To everyone involved, it’s simply an amazing discovery.
“It is so rare to find material this old in such good condition,” Dr. Nick Overton, archaeology research associate, told the University of Manchester. “The Mesolithic in Britain was before the introduction of pottery or metals, so finding organic remains like bone, antler and wood, which are usually not preserved, are incredibly important in helping us to reconstruct peoples’ lives.”
A team of archaeologists from two universities in England found incredibly preserved remains linked to a hunter-gatherer settlement near Scarborough, a coastal city on the North Sea about 360 miles north of London. The finding dates back about 10,500 years ago during the Mesolithic or ‘Middle Stone Age’ period. A lake filled with layer upon layer of peat over thousands of years preserved the discovery.
Among the items found were bones of animals taken while hunting including elk and red deer, beavers and water birds, and also hand-crafted weapons to take that prey such as a barbed antler and decorated bone.