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Archaeologists believe they have discovered an earlier version of Stonehenge

2026-06-18 08:54:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

Archaeologists believe they have discovered an earlier and much simpler version of Stonehenge, about 5km from the prehistoric monument.

All that remains of the older structure are two holes in the ground, but the team says they held wooden posts that were aligned with the Sun at the summer and winter solstices - the longest and shortest days of the year - in the same way as Stonehenge.

The site has been dated to around 5,000 years old, which is 500 years older than Stonehenge.

Artifacts, including pottery, stone tools and animal bones, were also found at the site, suggesting that prehistoric people held gatherings there.

Phil Harding, from Wessex Archaeology, who led the excavation, said it was one of the best finds of his long career.

"Two pillar pits tell me [a lot] more about people 5,000 years ago," he said.

"This tells me about the whole community, it tells me how they thought, how they behaved, how they worshipped the sky."

The large stones at Stonehenge are placed exactly in line with the Sun.

If you stand in the middle of the circle at sunrise on the summer solstice, you will see the Sun rise over a stone called the heel stone in the northeast of the circle.

In midwinter, if you stood in the center of the circle, you would see the sun set over an altar stone in the southwest of the site.

The structure, discovered in the village of Bulford, was a much simpler construction consisting of just two wooden posts, which have long since rotted away.

They were positioned 120 meters apart and were estimated to be between 2 and 4 meters high.

When Harding discovered the interesting holes, he noticed that they appeared to be aligned with the Sun, much like Stonehenge located a few miles away.

"I took the pencil and ruler, put them together, and I was aware that they were pointing in the general direction of the midsummer sunrise," he said.

Traces of the previous structure were found a decade ago in Bulford, when land was cleared for new military housing.

But only now has a detailed analysis of the extent been carried out, which included turning back the celestial clock.

"The sky - the positions of the Sun, Moon, planets and stars - change very slowly over centuries. We don't notice this in our lifetimes," said Dr. Fabio Silva, an archaeoastronomer from Bournemouth University and the Skyscape Academy.

"So we basically have to reconstruct the sky, what it looked like exactly 5,000 years ago, where the Sun rose and what time it rose in those places."

"If you consider the width of the pillars… then the alignment is exactly, exactly correct. It's aligned precisely with the sunrise on the summer solstice and the sunset on the winter solstice."