Stonehenge-area inhabited thousands of years prior to building of monument

Visitors take photographs of the world heritage site of Stonehenge, Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2013.AP Photo/Alastair Grant

The ancient monument of Stonehenge dates back to between 2500 BC and 3000 BC—but when it was built, people had already been living in the area for millennia, researchers found after a dig.

Artifacts from what is now Amesbury, the nearest settlement to Stonehenge, dated to 8820 BC. It's been inhabited ever since, the BBC notes, making it Britain's oldest settlement, something the Guinness Book of Records has now officially recognized.

(As such, Thatcham has lost the honor.) The year was established after burnt flints and large animal bones were unearthed; they point to feasts held there, Smithsonian reports.

"The site blows the lid off the Neolithic Revolution in a number of ways," says researcher David Jacques, who notes that it provides evidence of "people staying put, clearing land, building, and presumably worshiping, monuments." Experts had believed the stones were erected by European immigrants, notes Culture24, but in fact the area was a hub for people in the region, says Jacques.

It "was a forerunner for what later went on at Stonehenge itself," he says. "The first monuments at Stonehenge were built by these people. For years, people have been asking why is Stonehenge where it is; now at last, we have found the answers." Giant pine posts were placed in the area long before Stonehenge was there, sometime before 6590 BC, reports the Guardian; the study offers a "missing link" between the posts and the stone monuments.

(Click to read about Stonehenge's sonic secret.)

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Thousands of turtles killed by longline fishing in Costa Rica

Sea turtles were the second most common catch on Costa Rican fishermen’s longlines during the past decade. Sharks also suffered on the hooks.

A team of Americans and Costa Ricans estimated that longlines hooked more than 699,000 olive ridley sea turtles (Lepidochelys olivacea) and 23,000 green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) between 1999 and 2010. Female olive ridleys made up 92,300 of the total. This represents a serious blow to the reproductive potential of the species, which the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists as vulnerable. The IUCN lists green turtles as endangered.

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Approximately 20 percent or 144,400 of the hooked turtles died. People freed the rest from the curved steel spikes and released them back into the sea. However no one knows if the ordeal seriously injured the animals.

“The effect of the rusty hooks may be to give the turtles a good dose of disease,” said James Spotila, an environmental scientist at Drexel University and co-author of the study published in the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, in a press release. “No one knows because no one holds the turtle to see if it gets sick.”

Approximately 20 percent or 144,400 of the hooked turtles died.

Longline fishing involves a single long cable with many side lines coming off of it. Each side line holds a baited hook. Spotila and his teammates used data collected by observers aboard longline ships to calculate the totals of the various species caught.

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The research team also observed that many young silky (Carcharhinus falciformis) and blacktip (Carcharhinus limbatus) sharks ended up on the lines. Less than 15 percent of the captured silky sharks had reached maturity. An abundance of adolescents may mean the adults have been wiped out.

Longline fisherman caught more mahi mahi than any other fish. Mahi mahi attracted fishmermen’s attention because they command a good price in the market.

However, sharks and turtles have no legal commercial value in Costa Rica, because of protections under national law. One study author criticized the Costa Rican fisheries agency INCOPESCA for failing to enforce protections of the sharks and turtles.

“INCOPESCA has failed to adequately study and regulate the fishery in Costa Rica for many years,” said Randall Arauz, president of Pretoma, a Costa Rican conservation organization, in a press release. “It does not even enforce national laws. Board members have serious conflicts of interest because they are commercial fishermen. Until INCOPESCA is reformed in such a way that the Board of Directors is eliminated and its mission is to defend the public interest, neither the fish nor the turtles will be safe.”

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