An 8-year-old Norwegian girl has found an unexpected treasure, while playing by her school in Vestland County in the western part of the country. The gray-brown find turned out to be a prehistoric dagger made by Stone Age people some 3,700 years ago.
"I was going to pick up a piece of glass, but then the stone was there," Elise later told local media.
Elise showed the find to her teacher, who concluded that the 12-centimeter tool looked rather ancient and summoned archeologists from Vestland County Council to examine the artefact.
Based on its style, the dagger likely dates to the New Stone Age, or the Neolithic, when prehistoric humans began to shape stone tools and use domesticated plants and animals, build permanent villages and develop crafts.
Since daggers of this kind are rare finds, often discovered alongside sacrificial goods, the Vestland County Council teamed up with Vestland County's University Museum in Bergen, Norway's second-largest city, to further investigate the area. However, no additional evidence dating back to the Stone Age has been found so far.
Yet another question has been posed, regarding the material used for the dagger. Since flint, a hard sedimentary rock, does not occur in Norway naturally, the dagger is likely to have come from neighboring Denmark across the North Sea, researchers concluded. Previous finds of flint items in Norway were explained either through stone movement during the Ice Age or subsequent barter.
The Stone Age, which includes the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic, lasted from 10,000 BC until 1,800 BC in Norway. The first Stone Age people lived along the the country's coast. They fished in the sea and hunted wild animals. For doing so they needed tools, so they used stone and bone to make spears, axes, bows and arrows, harpoons and fish hooks. A number of local hunter-gatherers settled down permanently for farming in around 2400 BC.