Stonehenge’s 6-ton altar stone may have traveled from Scotland by glacier

Researchers studying the origins of Stonehenge's Altar Stone have proposed a new possibility for how the enormous rock began its journey from Scotland to southern England.

A team from Sheffield Hallam University and Curtin University, Australia, analyzed ancient ice movement and found that glaciers during Britain's last ice age may have transported the stone from Scotland's Orcadian Basin as far as Dogger Bank in the North Sea. From there, however, people would still have had to move it hundreds of kilometers to Salisbury Plain.

Stonehenge's central Altar Stone is a six-tonne sandstone megalith that researchers now believe came from northeast Scotland, roughly 700 km (435 miles) from Stonehenge. Its distant origin has raised one of the monument's most intriguing questions: how did such an enormous stone travel so far?