Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

More Secrets of Prehistoric People Spelled by Alps!


Sat 17 Oct 2020 | 10:00 PM
Yassmine Elsayed

The melting of glaciers in the Alps has re-exposed traces of hand-made tools that have been covered by ice and kept their secrets for nearly ten thousand years.

Media reports quoted Marcel Cornelissen, who headed an excavation trip last month to the remote crystal site near the Brunifirm glacier in the eastern Swiss canton of Uri, at an altitude of 2,800 metres (9,100 feet), saying: "We are making very fascinating finds that open up a window into a part of archaeology that we don't normally get."

Until the 1990s, it was believed that people in prehistoric times never headed to high mountains. When the "Oetzi" was discovered, a hunter who lived 5,300 years ago and whose body was completely preserved in the ice, many thought that this mummy, discovered in 1991 in Austria, was an exception.

However, amazing discoveries at times proved that the Alps were, on the contrary, a destination targeted by ancient humans for thousands of years.

Early humans are now believed to have hiked up into the mountains to travel to nearby valleys, hunt or put animals out to pastures, and to search for raw materials.

"We know that they used to climb mountains up to an altitude of up to three thousand meters to search for crystals and other raw materials," says Christian of der Maurer, an archaeologist from the canton of Uri.

The group climbed the steep mountainside, clambering across an Alpine glacier, before finding what they were seeking: A crystal vein filled with the precious rocks needed to sculpt their tools.

That is what archaeologists have deduced after the discovery of traces of an ancient hunt for crystals by hunters and gatherers in the Mesolithic era, some 9,500 years ago.

More than 2,700 meters high, leather pants and the same hunter's shoes were found, along with hundreds of other items, some dating back 6,500 years.

[caption id="attachment_160271" align="aligncenter" width="467"] This blackened braided basket from the Neolithic Age is from the Bernese Alps - AFP[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_160274" align="aligncenter" width="407"] Laced shoe found with the remains of a prehistoric man dating to around 2,800 BCE- AFP[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_160272" align="aligncenter" width="383"] Artifacts emerged from melting Alpine glaciers - AFP[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_160273" align="aligncenter" width="452"] Oetzi[/caption]

https://youtu.be/0Q544IYnKos