A child’s imagination can turn a molehill into a mountain, or a stick into a sword.
That wasn’t necessarily required when Elise’s teacher saw the 8-year-old holding a “rock” she found in the schoolyard at Our Children’s School in Osøyro, Norway.
That’s because Elise had stumbled upon a remarkable find—a 3,700-year-old flint knife from the Neolithic Era in a country that doesn’t contain flint.
Teacher Karen Drange notified the Vestland County Council of the discovery and the archaeologists examining it have now told Norwegian news outlets they believe it originated in Denmark.
Flint was among the first tool technologies that humans mastered—a hard substance sharp enough to skin an animal and even perform surgery, but that didn’t require any knowledge of metallurgy.
In a statement, Louise Bjerre Petersen, an archaeologist who assessed the tool, calls it a beautiful, incredibly rare find. The knife is now in the possession of experts at the University Museum of Bergen, who will study it for clues on life in Neolithic Norway.
Excavations at the schoolyard turned up no additional artifacts—an unusual thing for flint discoveries, which are almost always found in places like Neolithic burial grounds, flint manufacturing areas where people were breaking large blocks of flint into small blades, or game animal kill sites.
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The Neolithic Age in Europe lasted longer than elsewhere. When whoever last owned the flint knife was using it to scrape animal hides, the Great Pyramids were under construction, and the oldest had already been built.
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Elise isn’t the only schoolgirl in Scandinavia to happen upon an ancient weapon. GNN reported about the 8-year-old “Queen of Sweden,” who found an Iron Age sword in a lake in 2018.
Not to be outdone, 10-year-old Fiontann Hughes in Northern Ireland found a centuries-old sword with a basket hilt using a metal detector.
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