Stonehenge - the world's most famous prehistoric monument - may have started as a giant burial ground for the stone age elite as early as around 3,000 BC, a new study has found.
Researchers led by archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson excavated more than 50,000 cremated bone fragments, of 63 individuals buried at Stonehenge and studied them for the first time.
Pearson, who has been working at the site and on nearby monuments for decades, believes the earliest burials long predate the monument in its current form, 'The Guardian' reported.
He believes the first bluestones - smaller standing stones - were brought from Wales and placed as grave markers around 3,000 BC, and it remained a giant circular graveyard for at least 200 years, followed by sporadic burials.
It was thought that almost all the Stonehenge burials, many originally excavated almost a century ago, but discarded as unimportant, were of adult men.
However, new techniques have revealed for the first time that they include almost equal numbers of men and women, and children including a newborn baby.
"At the moment the answer is no to extracting DNA, which might tell us more about these individuals and what the relationship was between them - but who knows in the future? Clearly these were special people in some way," Pearson said.
A mace head, a high-status object comparable to a sceptre, and a little bowl burnt on one side, which Pearson believes may have held incense, suggest the dead could have been religious and political leaders and their immediate families.
For centuries, archaeologists have debated what Stonehenge really meant to the people who gave hundreds of thousands of hours to constructing circles of bluestones shipped from Wales, and sarsens dragged across Salisbury plain, the report said.
Some believe Stonehenge to be a sacred place. Others have judged it a temple, an observatory, a solar calendar, a site for fairs or ritual feasting or a centre for healing.
The latest theory is based on the first analysis of more than 50,000 fragments of cremated human remains from one of the Aubrey holes, a ring of pits from the earliest phase of the monument, which some have believed held wooden posts.
