A grandmother from Poland has unearthed a rare axe made of flint. She found the prehistoric tool in a field in Biłgoraj over 50 years ago and was immediately struck by the unusual-looking stone, deciding to keep it as a curiosity.
The ancient artifact measures around 4.3 inches and is a smoothed trapezoidal shape in brown and gray stone. It has a slightly serrated edge that was once a sharpened blade. After decades of enjoying the axe in private, the woman passed it down to her grandson Mariusz Buczko, who decided to get a second opinion.
Thanks to the expertise of archaeologist Jerzy Libera, of the Marie Curie-Skłodowska University, the stone has been identified as a rare flint axe that was made in around 2500 B.C.E. by the Globular Amphora culture. This community from the prehistoric European Chalcolithic period lived in Central Europe and evidence of their settlements have mainly been found in Poland and Ukraine.
In a news release posted on Facebook, the Lublin Provincial Conservator of Monuments noted that the discovery of these kinds of axes is very rare, and that they “are often found loose and unrelated to any other objects.”
Little is known about the community’s way of life, but the location of the flint axe has expanded the region that archaeologists believe they inhabited. In the same area, another resident recently found another cone-shaped axe made of mottled brown stone but archaeologists have not yet been able to confidently date the artifact.
Both axes will undergo further analysis and then be handed over to a local museum in Biłgoraj.
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