Cow's tooth could reveal how Stonehenge was built 5,000 years ago

Stonehenge pulls people in, but the real puzzle is how heavy stones traveled so far to reach the Salisbury Plain. A small clue sat in a museum drawer for decades – a cow’s tooth was found near the entrance to Stonehenge in 1924.

That tooth has now been studied with modern tools, and it tells a clear, testable story about place, season, and movement. Each layer of the tooth is locked in chemical signals during the animal’s second year of life.

Analyzing the Stonehenge cow tooth

In a new study led by Jane Evans of the British Geological Survey, scientists sliced the one inch molar into nine layers of tooth enamel and measured multiple isotopes.

Those signals show roughly six months of growth from winter into summer, a dietary shift from woodland fodder to open pasture, and changing geology in the food sources that fed the animal.

The numbers are specific and useful for archaeology. The tooth’s strontium values move from about 0.7144 in winter toward 0.7110 in summer, and the lead isotopes spike in late winter and spring.

This points to a geologically older source for part of the animal’s life history.

“Wales is the closest area from which you get those kind of lead compositions,” said Evans, isotope geochemist at the British Geological Survey.

That line matters because it ties the tooth to landscapes underlain by Paleozoic rocks, which are common in Wales.

It also lines up with the well supported idea that Stonehenge’s smaller stones came from the Preseli Hills in Wales.

Cows and the Stonehenge stones

“It raises the tantalising possibility that cattle helped to haul the stones,” said Michael Parker Pearson, of the UCL Archaeology.

That possibility is not pulled from thin air. A 2018 Antiquity study documented foot bone changes in Neolithic cattle that are consistent with pulling heavy loads, showing that people in parts of prehistoric Europe were already using cattle for traction.

The tooth data narrow the timeline to half a year in the Neolithic, not a vague lifetime window.

Oxygen and carbon patterns lock the seasonality in place, and the paired strontium and lead profiles separate local feeding from earlier life signals stored in the skeleton.

The lead peaks likely reflect stress related to calving and lactation, when stored lead can re enter the bloodstream and end up in enamel forming at that time.

That insight helps researchers avoid misreading lead as a simple pointer for geography.

Stonehenge rocks and logistics

Stonehenge used two main stone types, bluestones and sarsens, and the sarsens average about 25 tons. Moving any of those stones would have taken teams, timetables, and steady supplies.

Likely transport routes spanned roughly 156 miles from west Wales to Wiltshire, a serious haul by any measure. People would have needed food, shelter, rest points, and a plan for changing crews and animals along the way.

Teeth form in layers that do not change after mineralization. That is why enamel is a stable archive, and why this single molar can hold a line by line record of the animal’s water sources, diet, and geology for a fixed slice of time.

Each isotope system answers a different question. Oxygen points to season, carbon tracks plants and grazing environments, strontium tags the bedrock that fed the vegetation, and lead has the added wrinkle of storage and release from bone.

What the numbers imply Stonehenge

The winter strontium values are too radiogenic for most of southern England, then the ratios shift downward into summer.

That pattern looks like either a seasonal move across geological zones or a change from stored woodland feed to fresh pasture.

Lead does not smoothly follow that curve, and that mismatch is the clue. It pushes researchers to weigh physiology as well as geology, a critical step when using multiple isotopes to discuss mobility.

Combining isotope systems increases confidence, but it also raises new questions about timing. Strontium in enamel mostly reflects diet during mineralization, while lead may include a recycled signal from bone.

This study shows why internal body stores must be considered. Without that caution, a lead peak could be misread as a move on the map rather than a life event.

Stonehenge, cows, and future study

The cow tooth does not prove that teams of cattle dragged every stone across Britain.

It does show that animals linked to the project, or their remains, came from the same broader regions as the stones and that people were managing animals across seasons and terrains.

It also shows how much can be learned from curated finds collected a century ago. The sample was small, the evidence is precise, and the inferences are testable with more teeth and more sites.

Archaeology often leans on grand narratives, but here a single animal provides a grounded slice of real life.

That window, winter into summer in an animal’s second year, brings logistics, land use, and human decisions into focus without guesswork.

The approach can be applied to other monuments and routes. With bigger sample sizes, we can separate foddering from migration and see how work animals supported major building efforts.

The study is published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

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