#ironage

#ironage

Man From Denmark Found Stash of 1,500-Year-Old Gold Jewelry With His Newly Acquired Metal DetectorOle Ginnerup Schytz wanted to test his newly acquired metal detector. Fortunately, his old classmate owned some land, and Schyyz was given permission to test his new toy there. And so he did. But Schytz did not expect what happened next. After only a few hours of walking on the lot, the metal detector reacted to something, and that something turned out to be “one of the greatest gold treasures in Danish history.” Talk about beginner’s luck!The site was subsequently excavated by archaeologists from Vejlemuseerne, in collaboration with experts from the National Museum and with funding from the Agency for Culture and Palaces.Archaeologists now know that the treasure was buried in a longhouse in a village about 1,500 years ago. The studies, and the many samples and data collected, will provide invaluable knowledge about the connections and circumstances that led to the treasure being buried by an Iron Age chieftain.Learn more about this extraordinary archaeological find here.(All Images Credit: VeljeMuseerne)#Archaeology #Treasure #Gold #IronAge

Mysterious Iron Age Burial May Hold Remains of Elite Nonbinary PersonWhen archaeologists unearth a grave site, one of the things they want to determine is the gender of the person who was buried there. A 900-year-old burial in Finland, excavated in 1968, has flummoxed researchers for decades. The remains were dressed as a woman, but given a warrior's burial with a sword. Was this a female warrior, or had the grave originally contained both a man and a woman? A new DNA study may have the answer. As NPR’s Xcaret Nuñez reports, the individual likely had a genetic condition called Klinefelter syndrome. While girls are typically born with two X chromosomes and boys with one X and one Y chromosome, people with Klinefleter syndrome have two X chromosomes and one Y. Generally, those affected have mostly male physical characteristics, but they may also experience low testosterone levels, undescended testes and enlarged breasts. Most are infertile.“If the characteristics of the Klinefelter syndrome [had] been evident on the person, they might not have been considered strictly a female or a male in the early Middle Ages community,” says lead author Ulla Moilanen, an archaeologist at the University of Turku in Finland, in a statement.Considering the grave contained clues that this was a high-status person, the study might give us a new view of Finnish Iron Age culture. Read more at Smithsonian. (Image credit: The Finnish Heritage Agency)#archaeology #DNA #NonBinary #IronAge #KlinefelterSyndrome #MiddleAges #sword