#sword

#sword

Diver Finds 900-Year-Old Crusader SwordCongratulations on finding such a rare item!Shlomi Katzin rocks different poses as he shows off an old Crusader sword that he found during a dive at a beach in Carmel, Israel. Honestly, him discovering the relic during a swim feels like he unlocked a secret side quest or he accidentally opened a rare chest on the sea bed off the Carmel coast.  The sword has a one-meter-long blade and a 30-centimeter hilt. According to Nir Distelfeld, Inspector for the Israel Antiquities Authority’s Robbery Prevention Unit, “it was found encrusted with marine organisms but is apparently made of iron. It is exciting to encounter such a personal object, taking you 900 years back in time to a different era, with knights, armor, and swords.”Image credit: Anastasia Shapiro, Israel Antiquities Authority; Shlomi Katzin#Crusader #Artifact #Sword #Diving #ShlomiKatzin 

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