The towering rocks at Stonehenge are so heavy that, according to a new controversial idea, a glacier, rather than Neolithic people, may have carried them from western Wales and dropped them off at Salisbury Plain in England, where the ancient monument stands today.To get more history culture news, you can visit shine news official website.

But many archaeologists disagree, saying that this hypothesis lacks evidence and downplays the achievements, skill and imagination that the ancient builders likely displayed. Stonehenge’s history extends as far back as 8500 B.C., when Mesolithic people dug pits for totem-pole-like posts at the site. The first stone pillars were erected there in about 2500 B.C. and rearranged by people over the next several thousand years, according to English Heritage, the charity that manages historic sites in England.

The monument has two main stone types that come from different places: The larger sarsen stones in the outer ring — which stand up to 30 feet (9 meters) tall and weigh an average of 25 tons (22.6 metric tons) — likely come from Marlborough Downs, located about 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of Stonehenge.

The bluestones (named for their bluish tinge when wet or broken) are considerably smaller. They weigh up to 4 tons (3.6 metric tons) and are made up of about 30 types of rock that come from several locations in western Wales, a distance of about 140 miles (225 km). In his new, self-published book, "The Stonehenge Bluestones” (Greencroft Books, 201 — due out June 1 — Brian John argues that glaciers picked up the bluestones in western Wales and dropped them off in Salisbury Plain. John is a geomorphologist, a scientist who studies how landscapes change over time, and works as an independent consultant in the United Kingdom.

This glacier hypothesis isn’t new; it was first proposed in 1902 in the journal Archaeologia. But a seminal 1923 paper by British geologist Herbert Henry Thomas — who linked the bluestones to rock outcrops in Pembrokeshire in western Wales — dismissed the glacier idea.

"Since 1923, people have taken that statement [from Thomas] as more or less definitive,” John told Live Science. "Archaeologists, in general, have assumed that if the ice couldn’t have carried them, therefore they must have been carried by human beings.”

But this interpretation is mistaken, John said. "People have loved this story … all of the heroic ancestors slaving away, collecting up these stones from west Wales and then carrying them all the way to Stonehenge,” he said. "We all love heroic tales, and I think that’s why people have just accepted this, more or less, at face value without any questioning of the evidence on which it’s based.”

John looks at it this way: Most of the bluestones aren’t well-carved pillars but rather "boulders and slabs and rather clumpy bits of stone” that are characteristic of rocks caught up in glaciers. Moreover, about 500,000 years ago, the Irish Sea Glacier covered parts of the United Kingdom. It’s not yet clear how far this glacier extended, "but it’s a reasonable assumption that since it was such a big glacier, it may well have reached the edge of Salisbury Plain and possibly even to Stonehenge,” John said. [Glaciers Disappear in Before & After Photos]

Meanwhile, he said there’s no evidence that humans carried, pushed or boated the boulders to Stonehenge (archaeologists disagree). When employing Occam’s Razor, the idea that the simplest explanation is often the correct one, it makes sense that a glacier brought over the bluestones, rather than people finding and bringing the megaliths over, John said.

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