New evidence on the origins of people buried at Stonehenge

People buried at Stonehenge 5,000 years ago likely lived in west Wales where Stonehenge's smaller standing stones - bluestones - originated from, according to a new study involving UCL, University of Oxford, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle de Paris, France. The study, published in Nature Scientific Reports , suggests that a number of people buried at the Wessex site had moved with and likely transported the bluestones, which were sourced from the Preseli Mountains in west Wales and used in the early construction of Stonehenge. While there has been much speculation as to how and why Stonehenge was built, the question of 'who' built it has received far less attention. Part of the reason was that many of the human remains were cremated, and so it was difficult to extract much useful information from them. Now scientists from Oxford and Belgium have made a breakthrough by analysing 25 of the burials that were excavated in 2008 by a team led by Professor Mike Parker Pearson (UCL Institute of Archaeology). Many of the burials date to around 3000 BC, when Stonehenge was first built. Professor Parker Pearson and other experts have discovered that the Welsh bluestones were erected at this time, to form a 90m-diameter circle around Stonehenge known as the Aubrey Holes.