A sea raider ship that sank off the coast of Denmark 2,400 years ago contained fingerprints and several chemical clues that are helping researchers figure out where these raiders came from thousands of years ago, a new study has found.
Known as the Yotspring Boat, it is the oldest known wooden plank boat in Scandinavia and is currently on display at the National Museum of Denmark. However, its origin was shrouded in mystery for a long time.
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About 2,400 years ago, about 80 maritime raiders from the Armada, including this ship and three others, attacked the island of Als, off the coast of modern-day Denmark. However, the raiders lost. The people of Ars were grateful for the victory and sank the ship as an offering, along with the attackers’ weapons and shields.
The water is a low-oxygen environment, which caused the ship to sink in the 4th century BC, but it has been preserved for centuries. After being discovered in the 1880s, the boat was excavated in the 1920s from the Hjortspring Moses Bog (hence the ship’s name).
“But at the time, we lacked the modern scientific methods needed to solve the mystery of where these attackers were coming from,” Faubel said in a video about the research.
Recently, researchers decided to take another look at the boat. Before being displayed in the museum, the boat was chemically preserved. The team looked through archives and old records at multiple museums to find parts of the boat that had been left untouched.
In the end, they found some pieces of caulking tar and rope, including a piece of tar with ancient fingerprints, probably from someone who helped repair the ship, a discovery Fauvel called “really amazing.”
“This surprising fingerprint provides a direct link to the ancient sailors who used this ship,” the researchers wrote in the study, which was published Dec. 10 in the journal PLOS One.
To study coking tar, the researchers used gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, techniques that examine the chemical composition of a sample. They discovered that waterproofing tar is a mixture of animal fat (possibly tallow) and pine pitch (a sticky and elastic substance also known as resin).
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“This suggests that the boat was built in an area with abundant pine forests,” Faubel said in a statement.
Previous analysis has shown that the ship was carrying wooden containers resembling pottery from the Hamburg region, and the new discovery puts to rest the old idea that the ship originated near modern-day Hamburg, Germany. It is now believed that the ship may have come from as far away as the pine-covered Baltic region.
“At that time, pine forests only existed in certain areas of northern Europe,” Faubel said in the video, adding: “We think they may have come from somewhere on the Baltic Sea coast, east of present-day Rügen.” [in Germany]. ”
If this idea is correct, it suggests the attackers traveled a significant distance across the open ocean for their attack, Faubel said.
Researchers also used carbon dating to study ropes from the boat. By analyzing strings of lime bast derived from the tree’s inner bark, the researchers confirmed that the ship’s pre-determined date was between 400 BC and 101 BC, placing it in the pre-Roman Iron Age period of Scandinavia. Researchers determined the ship’s carbon age to be between 381 BC and 161 BC, the first time a date has been determined directly from ship materials. The researchers also worked with rope manufacturers to create replicas of the rigging and study the rope manufacturing process.
Using X-ray tomography to scan sections of the caulk and cord, the team created a digital 3D model that allowed them to study the fingerprints. However, analysis of the ridges on the prints did not narrow down the gender or identity of the person who created the prints.
In the future, Faubel hopes to extract human DNA from the tar and learn more about the people who built and used the boats. Understanding such far-flung raids can help explain ancient maritime warfare and Iron Age trade systems.
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