A Norwegian 8-year-old girl was playing outside her school when she came
upon a Stone Age knife.
A Norwegian 8-year-old girl was playing outside her school when she
stumbled upon an unexpected find: a flint knife made 3,700 years ago by
Stone Age humans, not a dropped ball or a discarded jump rope.
The youngster, who was only given her first name in a
statement
translated from Norwegian, was playing in a rocky area near her Vestland
County school when she came upon the gray-brown dagger. She said in the
statement, "I was going to pick up a piece of glass, and suddenly the stone
was there.
Karen Drange, Elise's instructor, observed the stone's antiquity when she
presented it to her. Drange called the Vestland county government, and the
county's archaeologists looked at the relic.
According to the translated statement from
Louise Bjerre Petersen, an archaeologist with Vestland county municipality, the almost
5-inch-long (12-centimeter) instrument is a rare discovery. The assertion
suggests that the dagger may have originated in Denmark since flint, a hard
sedimentary rock, does not naturally occur in Norway.
The researchers said that this kind of blade is frequently discovered with
objects used as sacrifices. The Vestland County Council and Vestland
County's University Museum in Bergen, Norway's second-largest city, joined
forces to research the region further. However, they claimed in the
statement that they had not discovered any other Stone Age artifacts.
The dagger most likely originates from the New Stone Age, often known as
the Neolithic,
when prehistoric people first fashioned stone tools, started to depend on domesticated plants and animals, built permanent
settlements, and created crafts like pottery. According to
Talk Norway, an informative website on Norway's history and cultural heritage, the
Stone Age, which includes the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic
periods, lasted in Norway from 10,000 B.C. to 1800 B.C. A number of
hunter-gatherers began permanently settling down to farm around 2400
B.C.
The University Museum will catalog the dagger and utilize it for study. The
item is not the only recent Stone Age find in Norway to draw notice. The H
Gamle Prestegard museum in southern Norway recently unveiled a full-body
replica of a Stone Age adolescent who lived 8,300 years ago. The teen boy
was probably a hunter-gatherer in a Mesolithic community, but the
circumstances of his death are unknown; it appears he passed away alone
leaning against a cave wall because his remains showed no signs of a
burial.
