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Archaeologists have uncovered traces of a hunter-gatherer team that lived in the Middle Stone Age, the Mesolithic, dating back 9,500 years, under the ice of a rapidly melting Swiss glacier, writes MTI.
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 glacial ice that has been rapidly melting for decades, creating a new area of research:
glacial archeology.
Due to rising global temperatures, glaciologists say that 95 percent of the roughly 4,000 glaciers in the Alps 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.
Archaeologist of the canton of Uri, Christian Auf der Maur, who was on an expedition to explore the crystals, said the discovery was extraordinary.
“We learned that prehistoric man climbed to an altitude of up to 3,000 feet in search of crystals and other raw materials,” he explained.
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 times that have been discovered since then may have shown that Ötzi set out on a unique adventure by 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. Hundreds of other objects were then unearthed, the oldest in BC. They are 4,500 years old.
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, the ice patches will disappear in twenty years, along with the findings,” he told AFP. regulates Gubler archaeologist.
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 led to the organization of the ice age archaeological exhibition. Pierre Yves Nicod the meter-tall human statue caught the eye of an archaeologist, who looked up 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.
Főkép: Leopold Nekula / Sygma via Getty Images
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