Stonehenge, England's most mysterious ancient monument. On a site older than the pyramids of ancient Egypt, 85 massive stones, some weighing more than 40 tons, stand guard on a remote and windswept plain. Why is it here? What's it for?
How is it possible? How was it built? The answers are lost in the mists of time. Myth links Stonehenge to England's mysterious druids. Celtic priests said to have practiced ritual sacrifice.
Now Naked Science asks the question. Who built Stonehenge? And unmasks the face of a man who may have helped build this astonishing ancient monument. Forget Manhattan's skyline or the stone carved sculptures of America's Mount Rushmore. This construction job was really tough.
No cranes, no hoists, no machinery. Just massive rocks, some heavier than a fully laden 18-wheel truck. A structure so old that the rocks could only have been heaved into place by sheer muscle power alone.
Still standing thousands of years later, dramatic and moody, Stonehenge dominates Salisbury Plain in southern England. It has fascinated people since before recorded history and still captures imaginations today. Amazingly, unlike most ancient ruins, this is not incomplete ruin.
It's pretty much today how its architects wanted it to be. Very open plan, great ventilation, a little light on a roof, but a strong and ultimately long-lasting construction. No one knows what such a design might have been for.
It's not recognizable as a church, or a temple, or a long-abandoned building. It just sits there in massive ancient splendor, being Stonehenge. One thing it has done over thousands and thousands of years is fascinate all those who come here.
I think the people that built this did all that they did to build it. It's tremendous. I mean, just look at it. It's unbelievable. It's a magical place.
In the public mind, Stonehenge has long been associated with one mysterious peoples, the Druids. The Druids were known as wise men, teachers and religious priests for the Celtic peoples ruling much of northern Europe more than 2,000 years ago. They believed in the immortality of the soul, sometimes making human sacrifices to aid Celtic warriors in battle, or as a ritual to cure the gravely ill. Those claiming to follow the ancient druid ways still meet here at summer solstice, June 21st, the longest day of the year, when the sun rises directly into the heart of the circle.
The monument's central axis aligns closely with the midsummer sunrise. Nowadays, these summer solstice celebrations turn into lengthy public parties. But in times past, long before the birth of Christ, these stones have probably witnessed real Druid ceremonies. Bodies have been found in this area.
Not the victims of Druid sacrifice, but human remains more than 4,000 years old. Could such bodies help solve the mystery of who erected these stones? It is a structure that lies at the heart of an area of England, steeped in monuments to now long-forgotten pagan religions. In this mystical heartland of England, there seems to be a lot of people.
Ancient association with circles, ones that are circular. Circles of rocks, shapes from our distant past. And even today, mysterious links seem to flourish. The area is famous for crop circles, incredibly complex patterns appearing literally overnight in cornfields.
People marvel at huge crop circles, made in the dead of night by a secret network of hoaxers. Though some still credit their creation to alien visitors. And yet, however intricate and huge the crop circle designs become, none can rival the mysteries of Stonehenge. The design evolved over many generations.
First, a circular ditch and bank. Then, a second phase of timber structures. The third phase saw the arrival of stones, some then repositioned over the years. The largest stones are 23 feet tall and weigh more than 44 tons.
That's the same as six double-decker buses. In total, more than 1,500 tons of rock, the weight of 10 steam locomotives. Perhaps most amazing is the precision with which it's been built. Some believe that the massive stones have been carefully aligned with stars in the heavens, a distinctly non-pocket-sized astronomical calendar. At some stage in its creation, the circle of upright stones was topped by huge carved rock lintels.
These huge lintel stones are nearly perfectly level, despite being built on sloping ground. Within this sits a circular arrangement of smaller uprights known as bluestones. And in the middle is a horseshoe of the largest of all the stones. A series of three slab constructions known as the trilithons.
Stonehenge is unique. Nothing quite like it has been built before or since. But the question remains, who built it? There are a lot of likely suspects. The first Britons at the end of the last ice age were primitive hunter-gatherers.
Then came waves of settlers and invaders from Europe and the ancient world. Druids, Celtic priests were preeminent, until they in turn were swept away by the Romans. The empire-building civilization who, 2,000 years ago, conquered most of the then-known world. Could any of these peoples be good candidates for the job of the Stonehenge design and construction crew? How can we decipher the available evidence to uncover who was really responsible?
The answer? We need some exact dates to weed out the losers. Stonehenge does not give up its secrets easily. But there are clues to be found, if you know where to look, deep under the stones.
Early archaeologists found antler horns, pottery, and even human remains in the area. Modern radiocarbon dating offers new and more accurate dates to work with. Superseding less reliable tests of the past, scientists can now test artifacts like this antlerhorn to tell exactly how old it is.
And because it was buried directly underneath the stones, it tells us the most likely date when Stonehenge was built. In tests published in 1995, scientists discover that some previous estimates had been wrong. The final phase of Stonehenge was older than they thought.
It was built as far back as 4,000 years ago. It's been stunning news for archaeologists such as Mike Pitts. The new radiocarbon dating of Stonehenge has had the biggest impact on our understanding of the monument since 1880. recognized it as something created by people many centuries ago.
It is the first hard evidence of a date, and it knocks those Druids, who only came to Britain around 2000 years ago, right out of contention. In fact, it eliminates many of our usual suspects. Our search for the builders of Stonehenge needs to travel much further back in time. It's certainly not a Roman building. It isn't the work of the Druids.
Nor those immigrant waves of settlers from all over Europe. Stonehenge is far older than all those civilizations, with the first phase predating the Great Pyramids of Egypt. The tests suggest that Stonehenge is the work of ancient Britons, a primitive and little-known people. It seems unbelievable.
4500 years ago, Britain was nearing the end of the Stone Age and the start of the Bronze Age. Its people were hand-to-mouth subsistence farmers, technologically undeveloped, just starting to understand how to work with metal. How could such primitive people have pulled off such an incredible construction project?
Could the dates be wrong? Or is there other evidence suggesting these primitive individuals were indeed able to build one of the world's longest lasting monuments? We hunt out that evidence in the very structure of the rocks, in the construction methods used, and by blasting Stonehenge-like rocks from the hills.
Examining Stonehenge, Naked Science has so far looked at ancient druid rituals, mysterious crop circles, and the idea that a primitive ancient people could somehow have erected this astonishing monument. Could our Stonehenge builders possibly have been late Neolithic, early Bronze Age man? This was, by anyone's standards, a big construction job.
The first problem any ancient builders faced was getting hold of the construction materials, the stones that make up Stonehenge. And that was far from easy. There are two types of stones at Stonehenge. The smaller ones are called the bluestones, believed to have been hauled to the site before the larger sarsen stones.
But once the sarsen ring had been erected, the builders seemed to have had second thoughts. The smaller bluestones were repositioned over the years within it. No one knows why. And there is another puzzling question. Just where had all these stones come from?
In one case, the answer is easy. Similar rocks to the large sarsen stones can be seen some 20 miles from Stonehenge. Using manpower to haul the rocks to the site would be tough, but not impossible. But the blue stones are a different matter.
They're not from this neighborhood at all. In fact, even tracing their source isn't easy. The clues to where they originated can be found with the rock experts at the British Geological Survey.
Here, in a vast collection, are rock samples from all over Britain. Every one with its characteristic crystalline texture preserved as a microscope slide. And each specimen cross-referenced to the geological map of Britain.
Is there a match between the rock type of the bluestones and a sample in the collection? And can that reveal the source of the stones anywhere in the British Isles? Under the microscope, the distinctive crystalline texture of the bluestones are a close match with samples already in the collection. They can even be traced to one specific location. The Preseli Mountain Range in southwest Wales.
It's a clever piece of deductive science. But it poses as big a riddle as it solves. The Preseli Mountains are more than 200... away from Stonehenge. The journey kicks off in tough terrain, and then, just to make it tougher, involves crossing England's biggest tidal estuary.
So how could stones weighing as much as four tons be carried such a long way with just the primitive technology of ancient Britons some 4,500 years ago? Perhaps one answer is, they never were carried. Perhaps ancient Britons just found the stones lying around on Salisbury Plain, deposited there by a powerful force of nature, the movement of ice. England's Ice Age, when massive ice sheets spread down from the Arctic as far as southern England.
Glaciers so powerful, they could easily sweep huge rocks across the landscape. Could such glaciers be responsible for shifting the bluestones? Naked Science visits the remote mountains of Wales to seek the answers. Local author and researcher Robin Heath is a man passionate about the mysteries of the Preseli bluestones and ancient Britain's.
I get excited about coming up here because these are my ancestors and this is the culture of Britain. Heath has been exploring here for the last 20 years cataloging peculiarities about the stones. Old artifacts which provide the latest clues for our investigation.
Many of the stones here at Preseli have giant stone wedges stuck between them. Someone, at some time, has tried to prise them away from the rock face. And there is even more compelling evidence that these rocks have been shaped and worked on.
There are some stones that have show evidence of being cut to size. And there are other stone tools being found by several people that appear to have been used for dressing the stone somewhat before its journey. The Stone Age tools found nearby suggest that these rocks were being worked by men around the time that the bluestones appeared at Stonehenge.
But the most damning evidence that the glacier theory is most likely wrong lies, or rather doesn't lie, at Stonehenge itself. There are no other bluestones to be found where the monument stands on the vast expanse of Salisbury Plain. What sort of glacier would deposit only these few massive rocks and leave no other trace of its passage?
The probable conclusion? It was our late stone age candidate who transported those stones. Which begs the next question, how did they do it? Perhaps examining the management of modern construction projects would shed light on how primitive man could achieve such a seemingly impossible feat. Naked science needed some rocks.
Naked science is hot on the trail of the people who built Stonehenge. So far, we have learned of a newly confirmed date for the construction of the final phase of this fascinating World Heritage Site. A date which seems to prove that late Stone Age Britons must have built this incredible construction. And that these primitive people were somehow responsible for hauling some of the massive stones hundreds of miles across rough terrain and tidal estuaries. Can Naked Science help establish just how they achieve such a feat?
We call in a professional. An undoubted expert in managing massive-scale construction projects. Someone with... with a passion for both construction engineering and ancient archaeology.
A qualified engineer with an interest in Stonehenge, Rick Smales. I got interested in archaeology and ancient construction primarily based on my background in construction and my love of architecture. of history. And I was always curious, like most folks are, well, how did they do that?
Modern United States construction projects may be 4,000 years and an ocean away from Stonehenge. And the tools they use just couldn't be more different. But the basic principles bridge the century. between them. Well, the first thing that we would look at is the actual site itself.
Now, in a normal construction project, when the project is finished, we have as-built drawings that identify everything that was put into the project. In the case of Stonehenge, we obviously don't have the drawings, but we have the actual structure itself. Using Stonehenge's structure as a project blueprint, Smales works backwards to the basic steps required for such a construction task.
Thank you. Step 1. Get your construction materials to the building site. Step 2. Work out how to use those materials to create your structure.
Step 3. Calculate how much labor all this involves. Using Smails'three steps, it may be possible to work out how Stonehenge was built. Our first step, getting the materials. The 40-ton Sarsen stones are relatively easy.
They are believed to have been brought to Stonehenge from a site about 20 miles away. How did ancient Britons move such massive weights? A decade ago, a team of engineers tried to solve this problem.
With the help of volunteers, a wooden sled, and a lot of grease, they moved a 40-ton rock hundreds of feet. Still, nothing compared to the 20 miles that the ancient Britons would have faced. Even trickier would have been getting those bluestones 240 miles from the place where they were quarried in the mountains of South Wales to Salisbury Plain. It's something that Robin Heath has a theory about. Well, as an engineer, you want to get the stones onto water quickly.
In prehistoric times, if you could have got it down to the Kledai River, three miles away, you've then got water most of the way to Stonehenge. Could Stone Age people possibly have had the technology to carry these four-ton rocks over water? And can naked science devise a test to see if such a feat was truly possible?
We need to build a boat, but what type? Archaeological evidence suggests that people from the Stonehenge era used a variety of different types of boats. The most common were log boats, a type of dug-out canoe cut from an oak tree. Is it possible? that these log boats could carry the sort of heavy stones required in the construction of Stonehenge.
An unusual discovery at Shardlow Quarry near Nottingham, England in 1998 offers evidence that they could have been used to build a log boat. could. When a flood washed away the mud from what appeared to be an old tree stump, something unusual appeared. Where a river had once been emerged the remains of an ancient Bronze Age log boat.
Even more interestingly, the boat was carrying an unexpected payload, more than half a ton of quarried rock. So, a log boat seems the logical choice for our rock carrying demonstration. For that, we need a very large tree. Fortunately, we find foresters culling some older oak trees from a hardwood forest, perfect for our boat.
Now we have a log, we need someone to sculpt it into our boat. Not many people make ancient log boats for a living. But Naked Science tracks down ancient woodwork expert Damien Goodburn, who takes up the challenge.
What we're setting out to do here, to make a vessel that will carry the stones with the maximum buoyancy and reasonable stability, is to take a pair of dugout boats and link them together with a simple platform of poles, and then the stone will be something like that. So that's our aim. The practicalities of it may be quite difficult, but that's what we reckon should work.
Like tools for the job and help from some friends, Goodburn thinks the boat can be ready in two weeks. What I have here is a very simple diagram of the boat we're trying to build. A very, very simple shape. The design is straightforward.
The log will be hollowed out to form a wide, flat-bottomed boat suitable for carrying heavy loads. These will carry the maximum possible cargo on the shallowest possible draft. So it seems to me this could be an ideal early Bronze Age barge for moving heavy weights, which is what we're about.
The first task is to cut off the top of the log, a technique called splitting, which uses chocks of wood to cleave apart the heavy oak. Wind your fingers. The team shows that the technology of the time would have worked.
Completing the whole boat by hand would be authentic, but time consuming. To speed up the process, naked science calls in the chainsaws. Our boat's construction is well underway, almost ready for its two greatest tests.
A, will it float? And B, can it carry a Stonehenge-sized stone? Assuming it floats, we need a very big rock. Because the Preseli Mountain is a protected national park, we blast out a boulder the same size and weight as the bluestones from this granite quarry. A substantial crane lowers the massive weight onto a sled at our boat yard.
The team suddenly realizes what an immense task they have taken on. We've always known it's going to be too much to balance such a load on our one finished log boat. To make it work, another log boat built by Goodburn 14 years ago is standing by.
If the team doesn't get the boat finished soon, they will miss the high tide, essential for launching the heavy weight of the boat. The plan is to lever the boat over oiled skids and slide and pivot it down to the water's edge. It's a nice idea in theory, but in practice it seems Goodburn may have underestimated the weight not just of the stone, but of the boat.
Eventually, with some extra effort, the log boat begins to gather some momentum. Keep pulling, that's it, stop. But not for long. The team is worried about the jetty not holding up under the one ton weight of the boat. These are just fairly rotten three by twos, and I'm not sure that's gonna take a ton weight.
We're having trouble in the bronze age. There wasn't any sawn pine trees. One, two, three!
Are you pulling? No, we were pushing on these ropes. That's why they're not...
That's right. It's about this big. Are you ready?
Brushing aside the problems with the precarious jetty, Goodburn decides that one last push should be enough to launch the boat and instructs our chainsaw operator to get in and row. Okay, hold the gun off. Nice one. It might not have been the most elegant of launches, but the log boat now safely floats in the water.
But the team doesn't have time to waste. They still need to launch the other boat and lash the two together. But one of them is sinking. Undeterred, the team presses on with lashing the boats together, which involves drilling holes in the side of the boat. Not something naked science would normally advise.
With the boat secured, the task of getting the stone on board begins in earnest. Okay, you ready people? One, two, three! Worried that the stone might slide too quickly, Goodburn changes tactics. So try a gentle push on three, okay?
One, two, three. Nothing at all. I think if you put a lever behind that big cross piece.
With the lever in place, the stone begins its slow crawl down to the boats. Next, the volunteers control the weight of the stone as it's placed on a bridge that will tilt it toward the boats. As they take the strain, Goodburn's plan is to have them slowly release the sled. But then, disaster strikes. We need to pull this over now.
Goodburn is too distracted to notice what has happened. But the stone is still slipping. And he hasn't realized that the sled is now stuck underneath the poles on which it is supposed to be resting.
By the time they notice what has happened, the tide has started to turn against them, and a frantic rescue plan is devised. Now, what we really want, if there's any chance on earth that you can pull uphill there... The idea is to winch the sled up, reposition it, and then remove the bridge all before the boat gets grounded.
On three. One, two, three! Yes! enough.
Hold it! Lean back. You can't pull if you're vertical. The sled is now in the right place. But there is a much more pressing problem.
The boats are dangerously close to sinking. They plug the leak with flax and lard, which should last at least a couple of hours. With the boat temporarily repaired, it's time to remove the bridge. Can you pull it right out now, please? Gently.
Not too fast. Okay, you can just pull it clear. Okay. Now what do we do?
Fortunately, someone comes up with a solution. But with the leak still threatening to sink the boat, it's time to get afloat and run our experiment. The moment of truth.
Could the combined technology of logboats and human power move a four-ton stone across a tidal estuary? Or would the weight of the stone prove too much? Naked science has finally done it. We have proved beyond doubt that Britons in the period between the Late Stone Age and the Early Bronze Age could have moved bluestones from Wales to England to build Stonehenge.
But we had it easy. We cheated with modern tools to make just one boat to move just one stone a few hundred yards on calm waters. Our ancient cousins seemingly built boat after boat and moved stone after stone hundreds of miles across open sea. The scale of investment of time, human effort and ingenuity is almost beyond comprehension.
And this from a supposedly primitive people. Once the stone arrived on the site, it still had to be raised. This is step two in Smales'guide on how to build Stonehenge.
Back at the attempt 10 years ago, the team of engineers thought that this could be done most efficiently using a ramp to provide a pivot point. Two, three, four! It seemed that raising the large topstones or lintels was not beyond Bronze Age Britons either.
All you needed was a big wooden scaffold. So we had our answer. Ancient Britons could have built Stonehenge with a little engineering know-how and some simple levers and ramps.
Armed with all the data, can Smails calculate just how many man-hours of labor it would have taken to carry out all of the work? We're looking at probably a peak workforce of maybe 300 people, taking on the short end the quickest it could be built, maybe two and a half, three years, and using in the order of a million and a half to three million labor hours. The work may have been spread out over generations, much like a medieval cathedral. But what could have possibly motivated them to undertake such a huge project?
To find out, Naked Science travels to Las Vegas. And the University of Nevada, to meet an expert in the relationship between architecture and the corresponding societies that create it, Dr. Ronald Smith. As you look at these places, they're reflections of us, the reflections of a culture, the reflections of emotions that we express. They are, in fact, a study of us. Smith thinks that the way a building is built gives us information about the intentions of the people who built it.
So analyzing Stonehenge's size, structure and shape will help us understand why it was constructed. Smith explains his theory with a modern example, Las Vegas. Why, for example? Are all the buildings so big? Large in America is seen as good, is seen as beautiful.
We are a country of large things, from buildings to cars. Everything large is good here. An interesting theory.
But then when you start to look around, you realize that people do interact with buildings and structures in an emotional way. So going back a few millennia, was there something about the size of the stones at Stonehenge that reflects why the monument was built? The great appeal of Stonehenge, the size of these huge stones. It's a place to celebrate, a place to worship, a place to acknowledge something greater than what is human, something bigger than what we are, bigger than the tribe, bigger than the community. It follows that the size of the stones might have been designed to tower over worshippers, reminding them of an omnipresent God, just like cathedrals through the ages.
Stonehenge as a religious site is also a theory favoured by Mike Pitts. They weren't accountants. Stonehenge was not a housing estate.
It was a religious monument. Perhaps the mountain, the Brasselli Hills, was a sacred mountain and there was something about the rocks on it that when they brought them to Salisbury Plain allowed them to bring something of that magic into their own world. There are so many possible explanations and whatever was going on I think we can be pretty sure that there were many of these things happening. All this new information starts to reveal that ancient Britons at the time of Stonehenge might not be the primitive people we once thought. In our probe into the origins of Stonehenge, we have established that its builders had solved difficult engineering problems and coordinated construction on a massive scale.
Had we underestimated the abilities of these ancient Britons? How could we build a more complete picture of these people to reveal the truth about the builders of Stonehenge? In April 2003, construction workers unearthed human remains at Boscombe Down, just three miles from Stonehenge. Flint arrowheads found with the bodies earned them the nickname the Boscombe Bowmen. Could they offer evidence about the people who were alive when Stonehenge was built?
They've been studied by Andrew Fitzpatrick of Wessex Archaeology. To start with, it didn't look all that special. It was only as the excavation was done that we realised there was something very unusual about the grave. Skeletons have been uncovered near Stonehenge before, but until now, they have either been foreign visitors, or much later bodies buried many years after it was constructed. The new grave was quite different.
So what does this excavation reveal? There are hundreds of bones, suggesting multiple burials. Something not usually known from this period. Who were these individuals?
Could their remains hold the key to unlocking the mystery of who built Stonehenge? The next clues about this unusual burial come from Jackie McKinley. One of the first things I do when I get material like this into the laboratory is lay everything out. And with quite a lot of work, it was possible to work out that we had parts of seven individuals.
But why had they all been buried together? A closer investigation of the bones of the skulls reveals that this was probably a family grave. Unfortunately, the condition of the bones means that a genetic test is out of the question. Is there another way of uncovering the relationship between the bodies?
The breakthrough comes from a new test, capable of identifying the likely location where people were born by identifying chemical markers absorbed in their teeth. Could the forensic teeth test tell us if the bodies had come from the same place? The technique traces chemicals taken up by tooth enamel during childhood to reveal where someone was brought up. These traces come from the food we eat. the water we drink and from the general environment.
The teeth enamel is tested for two separate chemicals levels of oxygen isotopes and the isotopic level of the element strontium. Each reading is compared to a map of known levels of oxygen and strontium to reveal the locality that has left these tell-tale chemical fingerprints in the teeth. Subtitles by the Amara.org community It seems logical to think that the bodies dug up near Stonehenge might have originated in the local area around the monument site.
But the teeth tests reveal an unexpected result. The people buried thousands of years ago in this mass grave had all grown up more than 200 miles away from Stonehenge, in South Wales, from where the Stonehenge bluestones had all been hauled. It's a link that fascinates researchers such as Andrew Fitzpatrick.
We think that these men come from Wales and the obvious thing with Stonehenge is that many of the stones come from Wales. It's an incredible finding. Strong evidence that the men and the stones originated from the same place. Tantalizing suggestion that these bodies were involved in transporting the stones from South Wales and possibly in the very building of Stonehenge itself.
But our quest is still not over. If these men built Stonehenge, can we go just one step further and actually see what the builders of Stonehenge might have looked like? Can we use the technology of our day to breathe life back into the men who the technology of their own day to such monumental effect.
Taking the most complete skull, Naked Science conducts a unique experiment on a 4,300-year-old Stonehenge man. His bones are scanned into a computer, creating a three-dimensional image of all the skull fragments. And the computer calculates just how to rearrange the pieces of bone into an anatomically correct order. Then, it's up to the facial reconstruction team to try and assemble the jigsaw puzzle into a fully formed face.
Here at the University of Manchester, experts use this new technique. Skilled facial anthropologists use advanced software to build layers of muscle. The system allows the operator to feel the contours of the skull, layer by layer, to create a three-dimensional model.
It takes many weeks of computer time, but finally the mysterious and long-dead Welshman is ready to be revealed. We are about to become the first people for over 4,000 years to see the features of one of the men who may have built Stonehenge. Our quest to uncover the builders of Stonehenge has taken naked science from England's Salisbury Plain to the mountains of Wales.
We have proved how ancient Britons could have hauled vast slabs of rock miles across land and sailed them across water to construct the monument. Examination of ancient graves has given us a face and shed new light on the origins of the peoples who might have come from far and wide to build Stonehenge. What the new science is telling us is that people were moving about, not just within Britain, but clearly all over Europe. And that one, I think, imagines now that the construction of Stonehenge would have been known about at least all over southern Britain, and that this was almost part of the purpose of it for the people who built it. It was a statement about their power.
We still remain with an enduring mystery and nothing but many different theories as to why it was built. The only certainty remains the stones themselves, a monument that has stood proud and immovable for thousands of years, an incredible monument to the incredible ingenuity of the human mind.