LONDON, ENGLAND—More than 5,000 artifacts have been found over a large area of the 14,000-year-old site of Les Varines on the Channel Island of Jersey, but this year the excavation team found denser concentrations of tools, burnt bones, and, for the first time, fragments of engraved stone. “We are at an early stage in our investigations, but we can already say the stones are not natural to the site, they show clear incised lines consistent with being made by stone tools, and they do not have any obvious functional role. Engraved works of abstract or figurative art on flat stones are part of the Magdalenian cultural package and one exciting possibility is that this is what we have here,” Silvia Bellow of the Natural History Museum said in a press release. Incised stones are known from Magdalenian camps in Germany and the south of France, but they are rare in northern France and the British Isles. “Although we are not yet sure of the exact age of the campsite, it might well represent some of the first hunter-gatherer communities to recolonize the north of Europe after the coldest period of the last Ice Age,” explained co-director Chantal Conneller of the University of Manchester. To read more about Paleolithic art, go to "New Life for the Lion Man."
