The Devil's Arrows: more smoke and mirrors from Clarke and Co

Natural rectangular gritstone blocks in the woods at Brimham Rocks

I may not be a technical wizard, but after many years of scrutinizing papers in many different fields I know when I am confronted by pseudo-science, and I know how to ask the fundamental question: Are the conclusions reached in the paper on the desk (or on the screen) justified by the evidence presented?

Well, I have been taking a quick look at this new article, just published with a good deal of marketing hype and gullible media coverage:

Deliberate prehistoric sourcing of the Devil's Arrows, Britain's tallest stone row Open Access
Anthony Clarke,  Jim Leary,  Chris Kirkland,  Proc. R. Soc. A (2026) 482 (2345): 20260504 .
https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2026.0504

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspa/article/482/2345/20260504/483254/Deliberate-prehistoric-sourcing-of-the-Devil-s

I will come back to it with a more detailed discussion, but these are my initial thoughts.

1. Stratigraphic Continuity & Sampling Overreach

The paper conflates an extensive sedimentary feature—the Kinderscoutian Brimham Grit—with a prominent modern landmark (Brimham Rocks) .

The authors have failed to run control samples across the full lateral extent of the formation, meaning that they cannot mathematically distinguish the famous crag from either prominent or unspectacular outcrops or  strata many miles away which are now buried beneath glacial deposits.

Sampling of the Brimham Grit was restricted to a single location -- a prominent, easily accessible tourist viewpoint, substituting modern human landscape perceptions and preferences for a rigorous sampling programme.

2. Glacial Dynamics Blind Spot.     

The authors appear to be completely naive about the processes of glacial entrainment.  Their simplistic ice-flow objections assume glaciers must have plucked stones from the modern topographic 

high points such as Brimham Rocks.

The Brimham Grit is mapped by BGS across an extensive area  to the west and northwest of Boroughbridge, sitting directly in the path of Devensian ice flowing south and east through the Dales margins. Ice flow during earlier glaciations will not have been significantly different.

The Vale of York is a thoroughly documented glacial depositional zone; the paper fails to demonstrate that streaming ice cannot have entrained the Devil's Arrows and other prominen gritstone blocks and dropped them nearby as convenient erratics.

3. Visual and Statistical Disconnect Histogram Mismatch: 

In spite of the claims in the paper, the raw, unmanipulated zircon age histograms presented look visibly distinct to the naked eye, indicating different physical proportions of mineral grains.

Further, there is statistical masking; the multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) models are highly susceptible to being flooded with irrelevant regional "noise" data (e.g., distant Scottish or Southern English formations), which artificially dilutes local variance to force a tight, artificial cluster match.

Finally, the paper relies on the technique of "telling rather than showing," claiming there are no better matches in the region without actually showing us the evidence accumulated over the years by Andrew Morton and other heavy mineral specialists.

I don't know the field, but it seems to me that the papers by Andrew Morton and his co-authors (in classic papers mapping the heterogeneous sediment routing of the Pennine Basin) are strictly used as "decorative authority".   Clarke and hios colleagues are saying "We know tthe literature.  Trust us....."  Other authorities are cited generically in the introduction to establish that "the detrital zircon spectra of siliciclastic rocks across the Pennine Basin are highly heterogeneous", giving this paper a veneer of geological respectability.  However, when it comes to the actual analysis, Clarke et al completely sidestep the profound implications of previous research. Instead of meaningfully confronting it, they treat it with disdain.

All in all, this is extremely poor science from a team which is getting an unfortunate reputation for making spectacular claims on the basis of very limited fieldwork and totally inadequate sampling protocols. This is the third highly controversial paper from  the Australian "Curtin University school" of geo-archaeology—led by Dr Anthony Clarke and Professor Chris Kirkland.  Their high-profile papers, including the Stonehenge Altar Stone Scottish origin study (Nature, 2024), the Salisbury Plain stream sediment study (Communications Earth & Environment, 2026), and now the Devil's Arrows paper (Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 2026), tend to dazzle the media, and parts of the academic community, because of their high-tech nature.  

Clarke and Kirkland have access to some of the world's most advanced LA-ICP-MS (Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry) equipment at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. When a paper is packed with complex U-Pb isotopic data, core geochemistry, and mineral-scale physics, it creates an intimidating "black box." Archaeology peer-reviewers often lack the highly specialized geochronological background to dispute the numbers, assuming that spectacular machine precision equals geological accuracy.  Instead of publishing in strict, traditional field-geology journals (where regional specialists would immediately question stratigraphic continuity or lateral lithological variations), they target high-impact, multi-disciplinary, or rapid-communication journals (such as Nature, and Royal Society Proceedings). These platforms prioritize groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting narratives and spectacular "discoveries"over cautious, regional field mapping.  And they don't come cheap............

So, to conclude:

Clarke et al have shown quite effectively that the stones referred to as a group called the Devil's Arrows have probably come from the Kinderscoutian gritstone in the Millstone Grit group.  They have NOT shown that the tall standing stones came from the same precise location -- namely Brimham Rocks.

They have NOT shown that the standing stones were transported by human beings.

They have NOT shown that glacial transport was impossible.

They have NOT ruled out multiple other locations to the west and north-west of Boroughbridge from which the stones might originally have been transported by ice.