Photo: The hand ax, seen here beside a 20-pence coin, is between 40,000 and 60,000 years old. Worthing Museum
A Little Boy Found a Strange Stone on the Beach. Archaeologists Told Him It Was a Neanderthal’s Hand Ax
The artifact is now on display at a museum in southern England. Experts say the find is “so rare that most qualified archaeologists would never find one themselves”
By Sonja Anderson
During a recent visit to a local museum in southern England, a 9-year-old boy felt a pang of recognition. The small axes on display in the Worthing Museum’s Stone Age exhibition resembled something in his own bedroom: a shiny, carved rock he’d found while playing on Shoreham Beach in West Sussex a few years earlier.
The boy, Ben Witten, brought his find to the museum, where experts concluded it was a Neanderthal hand ax—carved by an extinct group of humans between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago.
Read the full article here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-little-boy-found-a-strange-stone-on-the-beach-archaeologists-told-him-it-was-a-neanderthals-hand-ax-180985578/
