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This has been a monumental year for further insight about Stonehenge's creation. Researchers are now positing that the iconic stone circle may have been erected in an effort to unite ancient farming communities, CNN reported.
Earlier this year, experts discovered that Stonehenge's central six-ton altar stone may have come from more than 450 miles away in Scotland. It was previously known that the sarsen stones came from 16 miles away from the site, in what is now the British town of Marlborough, and that the smaller bluestones were brought from 125 miles away, from the Preseli hills in what is now Wales.
Mike Parker Pearson, a professor of British later prehistory at University College London, has proposed that Stonehenge's very creation may hinge on the stone's geographical distance. Stonehenge, he claims, may have been the result of early efforts to unite farmers and their communities across the British Isles during a time of social change. The stones could have been a gift or signified a political alliance.
"Stonehenge stands out in being a material and monumental microcosm of the entirety of the British Isles," he writes in a new study, published in the journal Archaeology International on Thursday.
No other monument in the region includes stones from such distances. According to Parker Pearson, Stonehenge should be considered as much a political monument as a religious one. Though the structure is aligned to the winter and summer solstices, it may not be its primary purpose.
"I think we've just not been looking at Stonehenge in the right way. You really have to look at all of it to work out what they're doing. They're constructing a monument that is expressing the permanence of particular aspects in their world," Parker Pearson told the Guardian.
The altar stone, for instance, was previously thought to have fallen into its current position; however, other stone circles in Northeast Scotland contain stones that have been laid flat. Now, it is believed to be more intentional, possibly even coming from another monument.
The altar stone is believed to have been added around 2500BCE during a period of cultural shifts in Britain with new people coming in from mainland Europe.
"That is the moment that Stonehenge is built, and I wonder if it is that moment of contact that serves, in whatever way, as the catalyst for this really impressive second stage of Stonehenge. It's an attempt to assert unity, quite possibly integrating the newcomers - or not."
Desite this, the "beaker people", who came to Britain from the Eurasian steppe around 4,400 years ago, eventually displaced the neolithic population that had been there. Stonehenge was still, however, considered a significant monument by the newcomers.