Stonehenge was built by Welsh people who dragged the monuments 140 miles, says breakthrough study

, shows that both people and materials were flowing between areas around 5,000 years ago and that some of these people stayed put in the region.

When they passed away, their cremated remains were placed under the ancient monument in what is now Wiltshire.

The earliest bones have been dated to about 3,000 BC and then span a range of around 500 years.

John Pouncett, a lead author of the study, said: "The range of dates raises the possibility that for centuries people could have been brought to Stonehenge for burial with the stones.”

Co-author Dr Christophe Snoeck demonstrated that cremated bone faithfully retains its strontium isotope composition.

He said that "about 40% of the cremated individuals did not spend their later lives on the Wessex chalk where their remains were found."

The cremated remains from Stonehenge were first excavated by Colonel William Hawley in the 1920s from a network of 56 pits dotted around the inner circumference and ditch of the monument, known as Aubrey Holes.

Hawley then reburied them at the site to be dug up at a later date.

Pouncett, a spatial technology officer at Oxford’s School of Archaeology, said the research "gives us a new insight into the communities who built Stonehenge".

"The cremated remains from the enigmatic Aubrey Holes and updated mapping of the biosphere suggest that people from the Preseli Mountains not only supplied the bluestones used to build the stone circle but moved with the stones and were buried there too," he added.

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