Hi-tech research shows Neolithic axes have travelled from the Alps

[Adsos Letter]

Source: Daily Echo
Andrew Napier

IT’S a mystery that could shed light on life in Hampshire 6,000 years ago.

Four Stone Age axes, dating from a time when people had stopped hunting woolly mammoths and sabretoothed tigers and turned to farming, are giving clues to the origins of settled human life in the county.

They were found at Hill Head and Titchfield, near Fareham, and at Beaulieu, in the New Forest, and Bartonon- Sea.

The tools, which are now in Winchester City Council’s collection, have been analysed and found to originate in the north Italian Alps from around 4,000BC. They had been carried for many miles before they were lost in Hampshire. But no-one knows why or how they got here.

http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/4143357.Hi_tech_research_shows_Hampshire_s_Neolithic_axes_have_travelled_far/

[derby378]

1. Perhaps a landbridge across the English Channel during colder years?

True, boats are a possibility, but I don't think mankind had anything really sophisticated in the way of boats back then.

[MUAD_DIB]

4. Yes, you are right I believe. During the Ice Age the sea level

was about 300 ft lower than it is today.

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. About 2,000 years too late; but they did have boats in 4000 BC, so there's no need

The English Channel was formed long before that, but there was a low-lying area in what is now the North Sea; but that disappeared, and Britain became an island, about 6000 BC:

Lost world warning from North Sea


Archaeologists are uncovering a huge prehistoric "lost country" hidden below the North Sea.

This lost landscape, where hunter-gatherer communities once lived, was swallowed by rising water levels at the end of the last ice age.
...
As the temperature rose and glaciers retreated and water levels rose, the inhabitants would have been pushed off their hunting grounds and forced towards higher land - including to what is now modern-day Britain.

"In 10,000 BC, hunter-gatherers were living on the land in the middle of the North Sea. By 6,000 BC, Britain was an island. The area we have mapped was wiped out in the space of 4,000 years," explains Professor Gaffney.

So far, the team has examined a 23,000-sq-km area of the sea bed - mapping out coastlines, rivers, hills, sandbanks and salt marshes as they would have appeared about 12,000 years ago.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6584011.stm

But small boats have been found in the area from that period:

# Pesse logboat, Netherlands. Found on land, dated to ca 6300-7000 BC. 3 m long and made of pine tree. Described in an article by Detlev Ellmers in The Earliest Ships (Conway Maritime Press 1996).
# Logboats of French inland. Three different finds have been made in the Seine valley area near Paris. The finds were made between 1984 and 1994. They are C14 dated to between 6400 and 7200 BC. Replicas have been made by GRAS. Ref Philippe Bonnin: Découverte de deux pirogues monoxyles mésolithiques entre Corbeil-Essonnes (Essonne) et Melun (Seine-et-Marne). Report.
# Hardinxveld-Giessendam logboat, Netherlands. Excavated on land in 1998, 5.5 m long, dated to c 5000 BC.

http://www.abc.se/~m10354/uwa/wreckeur.htm

[Orrex]

2. In the Neolithic age, savage warfare did I wage

Cool story. I love stuff like this.

[AdHocSolver]

3. Evidently, offshoring was a problem 6,000 years ago. n/t