Buzz60Although Stonehenge may be the most famous of Europe’s megaliths, it’s far from the only one: There are about 35,000 of these mysterious stone structures throughout the continent.

Now a new study suggests that an ancient culture that emerged from what’s now the Brittany region of northwest France may have begun building these structures and monuments some 7,000 years ago.

Study author Bettina Schulz Paulsson of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden said that the megalith building probably began in France and spread from there via sea routes around Europe over the next 1,000 years or so.

“We have thus been able to demonstrate that the earliest megaliths originated in northwest France and spread along the sea routes of the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts in three successive principal phases,” she wrote in the study.

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