Stonehenge and Nearby Stone Circles Were Newcomers to Landscape worked by Ice Age hunters

Ancient Origins

About 5,000 years ago, not far from Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in England, some people built a stone circle smaller than its more famous counterpart. But for some reason, sometime after they built it, they dismantled the circle of bluestones and removed them.

Stonehenge and “Bluestonehenge,” as researchers have dubbed it, and other manmade features within a mile or two of the famous site were newcomers among some very ancient human-worked features in the landscape, a group of researchers says.
The archaeologists published an article this month about Bluestonehenge in the journal Antiquity (closed access) that says it and Stonehenge, a third stone circle several hundred meters away known as Amesbury henge and another at Durrington Walls came much later than when Stone Age hunter-gatherers began building features in wood in the area.

A digital reconstruction of Bluestonehenge by Henry Rothwell (Wikimedia Commons)

About 9,000 years ago, some people built wooden features that may have been ceremonial or ritual in nature—possibly aligned to solstice sunsets. Chemical traces of the pinewood are still detectable in the postholes in the soil near Stonehenge.

Prehistoric people built Bluestonehenge out of bluestones that came from far away and later removed those stones to Stonehenge, the researchers think. The smaller Bluestonehenge monument was connected to its more famous counterpart by a feature called the Avenue—a broad road leading from Stonehenge to the River Avon about 500 meters (1640.4 feet) away.
“Stonehenge has long been known to form part of a larger prehistoric landscape,” write archaeologist Michael J. Allen and his colleagues. “In particular, it is part of a composite monument that includes the Stonehenge Avenue and the newly discovered West Amesbury henge, which is situated at the eastern end of the Avenue beside the River Avon. Inside that henge lies an earlier circle of stoneholes, formerly holding small standing stones; this is known as ‘Bluestonehenge’.”

Features of the immediate landscape of Stonehenge include three stone circles, at Stonehenge itself, at the Neolithic village of Durrington Walls, which are still standing, and another that was taken down—Bluestonehenge. (Drawn by Joshua Pollard for Antiquity)

The researchers said the Avenue has been known for centuries, but in 2008 and 2009 the Stonehenge Riverside Project did more explorations and dug new trenches and ascertained that the road reached the River Avon.
“The aim was to establish whether the Avenue was built in more than one phase, and whether it actually reached the river, thereby addressing the theory that Stonehenge was part of a larger complex linked by the river to Durrington Walls henge and its newly discovered avenue, two miles upstream,” they wrote.
All along from 1719 AD through to the present day, researchers have been analyzing the Avenue and digging in it to determine its parameters and purposes. Scholars have proposed theories about the prehistoric banks, ruts, ditches and ridges and stripes in the soil of the Avenue. There has been speculation that the ancient people dug the ditches of the Avenue and built other monuments in the area to align with the winter and summer solstice sunsets.

The Avenue, a road leading from Stonehenge to Bluestonehenge at the River Avon, was part of a larger network of monuments in the area, including stone circles at West Amesbury and Durrington Walls. (Photograph by Adam Stanford in Antiquity)

Stonehenge is near three Early Mesolithic postholes that held pine posts 1 meter (3.1 feet) in diameter. These postholes are 250 meters (820.2 feet) west of the Avenue and hint “at the possibility that this unusual solstitial alignment, formed by the ridges and stripes, was recognised long before the Neolithic. These vertical pine posts or tree-trunks were erected, probably one after the other, in the centuries around 7000 BC by hunter-gatherers, three millennia before the beginning of agriculture in Britain. Monuments built by hunter-gatherers are generally rare; although large pits are known from this period, the Stonehenge postholes are unparalleled anywhere for the Early Mesolithic of Northern Europe.”
Also, along the River Avon researchers have found activity from the 8^th millennium BC through the 5^th millennium BC, “making it, potentially, an unusually ‘persistent place’ within the early Holocene,” the authors wrote. The Holocene was the most recent Ice Age that began around 10,000 years ago.

Stonehenge is situated among a number of nearby prehistoric monuments, including the newly discovered Bluestonehenge, a smaller circle that was 500 meters away at the end of a road leading to the River Avon. (Wikimedia Commons photo/Michael Osmenda)

As for the bluestones of Bluestonehenge, which are missing, the researchers speculate they were taken to Stonehenge. They say they are uncertain of the date of construction of Bluestonehenge, but it occurred about the same time the people were digging the ditches of the Avenue, building West Amesbury henge and rearranging some other bluestones at Stonehenge.
These works were possibly carried out by people of the Beakers culture, the authors wrote.
“The arrival of Beakers and accompanying continental European styles of mortuary practice and material culture signalled a major social and cultural transition in Britain, including the decline of large-scale labour mobilisation for megalith-building,” their paper states.
One of the authors, archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson, has speculated that stone henges were meant for the dead, and wood henges found in the vicinity were features meant for living people.
Top image: Stonehenge  England (public domain)
By Mark Miller

7,000-Year-Old Forest and Footprints Uncovered in the Atlantis of Britain

Ancient Origins

Ancient footprints as well as prehistoric tree stumps and logs have become visible along a 200-meter stretch of a coastline at Low Hauxley near Amble, Northumberland, in what is believed to be Doggerland, the Atlantis of Britain.

The Daily Mail reports that the forest existed in the late Mesolithic period. It began to form around 5,300 BC, and it was covered by the ocean three centuries later. The studies proved that at the time, when the ancient forest existed, the sea level was much lower. It was a period when Britain had recently separated from the land of what is currently Denmark. The forest consisted mostly of hazel, alder, and oak trees. Researchers believe the forest was part of Doggerland, an ancient stretch of a land, which connected the UK and Europe.

Doggerland: Stone Age Atlantis of Britain

Located in the North Sea, Doggerland is believed to have once measured approximately 100,000 square miles (258998 square kilometers). However, the end of the Ice Age saw a great rise in the sea level and an increase in storms and flooding in the region, causing Doggerland to gradually shrink.
Doggerland, sometimes called the Stone Age Atlantis of Britain or the prehistoric Garden of Eden, is an area archaeologists have been waiting to rediscover. Finally, modern technology has reached a level in which their dreams may become a reality. Doggerland is thought to have been first inhabited around 10,000 BC, and innovative technology is expected to aid a new study in glimpsing what life was like for the prehistoric humans living in the region before the catastrophic floods covered the territory sometime between 8000 - 6000 BC.

The area, which would have been home to a range of animals, as well as the hunter gatherers which stalked them, became flooded due to glacial melt, with some high-lying regions such as 'Dogger Island' (pictured right, highlighted red) serving as clues to the regions ancient past. (public domain)

Sunken Land Reveals its Secrets

The latest research was made by a group of archeologists and volunteers led by a team from Archaeological Research Services Ltd, which previously performed some other projects related to the Northumberland. The works were possible due to the lower level of water. The major excavations involved a total of 700 people and uncovered part of an Iron Age site dating from around 300 BC near the Druidge Bay.
Doctor Clive Waddington, of Archaeology Research Services said:

''In 5,000 BC the sea level rose quickly and it drowned the land. The sand dunes were blown back further into the land, burying the forest, and then the sea receded a little. The sea level is now rising again, cutting back the sand dunes, and uncovering the forest.''

Clive Waddington, project director of Archaeological Research Services Ltd at the prehistoric archaeological dig at Low Hauxley near Amble, Northumberland (The Journal)

Ancient Footprints

Waddington maintains that his team also discovered the evidence of humans living nearby. They found footprints of adults and children. Due to the results of the analysis of the footprints, it is believed that they wore leather shoes.  Animal footprints of wild boar, brown bears and red deer also had been found.

Fossilized Forests

The remains of the forest of Doggerland do not belong to the oldest known forest. The oldest fossilized forest was discovered by a team from the Binghamton University in the town of Gilboa in upstate New York. The Gilboa area has been known as a tree fossil location since the late 19^th century. However, the first researchers arrived there in the 1920s. The most recent research started in 2004, when Linda VanAller Hernick, paleontology collection manager, and Frank Mannolini, paleontology collection technician, uncovered more intact specimens. According to the article published in 2012 by William Stein, associate professor of biological sciences at Binghamton, the fossils discovered in this area are between 370 to 380 million years old.
See the 5,000-year-old forest unearthed by storms:

Featured image: The remains of an ancient forest in what is believed to have once formed part of Doggerland. Credit: North News and Pictures.
By Natalia Klimczak

Ice Age Death Rituals Revealed at Infant Burial Site

by Laura Geggel

       

The excavation of a double infant burial dated to the last ice age, at the Upward Sun River site in Alaska. Credit: Credit: Ben Potter | University of Alaska, Fairbanks

The fragile skeletons of two infants, discovered beneath the cremated remains of a 3-year-old child, may help researchers understand death rituals practiced during the last ice age in North America, a new study finds.
The children's remains, which date back to 11,500 years ago, were found in a hearth at Upward Sun River, an archaeological site in central Alaska. Researchers uncovered the cremated skeleton of the 3-year-old child in 2010, and returned to the site in 2013, digging deeper to see what else lay within the prehistoric hearth.
About 15.7 inches (40 centimeters) beneath the first cremated child, they found the double burial. [See a time-lapse video of the Alaskan excavation]

 

"When we got to the bottom [of the hearth], we identified a carpet of red ochre. That clearly set it out," said Ben Potter, an associate professor and chairman of anthropology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. "Then, we encountered the human remains and the grave goods at the very bottom. That was very unexpected and amazing."
The team immediately stopped the excavation, and contacted local and regional native groups and state officials, asking for permission to study the remains of the tiny infants.
"They were treating the human remains with respect, and that's really what you need to do," said Roy Carlson, professor emeritus of archaeology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, who was not involved in the study.
The skeletal remains of the two infants, found with their legs bent toward their chests, are a "remarkable and unusual" find, Carlson said. An analysis of the infants' teeth and bones suggests that one was likely a late-term fetus, and the other was about five weeks old, making them the youngest known individuals from the late Pleistocene epoch to receive burial treatment, the researchers wrote in the study.

Researchers found stone darts or spears, and foreshafts made out of carved antlers in the prehistoric grave.
Credit: Ben Potter | University of Alaska, Fairbanks

 

The grave also holds a prehistoric hunting tool kit. The team found several stone-made bifaces, dart or spear points, and antler foreshafts decorated with geometric incisions next to the infants. Other ice-age findings have suggested that early hunters may have used stone weapons and foreshafts together, but the new finding is the first to provide concrete evidence that they were used in tandem.
"They were placed in the position that we could infer that they were attached," Potter told Live Science. "Imagine if you are a hunter on the landscape. You wouldn't want to carry a large amount of heavy spears or dart shafts with you. You would just have one or two [foreshafts], but you would have many points in case you break one."
The burial placement of the hunting tools suggests that terrestrial hunting, as opposed to fishing rods or other hunting weapons, were of utmost importance to the ice-age people, Potter said.
Twin clues
The relationship between the two infants, likely girls, remains a mystery. It's possible that the girls are twins, Potter said, but a DNA test would be needed to verify the idea.
It's unlikely that a highly mobile foraging society would have two deaths from different mothers at exactly the same time, he said. If they were twins, it might explain why the girls are buried together, he said.
"One could have died in utero, and then that enhances the potential for an early death for the surviving child," Potter said. [8 Grisly Archaeological Discoveries]
The soil at the burial site isn't that disturbed, so the infants may have been buried at the same time, the researchers said. Or, they could have died within a season or two of each other, which could indicate that they are not twins, Potter said.
Either way, researchers are looking forward to the results of the genetic tests. And regardless of whether the infants were twins, the people who buried the children clearly gave them deferential treatment.
"You have grave goods, ochre, burial in a highly flexed orientation, and the grave goods are quite amazing," Potter said. "For the upper [3-year-old] child, you do not have grave goods, you do not have ochre and the child is cremated. So this is quite interesting."
The team also found bones of ground squirrels and salmonids, which are fish related to present-day salmon, in the hearth. These animal bones suggest that the infants' burials took place during the summer, when these animals are typically in the region, Potter said.
Carlson said the findings are the result of "top-notch research."
"It brings forward information about Alaska 11,500 years ago from a time which we knew very little about and we know a lot more about now," he said.
The study was published online today (Nov. 10) in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Live Science