A 6-year-old rock turns out to be a 50,000-year-old Neanderthal axe

A then six-year-old boy found a strange rock on the beach in Sussex, England, and didn’t tell anyone for the next three years, he discovered. The rock has now been identified as a 50,000-year-old Neanderthal hand axe.

James Sainbury, curator of archeology and social history at Worthing Theaters and Museums, received an email from the mother of a boy named Ben about the rock, not expecting it to be anything out of the ordinary. Live Science.

“I get emails like this all the time, especially about beach finds, and they’re usually just pebbles that look funny,” he said.

“But as soon as I saw the picture, I thought, ‘That’s an Upper Paleolithic Neanderthal hand axe.’ “This is an absolutely incredible find,” added Sainsbury’s.

According to the curator, Neanderthal hand axes are relatively small and have black double-edged flints, which make them recognizable.

To be more specific, Sainsbury’s identified the artifact as a Mousterian hand axe, meaning it “dates to the last period of the Neanderthals when their days were truly numbered in Europe and Britain”. .

He added that according to some scholars such hand axes were made by the last Neanderthals in the area.

“As far as Sussex goes, it’s very rare indeed,” Sainsbury said.

“In our museum, we have one example and one only. They are extremely rare because the Neanderthal population density was probably very low,” he added.

On 24 November the artefact was brought to Worthing Museum by Ben and his family where Sainsbury’s confirmed that it was indeed a Neanderthal axe.

He added that the specimen had been safely buried underwater for most of its history because of how fresh and harmless it was.

“It’s very unlikely that it would have made it to the beach, at that height on the beach, without damaging it,” he explained.

“So I think it was brought from the English Channel with tin shingles to shore up the coast defences, where it may have been dug up from an old river bed in the Doggerland area, or from the North Sea,” Curator. said

Doggerland is an area now submerged under the North Sea that was inhabited by prehistoric people before being flooded by rising sea levels about 8,000 years ago.

The child, Ben, gave the ax to Worthing Theaters and Museum and was shown just an hour after meeting Ben’s family.