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Name : Pfyn culture flint tool

What it is : A obdurate tool with a wooden grip and birch tar

A whitish stone tool is stuck into a piece of brown wood with greyish tar. There is a hole drilled into the wood.

A Pfyn culture stone tool with a wooden handle from about 3800 B.C.

Where it is from : Öhningen , southern Germany

When it was made:3800 to 3500 B.C.

touch on : Hohle Fels water supply birdie : The old limning of a bird in the populace

Green carved scarab beetle in a gold setting and a gold chain

What it tell us about the past :

This obdurate putz from a Neolithic archeologic site in southern Germany bring home the bacon a rarified aspect at how prehistoric knife were actually used : with a wooden handle that made them loose to grapple without injury .

Thetool , which ison displayat the Baden - Württemberg State Archaeological Museum ( ALM ) , was base at a site call Wangen - Hinterhorn in Öhningen , a municipality on the border of Germany and Switzerland . Measuring just 2.9 inches ( 7.3 cm ) long , the tool looks a bit like a small prehistoric Swiss Army knife . The sharp - butt flint brand was fastened to a wooden handle with birch rod sea dog , and a hole was drilled into the woods , belike so the tool could be pay heed .

A group of penguins dives from the ice into the water

This tongue was discovered at a settlement website associated with the Pfyn culture . During the Neolithic period ( 4300 to 3500 B.C. ) , this culture unfold from southern Bavaria to northern Switzerland and is well be intimate for its pile domicile — houses built on stilts in marshy land around the boundary of lake , river and wetlands .

Nearly 1,000 Alpine pile dwelling sites have been observe to escort in six countries , according toUNESCO , which added pile dwellings to its World Heritage inclination in 2011 . Because they are located in wetlands , many of these archeologic sites have right shape for the preservation of constituent material that would normally disintegrate , like wood .

The prehistoric settlement of Wangen - Hinterhorn and its pile dwellings were first distinguish in the shallow urine geographical zone along Lake Constance by a farmer in 1856 , but extensive excavation by archaeologist did not take topographic point until the seventies and 1980s .

An image of a spiral galaxy

The people of the Pfyn culture settled the area fence Lake Constance around 3900 B.C. They built their dwellings on stiltbird made from local trees and haddomesticated beast and crops . However , they did not necessarily survive there permanently ; archeologist have foundwaves of occupationover the row of a millenary . Artifacts preserve in the wetland environment advise that the Pfyn masses were introduce andexperimenting with textilesand that they had also begun to manufacturecopper object .

— Tumaco - Tolita gold figurine : A 2,000 - twelvemonth - old statue with a ' fancy nose decoration ' from a vanished South American culture

— Mechanical Dog : A ' good son ' from ancient Egypt that has a red-faced tongue and ' bark '

a black and white photo of a bone with parallel marks on it

— Onfim ’s scribble : A thirteenth - century kid ’s self - portrait on hogback , slaying an enemy

archaeologist have found a few other deterrent example of wood - and - Flint River tools dated to the Pfyn culture . They include aflint daggerwith a woodwind handle dated to 3000 to 2400 B.C. , which is also at ALM , and aflint knifefound in the 1940s that had impressions of grain seeds in the tar that hold up the Harlan Fisk Stone tool into the wooden handgrip . Although the grain impressions suggest these unique object may have been used for food processing , little else is know about their function .

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