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Archaeologists have uncovered traces of a 9,500-year-old team of hunter-gatherers living in the Middle Stone Age, the Mesolithic, under the ice of a rapidly melting Swiss glacier.
The ancient hunting team was able to scale the steep slope, climb an alpine glacier to find what they were looking for: precious crystals they needed to machine their tools.
Traces have emerged in the wake of glacier ice that has been rapidly melting for decades, creating a new area of research: glacier archeology.
Due to rising global temperatures, glaciologists say the Alps are around four thousand 95 percent of its glacier will disappear by the end of the century.
However, the dramatic changes provided a good opportunity for archaeologists to understand what life might have been like in the mountains thousands of years ago.
Until the early 1990s, it was widely held that prehistoric man largely avoided formidable mountain peaks. A series of startling finds that emerged from the melting ice showed that there was active human life in the Alps for thousands of years.
Today, prehistoric groups of people are believed to have climbed mountains, roamed through valleys, hunted, herded their animals, and searched for raw materials.
An archaeologist from the canton of Uri, Christian Auf der Maur, who participated in the expedition to explore the crystals, said the discovery was extraordinary.
We learn that prehistoric man climbed to an altitude of up to 3,000 meters in search of crystals and other raw materials. “The first prehistoric find to emerge from the melting of glaciers was the discovery of Ötzi, a 5,300-year-old warrior, in 1991, with his body preserved intact by a Tyrolean glacier.
The large number of prehistoric finds unearthed since then showed that Ötzi had not embarked on a unique adventure when crossing the steep passes of the high mountains.
The Schnidejoch Pass, located at an altitude of 2,560 meters in the Bernese Alps, has been a valuable site since 2003, where 3,000-year-old birch bark quilts were found and later leather pants and shoes, which may have been owned of the same unfortunate. Then hundreds of other objects were unearthed, the oldest from 4,500 BC. C.
Leather, wood, birch bark, and textiles usually don’t last as long, but ice has kept them intact. A 6,000-year-old spleen cord was also found there last month.
While global warming is made possible by extraordinary discoveries, it also threatens archaeological treasures. If not discovered quickly, the organic matter coming out of the ice will quickly decompose and disappear.
The time window is very small, in twenty years the ice patches will disappear, along with the findings “ Archaeologist Regula Gubler told AFP news agency.
Archaeologists say the problem is that they can’t be there on all melting ice fields, so they have to rely on hikers and others to notify them if they find a valuable find. Sometimes a treasure goes through strange detours.
For example, in 1999, two Italian hikers found a wood carving at an altitude of about 3,100 meters on the Arolla glacier in the southern canton of Wallis. They cleaned it and hung it on the wall in their living room. 19 years later, a series of fortunate events caught the attention of archaeologist Pierre Yves Nicod, who was organizing an ice age archaeological exhibition, to the meter-tall human statue, searched for it, and determined its age. It turned out that the carving is a Celtic work of the Iron Age of more than two thousand years, its function is unknown.
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