, can be detected in bones and teeth for centuries. And since different geologies and plants have different strontium markers, the isotopes act as a kind of homing device to track where the person lived.

The problem was that archeologists hadn’t figured out how to use the technique on cremated bones. Cremation destroys tooth enamel where strontium is typically found and it damages bones.

“Rick stumbled on this question: Is cremation really a dead end or not?” Dr. Snoeck recalled. Few professors gave him much hope of finding the answer. “When I started, many professors told me it could be that at the end of your PhD, you’ll find that nothing works and you will be quite disappointed. I was ready to take the risk.”

After several years of research, Dr. Snoeck discovered that the strontium isotopes were better preserved in cremated bones because the heating process locked in the chemical. He developed a test to find the isotopes and tried it out on a few sites in Ireland before approaching researchers at Oxford who had just excavated a collection of bones from Stonehenge. They agreed to give it shot and the results proved stunning. “Strontium worked beautifully,” he said.

Dr. Snoeck is now working on a project in Belgium to apply the technology to 3,000 years of cremated remains across the country. He’s also involved in another project in Ireland and Crete, and could soon be working in Austria and Slovenia. Dr. Snoeck said cremation was prevalent in Europe from the Bronze Age, which started around 2000 BC, to the rule of the Catholic Church. The technology will provide new insights into the makeup of populations and how people moved around. “It’s really growing and it’s nice to see people are picking up the method and want to use it.”</s>The mysterious assemblage of 25-ton rocks at Stonehenge usually steals the show. But the ground beneath the stones holds secrets, too — 5,000 years ago, this patch of land in Wiltshire, in southern England, was a burial place. And some of the ancient human remains found at Stonehenge have unusually distant origins, according to a new archaeological study of cremated bones published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.

The remains offer another line of evidence connecting Stonehenge to Wales, 140 miles away. A quarry in Wales is probably the source of Stonehenge's bluestones, so called because of their blue hue revealed when they are damp or broken. It is possible, the authors of the new study say, that people buried at the henge came from the same Welsh region.

Christophe Snoeck, a researcher at Vrije University in Belgium who specializes in archaeology and chemistry, helped lead the study of 25 people buried at Stonehenge and found that they were from distant lands. “Forty percent of the people who we analyzed could not have lived in Stonehenge for the last decade or so of their life,” Snoeck said.

A chemical analysis of their bones indicates that 10 of the 25 people were not locals. This was at a time when, before the invention of the wheeled transport, most people stayed within a few kilometers of their settlements, Snoeck said. “I know today everyone moves around, but we're talking 5,000 years ago,” he said.

The beginnings of this study can be traced to the 1920s, when archaeologists first excavated pits at Stonehenge called Aubrey holes, named after 17th-century natural philosopher John Aubrey. The archaeologists identified 58 Neolithic individuals in 56 Aubrey holes. But those archaeologists reburied bone fragments in a single hole, creating a jumble that Snoeck likened to a mess of ribs charred together in a post-barbecue fire.

After a team re-excavated the remains in 2008, Snoeck's co-author Christie Willis, at the University College London's Institute of Archaeology, began identifying individuals from the jumble. She was successful in 25 cases.

Snoeck, meanwhile, was developing a technique to identify the element strontium, a metal deposited in bedrock, within cremated remains. Plants absorb strontium from the soil. It accumulates in bones when people eat plants.

Archaeologists can detect different versions of strontium, called isotopes, preserved in tooth enamel. This gives researchers a sense of where deceased people lived. "The strontium is usually related to the underlying geology, and this gives us geographic information," said Jane A. Evans, an archaeologist at the British Geological Survey who was not involved with this research. Evans had previously mapped different strontium isotopes across Britain for this purpose.

But cremated remains were generally considered an archaeological dead end, too damaged to yield information. Teeth have a bad habit of exploding when bodies are burned, Snoeck said.

Yet he refused to accept that cremated remains were totally inscrutable. "Not being able to extract information from them was leaving too many blank pages in our history, in our past," Snoeck said.

For his PhD research, he developed a way to identify strontium in cremated bones from Northern Ireland. “Lots of people were telling me it's never going to work,” he said. But burned bones, as it turns out, crystallize and become compact like teeth. And, like teeth, Snoeck discovered, they also trap strontium.

Working on cremated bone "opens up a whole new area of study in adult migration that was not previously possible," Evans said. Strontium collects in tooth enamel formed in childhood; strontium in bones should give a snapshot of the last 10 to 15 years of a person's life.

When archaeologists sent Stonehenge remains to Snoeck's lab for another project, he jumped at the chance to apply his technique to them. The Wessex chalk beneath Stonehenge, which stretches for at least nine miles in every direction, has a very specific strontium profile. Ten of the people did not match that type.

Those Neolithic bones did, however, match the strontium isotopes found in Wales. The analysis cannot prove that Welsh people built the monument. But the archaeological dates of the remains are close to the period of early Stonehenge construction.

“This suggests it was not just the stones that were brought to Wiltshire," Evans said, "but there could have been a continuing link between the two areas."

Snoeck said he doubts that the people were cremated near Wiltshire. The archaeologists who first excavated the Aubrey holes identified impressions of organic containers — leather bags, probably — in the soil. It's more likely that travelers carried their deceased to this place, placing them to rest miles from home.

The archaeologist plans to study cremated remains in other countries. “They've been kind of forgotten and put aside. And I thought that was quite sad, because huge parts of the world” — especially in prehistoric Europe, but not just there — "people were cremated,” he said.

His next project, called CRUMBEL, will trace cremation throughout history in Belgium, from ancient practices to its abandonment under the influence of the Catholic Church, which relaxed its rules against cremation in 1963.

Move over, Stonehenge: Scientists just found a ‘superhenge’ next door

170,000 years before Stonehenge, Neanderthals built their own incredible structure

Carhenge builder has the last laugh</s>Scientific research suggests the neolithic people who built Stonehenge did not come from Wiltshire where the formation was constructed.

Cremated human bones found at the site, dated to be 5000 years old, showed that those who erected the stones most likely came from west Wales.

"We know that western Wales provided the bluestones used in some of the constructional phases of Stonehenge but the potential for having links to communities in in western Wales or western Britain is just astonishing," archaeologist John Pouncett told ITV News.

Tests were carried out on 25 people buried near Stonehenge about the time it was built. Experts say 15 of them were born and raised in Wiltshire but 10 were not local, five are thought to have been from the region the stone was originally quarried and the remaining five were also from Wales.</s>Ten individuals buried at Stonehenge have been identified as coming from Wales

In recent years, the mysterious Stonehenge has had a link from its location of Wiltshire, in southern England, to the faraway location of Wales. This is thanks to evidence showing that the megaliths used to erect the henge originally came from Wales. Now, new evidence suggests that some of the people buried at the ancient site more than 5,000 years ago also came from Wales.

According to a study recently published in Scientific Reports, a new way of measuring strontium isotopes within cremated bones has shown that some people buried at Stonehenge would have spent the last 10-15 years of their lives 140 miles away in Wales.

Back in the 1920s, remains of 58 individuals cremated and then buried at Stonehenge were discovered. At the time, though, methods of identification were not advanced enough to estimate where these individuals came from. These remains were then reburied in a mass grave, according to the Washington Post.

Moving forward to 2008, these remains were exhumed and reexamined. Christie Willis, at the University College London’s Institute of Archaeology, and co-author of the new study, began identifying the individuals. Out of the jumble of charred bones, she was successful in identifying 25 individuals. However, it was still difficult to identify where these people came from as teeth are normally destroyed in the cremation process. What they needed was a way of using the bones to test where these people came from.

Christophe Snoeck, a researcher at Vrije University in Belgium, who specializes in archaeology and chemistry, had managed to create such a testing method. According to the Washington Post, Snoeck had developed “a technique to identify the element strontium, a metal deposited in bedrock, within cremated remains.” This element is deposited in human bones when they eat plant matter and, as a result, can help identify where people lived in the last 10-15 years of their life.

Using this method, Snoeck tested the remains of the people buried at Stonehenge and discovered something very interesting.

According to his findings, 10 of the people identified in the remains were not from the local area of Wiltshire. Instead, they spent the last decade of their lives in Wales.

“Forty percent of the people who we analyzed could not have lived in Stonehenge for the last decade or so of their life,” Snoeck said.

While the exact details of why these people were cremated and then buried at Stonehenge is not known, some assumptions can be made based on the archaeology.

According to items originally found with the cremated remains in the 1920s, the date of these bones can be placed around the time of the construction of Stonehenge. It doesn’t prove that these people were involved in the construction of Stonehenge, but it does create an ongoing link between Stonehenge and Wales at the time.

Jane A. Evans, an archaeologist at the British Geological Survey, and who was not involved with this research, weighs in on the discussion.

“This suggests it was not just the stones that were brought to Wiltshire,” Evans said, “but there could have been a continuing link between the two areas.”

It also seems likely that these people were cremated and then their remains were carried to Stonehenge for burial.</s>Stonehenge continues to give up its 5,000-year-old secrets.

Although people have long wondered how and why the iconic monument was built, the question of "who" built it has received much less attention.

Now, a new study sheds some light onto these prehistoric people and where they came from. Using new technology that can determine where dead people lived, scientists say that cremated human remains from the site show that some of the people there came from other parts of western Britain – most likely Wales.

Those people also likely lugged some of the Welsh stones that were used to construct Stonehenge, according to the study, which was published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports.

Stonehenge, one of the most impressive prehistoric megalithic monuments on Earth, is a World Heritage site known for its alignment with the movements of the sun. Thousands of people travel there each year to mark the solstices in summer and winter.

However, "despite over a century of intense study of Stonehenge, we still know very little about the individuals buried at the site," the study said.

To rectify this, researchers analyzed skull bones from 25 individuals buried at the monument to better understand the lives of the people there. While 15 of the people were local to the Stonehenge region, the other 10 probably spent at least the last few years of their lives in present-day Wales, study authors say.

The cremated remains suggest that people not only supplied the stones used to build the stone circle, but also "moved with the stones and were buried there too," the study said.

Study lead author Rick Schulting of the University of Oxford said that "the really remarkable thing about our study is the ability of new developments in archaeological science to extract so much new information from such small and unpromising fragments of burnt bone."

The excavation of human remains at Stonehenge.</s>The people who built Stonehenge came from Wales. They took the massive rocks that were used to build the mysterious structure from west Wales on a journey with them. That's what an international team of researchers have discovered through radiocarbon-dating with new developments in archaeological analysis.

There are still many unknowns regarding Stonehenge, a ring of stones in southwest England that has fascinated the world, including Buzz Aldrin, for centuries. Those unknowns include both how and why the ring was constructed, considering there is little to no evidence of construction and the society which built the ring evidently kept no written records. But luckily for the archaeologists, they did leave bones.

Under careful supervision, the team from the University of Oxford, University College London, Université Libre de Bruxelles & Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle de Paris, France, analyzed the skull bones of the 25 individuals who were buried at the site.

To give a sense of Stonehenge's history, these bodies were originally excavated back in 1920s. Their bodies were found in what are named Aubrey holes, named the man who discovered them: John Aubrey, a pioneer of the field of archaeology in 1666. Analysis of these bodies over the years has shown that these people were living around 3000 BC, an early point in Stonehenge's existence.

Using radiocarbon dating, the scientists analyzed the bones' strontium isotope ratios. Human bones absorb the element strontium through water and plant foods. When dealing with ancient peoples who could only eat localized foods, this matches the bone to a particular place.

The strontium levels within the bones matched with western Britain, a region that includes west Wales. With the strontium analysis has its limits, archaeologists also know that the stones from Stonehenge come from Wales, specifically an area known as the Preseli Mountains. These two facts are not a coincidence, the research team believes.

"The powerful combination of stable isotopes and spatial technology gives us a new insight into the communities who built Stonehenge," says John Pouncett of the University of Oxford, in a press statement. "The cremated remains from the enigmatic Aubrey Holes and updated mapping of the biosphere suggest that people from the Preseli Mountains not only supplied the bluestones used to build the stone circle, but moved with the stones and were buried there too."



The similarities between the Preseli Mountains and Stonehenge were already myriad. Neolithic structures in the area, like the Carreg Coetan Arthur, bare a similarity to Stonehenge, although lacking in the former's complexity. Using college students as experimental builders, scientists have grown to believe that the ring was probably constructed using sleds.
Tests on the 5,000-year-old burnt human bones of 25 people found at Stonehenge suggest that ten came from more than 100 miles (160 km) away in West Wales.