Ice patches are similar to glaciers in that they’re long-living hunks of ice replenished by snow each winter. But they differ in that they don’t move. That means that any artifacts left on them are simply entombed in the ice rather than ground to a fine dust, which is what happens to artifacts trapped in glaciers as they slide down the mountain.

Now that climate change is causing ice to melt, those artifacts are once again seeing the light of day after thousands of frozen years. In case of Oppland, Norway, some artifacts have been dated back to 6,000 years ago.

The wealth of artifacts recovered in Oppland (or any ice patch for that matter) are delicate and after centuries of life without air, they degrade and can be destroyed by the elements in a matter of days if nobody finds them. That makes the scientists’ work equal parts detective and EMT.

…The earliest artifacts date to 6,000 years ago, which Barrett said are unique in their own right. But the artifact record that allows the scientists to spin their historical yarn begins to pick up steam in the third century.

That’s a period when agriculture and economic activity started to take hold in the valleys populated by Nordic people.

…The number of artifacts peaked in the Viking Age, which lasted from around the late eighth century until the early 10th century. During this period, exploration was the name of the game. Ships were setting out across the sea, contributing to a larger trading economy that was in part driven by natural resources brought down from the mountains.

Norway’s Melting Ice Patches Offer a New Glimpse Into History

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Crops are fading in the drought. And the unusual weather circumstances made the remarkable photos possible, Murphy explains.

“In the late Neolithic, people would have built this henge out of timber,” he says. Imagine massive posts — possibly whole tree trunks — planted in pits and postholes.

“Over time, when the monument fell out of use, the wood all rots away and the holes kind of fill up with organic material,” he said. “But they leave a sort of a fingerprint, or a footprint.” Archaeologists can see it in soil samples. And, in a drought, you can see the impact on crops.

“Those filled-in holes retain a slight amount more moisture than the surrounding soil,” Murphy says. “The crop that is growing out of those features has a very small advantage in terms of additional water and it’s very slightly healthier.”

In normal weather, the difference is undetectable — that’s why Murphy had flown drones overhead before without noticing it. And even in a drought, it’s too subtle to see from the ground.

But combine the dry spell with the aerial view, and suddenly the outline is obvious.

In Ireland, Drought And A Drone Revealed The Outline Of An Ancient Henge : NPR

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By creating a map of strontium isotope ratios across a geographical area and comparing that with those found in a bone fragment, scientists can determine a human or animal’s place of origin — or at least where they spent the majority of the last 10 years before they died.

In this study, the researchers identified bone fragments belonging to 25 distinct individuals that had been buried at Stonehenge. The strontium isotope analysis revealed that the bones of 15 of these people exhibited the same strontium isotope ratio that existed in the area around the monument.

The results from the other 10, however, showed that these people did not consume food grown in the local area alone.

…The researchers can’t be totally sure where these 10 people came from, but the strontium isotope ratios in their bones are consistent with a region in west Wales that is known to be the source of some of the stones in the monument.

Further analysis also suggested that the wood fuel that was used to cremate some of these people did not come from the area around the monument either.

Human remains buried at Stonehenge 5,000 years ago offer a clue to where they came from

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The results revealed that 40% of the people buried at Stonehenge likely came from west Wales, the suggested origin of the site’s smaller bluestones.

…The bone analysis suggested that within the last ten years of their lives, these people were not living at Stonehenge nor originally from the area around Stonehenge, known as the Wessex region.

Stonehenge mystery solved? Study sheds light on people buried at monument – CNN

Archaeologists Find Crushed Pompeii Man’s Skull, and His Money Too – HISTORY

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Greek philosopher Pythagoras discovered that the sum areas of two squares on two sides of a triangle will always add up to the area of a square on the hypotenuse – the longest side of a right angle triangle.

However, Pythagoras was not born until the 5th century BC – some 2,000 years after Stonehenge was erected.

…Contributor and editor of Megalith, John Matineau, told the Telegraph: “People think of our ancestors as rough cavemen but they were applying Pythagorean geometry over 2,000 years before Pythagoras was born.

…They were astronomers and cosmologists. …“They were studying long and difficult to understand cycles and they knew about these when they started planning sites like Stonehenge.

Summer solstice 2018: Pythagoras’s theorem used to build Stonehenge | Science | News | Express.co.uk

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