A 6000 year old snowshoe found!

[Dave]

http://www.thelocal.it/20160913/mou...e-is-6000-years-old?utm_tracker=1722735x84899

The shoe was found in 2003 in the melting snow of Gurgler Eisjoch glacier by Simone Bartolini, a cartographer for the Military Geographic Institute in Florence. Bartolini was mapping the Austrian-Italian border in South Tyrol, a German-speaking area of northern Italy.

Assuming the shoe to be about a hundred years old, Bartolini displayed the shoe in his office as a memento. He only realised that it was much older than previously thought after discussing it with an archaeologist colleague.

Radiocarbon dating by two separate labs now shows the shoe dates from 3800-3700 BC. This makes it up to 600 years older than the famous ice man Ötzi, who was found in 1991 just seven kilometres from the site of the latest discovery.

The shoe was presented at a press conference in South Tyrol on Monday. It is made from a 1.5 metre piece of birch wood bent into an oval.

“It is the oldest snowshoe in the world,” the scientists said in a statement.

 

[wicca]

Amazing! Look closely and you can see Euro 43-UK 9 on the crosspiece...

No, seriously, that is an incredible find. Imagine if the conversation with his friend the Archaeologist had not taken place! It is just the sort of thing that an office cleaner would perhaps throw away eventually and it would have been lost. 7 k's from Otzi, using the same trail through the mountains perhaps?

 

[Dave]

Amazing! Look closely and you can see Euro 43-UK 9 on the crosspiece...

Yeh its amazing isnt it? Mind boggling. Nothings new eh?

 

[bopdude]

Great find and an uncanny coincidence or could it be more

Sent from my SM-N910F using Tapatalk

 

[forrestdweller]

appearantly the design hasn't changed over the last 6000 years and was still in use until recently which explains why nobody realized how old it was..... .also shows how good the design is!

7 k's from Otzi, using the same trail through the mountains perhaps?

makes me wonder why no snowshoes have been found with him.....

 

[Dave]

Yeh, thats a good point. That could unlock more of the mystery. He should have had them then, unless he left in a hurry eh?

Hardly any difference between those and the Brit army WW2 ones.

It is weird how little seems to have changed in thousands, maybe tens of thousands of years, then suddenly, it all changed uber fast in the latter half of the twentieth century

 

[forrestdweller]

Yeh, thats a good point. That could unlock more of the mystery. He should have had them then, unless he left in a hurry eh?

IIRC he died in spring plus he was involved in a fight, so i guess he may have not planned to get that high into the mountains where he would have needed them?! I cannot imagine his attackers taking just his snow shoes and leave the prestigious axe and all his other gear with him....