clipped from: news.nationalgeographic.com An amateur archaeologist has found an unprecedented collection of Stone Age hand axes among material collected at the bottom of the North Sea.
Jan Meulmeester of the Netherlands found 28 axes, possibly up to 100,000 years old, in marine sand and gravel scooped up by a British construction materials supplier.
He also found fragments of bones, teeth, tusks, and antlers from mammoths and other animals that had likely been butchered with the utensils.
Fishermen have pulled the occasional stone tool or bone from the North Sea, but this trove—dug 8 miles (13 kilometers) off the coast near Great Yarmouth in the United Kingdom—suggests something far more than a random find.
"The condition of the material is such that is evident that it really comes from one single spot," said Hans Peeters, an archaeologist with the National Service for Archaeology (RACM) in Amersfoort, Netherlands.