A series of coincidences made it possible to discover the oldest archaeological find in Lithuania: for the tool, even 13 thousand. years

The oldest ax in Lithuania is 13 thousand years old. According to scientists, the artifacts of such an old horn often disappear, so the miracle is not only that it survived, but that after a series of coincidences it reached our times, writes the medium.

“Some things are destined to survive, be discovered, recognized and fall into the right hands after a thousand years. 2014 While digging the dirt on Vilius Venckūnas farm, men discovered an unexpected find: a horn. The horn impressed them, but gave it to the owner of the plot. After a while, a friend from Germany visited Vilius Venckūnas. When he saw the find, he remembered seeing a similar one in a German museum. The owner, realizing how old and rare this find was, handed it over to specialists and, starting this week, it will be possible to see the unique find in the exhibition, says Dalia Ostrauskienė, archaeologist at the National Museum of Lithuania and curator of the exhibition.

The ax was the subject of a long and complex investigation.

Specialists from Dr. Dr. from Klaipėda University helped talk about the unique exhibition. Tomo Rimkaus, prof. skilled. Dr. Algirdas Girininkas, dr. Guido Slah has conducted research today that allows us to talk about the purpose and intensity of the use of the ax. The ax was studied in the radiocarbon laboratories of the Klaipėda University Archaeological Material Research and the London Center for Biosciences Innovation (BETA).

“Visitors to the exhibition will see an ax with a fairly smooth surface, but when the microscope is magnified 115 times, you can see the gloss of the surface and the incised lines. They show that the tool has been used frequently, and only the perceptible shine in a certain place betrays the contact of the ax handle with fur or skin. For greater comfort, the handle could be wrapped in leather or the portable ax came into intense contact with the reindeer hunters’ skin or leather clothing, ”says G. Slah.

In a crack in the horn, a tiny carbon was found from a layer that had not been touched by subsequent human activity. This suggests that the ax was not moved for a long time, and perhaps never after it was lost.
Such axes made from reindeer horns were used in the region around the Baltic Sea. Although widespread in their time, they are extremely rare. The first ax of this type was found over a hundred years ago in the Nørre Lyngby area of ​​Denmark, and since then all axes of this type have been named after this area. Several dozen such axes were found in the northern European region, and only one of them is known from the eastern Baltic countries: five were found on the territory of former East Prussia before the Second World War, and in 2009 a find was also found in Latvia.

The exhibition is an experience of a sliding ice age.

Visitors to the exhibition will not only see a unique find, but will also feel the atmosphere that prevailed in these areas 13 thousand years ago – it was a period of the end of the ice age, when the climate in Lithuania was briefly warming up.

“13 thousand years is an impressive number. However, it is difficult to cover and imagine such a long period of time. The research carried out allows us to reconstruct the period when Lyngby’s ax fell to the ground. This will allow the visitor to the exhibition to compose a changing landscape: at that time, the ax found was the edge of a large shallow basin of water, alongside which vagabonds hunted. For thousands of years, the tundra in this place has been replaced by deciduous trees, and today we will no longer find the lake: the Nemunėlis river has eroded its course here ”, say A. Girininkas and T. Rimkus.

The discovery of the Lyngby ax and its research allowed scientists to expand their knowledge of the life of the first inhabitants of the postglacial period, to determine the development of lodgings in the eastern Baltic region at the end of the last ice age.