That is what the Salisbury Plain seemed like earlier than Stonehenge

Stonehenge as viewed from the northeast

Enlarge / Stonehenge as considered from the northeast, exhibiting the post-and-lintel building of the Sarsen Circle. (credit score: Timothy Darvill)

Stonehenge was an vital place for hundreds of years earlier than individuals positioned the primary stones, in line with a latest research. Archaeologists used the microscopic stays of bugs, pollen, fungal spores, and historic DNA preserved within the soil to reconstruct the traditional surroundings of southwest England’s Salisbury Plain. Six-thousand years in the past, the plain was a mosaic of open grassland and woods, the place archaeological proof exhibits that folks as soon as hunted herds of extinct cattle referred to as aurochs.

Samuel Hudson, an environmental scientist on the College of Southampton, and his colleagues say their findings recommend that lots of the ceremonial websites and routes left behind by Britain’s earliest farmers—the builders of Stonehenge—might date again hundreds of years to land utilized by the primary occupiers of Britain after the tip of the final Ice Age.

What occurs when worlds collide?

A couple of mile away from Stonehenge lies an older, much less well-known archaeological website referred to as Blick Mead. Right here, the Salisbury Plain meets the floodplain of the River Avon. Stone instruments (greater than 100,000 of them), butchered animal bones, and charred fish bones present that folks got here to this place repeatedly for hundreds of years in the course of the Mesolithic interval.

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