Mysterious 4,500-Year-Old Flint Blade Unearthed by Amateur Archaeologists in Northern Germany Sparks New Questions About Ancient Life
The Rare Bronze Age Blade Made Of Flint Found In Germany
Archaeologists from the Regional Association of Westphalia-Lippe (LWL) announced the discovery, noting that their staff were utterly shocked when first presented with the find.
Amateur archaeologists were exploring access roads in a development area on Bahnhofsstraße in Altenberge when they made several discoveries. The most fascinating, however, was the flint blade. The hobbyists then presented their find to LWL experts, who dated the fragment to roughly 4,500 years ago, placing it near the end of the Neolithic period and the beginning of the Metal Age in Central Europe.
C. Hentzelt/LWLThe site in Altenberge where the flint blade and arrowhead traces were found.
Curiously, the other finds made at the site fall far outside of this era.
One of those other finds was later revealed to be scrap from the production of small arrowheads. This residue was even older, dating back to the Middle Stone Age, which lasted from 9650 to 4900 B.C.E.
When experts investigated the area, they noticed signs that the layer of earth where the finds were made had been “severely” disturbed by long-term cultivation at the site. Unfortunately, this led them to determine that further large-scale excavation would not be worth the effort, though they didn’t rule out the possibility of more individual finds being made.
But while this discovery may have been rare for the Münsterland region, it does recall similar recent discoveries from elsewhere nearby.
3,000-Year-Old Bronze Age Daggers Found In A German Cornfield
Stade District/Christian SchmidtOne of the Bronze Age daggers found in Kutenholz.
In March 2025, researchers from the University of Hamburg announced the discovery of some of the earliest Bronze Age artifacts ever found in the region of Kutenholz, Lower Saxony. There, in a cornfield, they found two well-preserved daggers from the Bronze Age, which offered unique new insight into the ritual practices of ancient communities that once inhabited the region.
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