The early morning light illuminates the circle of stones. The image was taken by Marianne Purdie.
Historians in the United Kingdom propose that the builders of the ancient monument ate energy bars to stay strong during the cold winter months.
People in the region at the time ate mostly beef, pork and dairy, and the ring of standing stones was built between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago. The monument's builders may have lived in a nearby settlement called Durrington Walls, where they may have eaten sweet and salty snacks during the winter.
Susan Greaney, an archaeologist and senior properties historian at English Heritage, said that Neolithic people were known to have collected and cooked hazelnuts, crab apples, sloes, and other fruits. Greaney said that nuts and fruit may have been cooked with meat fats to make a great energy bar.
In photos, a walk through a monument.
There are some good videos for you.
Greaney said that midwinter and Feast were important to the builders of the monument. They had access to healthy fruit and nuts, and we are lucky to have that evidence.
A British seasonal favorite that includes beef suet, fruits, sugar and sometimes alcohol, may have been baked into a pastry like a mince pie, which was mixed with sweet fruit and nuts. The earliest records of mince pies date to medieval times and there's no evidence of Neolithic baked goods, but cereals could have been used for baking thousands of years ago in England.
Neolithic builders and their communities may have enjoyed such delicacies for celebration as well as sustenance, with the sharing of food helping the community to bond, encouraging people to travel from far and wide to help build Stonehenge.
She said it was fun to imagine travellers being greeted with a tray of mince pies. English Heritage will be selling Neolithic-style mince pies at Stonehenge during the month of December to recreate what that might have been like.
It would have been difficult to move such enormous stones if they were powered by meat-flavor energy bars. The larger of the two types of stones is called "sarsen" and the smaller is called "bluestones," according to Bournemouth University. On average, sarsen and bluestones weigh 25 tons and 5 tons, respectively, and measure up to 30 feet (9 meters) tall.
A group of university students in the U.K. tested a possible method of transporting giant stones from quarries to a ring. They dragged a sled carrying a stone block over wooden tracks at an average speed of about 1 mph. The scientists told Live Science that moving the slab required 10 students, which was less than they expected.
Live Science published the original article.
