Strange 5,000-Year-Old Underground Structure Discovered In Neolithic Dwelling In Denmark

PUBLISHED
5 days ago

The sunken space may represent a one-of-a-kind structure with massive implications for how people stored food at the time.

Dr. Russell Moul
Science Writer

Edited
by
Holly Large



A photo taken early morning of a Funnel Beaker culture dolman showing an earth mount with an entrance leading into its interior. The entrance has four large stone lined up on its right side and five stones on its left.
Researchers wondered whether the cellar-like structure was actually a Funnel Beaker Culture burial site, like the one pictured here, but they have rejected this idea due to a lack of supporting evidence.

Image credit: Malene Thyssen via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)



A5,000-year-old Neolithic site has been unearthed on a Danish island that holds an unusual secret: a stone-paved cellar associated with the Beaker Culture. The site, known as Nygårdsvej 3, is located near the Danish village of Eskilstrup on the island of Falster. It was discovered during the extension and electrification of a railway line that passed through a local farm.

The excavation revealed two phases of house construction that were built using designs common to the Funnel Beaker Culture. Named after the distinct funnel-shaped beakers they produced, these people were a significant Neolithic archaeological culture that existed in Northern Europe between around 4000 and 2800 BCE.

They were the first farming societies in the region and spread across much of what is now modern Denmark, northern Germany, southern Sweden, and parts of the Netherlands and Poland. With this change, people started to build the first houses in the region, along with megalithic tombs (dolmens), and other landscape-altering structures. This marked a drastic shift away from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the Late Mesolithic era.

One such structure has been identified at Nygårdsvej 3 site. Among 141 postholes found at the site, several appear to form the wall and central posts of two houses built on the same spot in different phases. In total, 38 postholes were used for the first building and 35 for the second, suggesting that considerable planning went into its construction.

More:
https://www.iflscience.com/strange-5000-year-old-underground-structure-discovered-in-neolithic-dwelling-in-denmark-76337