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A fluffle of savage rabbits unearthed priceless archaeological treasures on an island off the coast of Wales, UK.
Burrowing rabbits unearthed two artifacts – a 9,000-year-old Stone Age tool and a 3,750-year-old piece of pottery, likely from a broken Bronze Age urn, according to the Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales , which manages the island of Skokholm, where the objects were found.
Archaeologists have found similar artifacts on the British mainland, but these new finds are the first of their kind on Skokholm Island and indicate humans visited or lived there thousands of years ago, Wildlife has found. Trust.
Related: Return to the Stone Age: 17 Key Stages of Paleolithic Life
The island, located about two miles off the coast of Pembrokeshire, a county in southwest Wales, is known for the tens of thousands of seabirds that nest there in spring and summer . Its natural beauty and wildlife have earned it the nickname “Dream Island”.
Archaeological finds over the years have shown evidence of prehistoric people on this island, but little is known about them. From 1324, Skokholm Island became a rabbit farm for the next 200 years – a common island practice at this time, according to the Wildlife Trust. It seems that some of the descendants of these rabbits dug the latest finds.
Guardians Richard Brown and Giselle Eagle, who watch the island as it is closed due to the pandemic, first found the smooth, oval Stone Age artifact while they were near ‘a labyrinth of rabbits. They described him as “an interesting rock” in a March 16 blog post.
The duo sent photos of the pebble to Toby Driver, an archaeologist with the Royal Commission for Wales, who in turn contacted prehistoric stone tool expert Andrew David. As soon as he saw the pictures, David knew the stone was an important find.
“The photos were clearly of a Late Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) ‘beveled pebble’, a tool that would have been used in tasks such as the preparation of seal skins to make skin-dressed personal watercraft, or to process foods such as shellfish, among hunter-gatherer communities about 6,000 to 9,000 years ago, ”David wrote in an email to the keepers.
“Although these types of tools are well known at coastal sites in Pembrokeshire and Cornwall, as well as in Scotland and northern France, this is the earliest example of Skokholm and the first solid evidence of the late Mesolithic occupation of the island, ”David added.
A few days later, Brown and Eagle found another artifact – a piece of coarse pottery – which the rabbits had dug through the same holes as the previous find. As the guards wrote in a March 19 blog post, this piece of pottery “to our (very) inexperienced eyes, looked old.”
The pottery fragment came from a thick-walled pot that had been decorated with incised lines around its top, Jody Deacon, the curator of prehistoric archeology at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales, told the keepers. This pot was likely a Bronze Age vase urn, a container associated with cremation burials, Deacon noted.
The pottery fragment dated from 2100 to 1750 BC, or around 3,750 years ago, Deacon said. The dead were often cremated and buried in urns in West Wales at this time, but this is the earliest evidence of such an urn on the Isle of Skokholm or on one of the isles of the west Pembrokeshire, said Deacon.
“This is an incredibly exciting find,” the Guardians wrote in the March 19 blog post. “It is rather breathtaking that for thousands of years people have returned to this same region, some of them perhaps working on sealskins, perhaps building boats out of hide, others burying them. their deaths.
Thanks to these rabbit-assisted finds, the Royal Commission for Wales is now planning to undertake archaeological work on Skokholm Island this summer.
“It looks like we have an ancient bronze burial mound built at a Middle Stone Age hunter-gatherer site disturbed by rabbits,” Driver said. “This is a sheltered place, where the Island Cottage now stands, and which has clearly been established for millennia.”
Originally posted on Live Science.
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