A human bone found by a rower may be one of the oldest items ever retrieved from the River Thames in London.
Simon Hunt discovered the femur – the thigh bone – in the riverbed during low tide. Carbon dating indicated that it is over 5,000 years old.
He immediately recognized that it was a human bone and began to fear the worst.
“It looked really old, but part of me was thinking, What if it’s not?” Simon says.
“I have no idea what a bone looks like that has only been in the water for two years, what if it was something more sinister?”
Simon, who works as a graphic designer, spotted the bone as he was getting into his rowboat. He ripped the bone from the rocks where it lay and rowed it up and down the river to protect it.
transparent plastic bag
He then put the bone in a clear plastic bag and took it home to show his wife, carrying it in full view of people passing by. But nobody gave a damn.
He called the police, who asked him to show him where he had found the femur so they could investigate. But when they got there, the tide had come in and the place was underwater.
The officers sent the bone for laboratory testing. Simon had to wait several months for the police to call him and ask him to take a bag to the police station to collect it.
‘Guess when it was’
“They told me it was old and asked me to guess when it was,” says Simon.
“My reference point for ancient things that are tangible is kind of medieval, but I was far away.”
Polished Stone Age
In fact, the bone belongs to someone who lived at the end of the British Neolithic Period – the end of the Stone Age. Experts have managed to date it between 3,516 and 3,365 BC
An archaeologist estimated the person’s height to be about 170 cm by measuring the length of the femur. Couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.
The bone is older than Stonehenge in the UK and the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt.
“People tell me they think it’s strange that I met him in London, but we have to remember there was no London back then,” says Simon.
“I think it must have been in the mud or something, since it’s been so well preserved, and then it was rummaged around and came to me in the river.”
Neolithic Britain witnessed the arrival of agricultural culture as migrants brought techniques and tools from mainland Europe.
neolithic skull
The Museum of London, which Simon hopes will one day be the definitive home for the bone, has a fragment of a Neolithic skull dated between 3645 and 3600 BC.
The museum says the skull is one of the oldest things recovered from the River Thames — and the bone would have been next to it.
Meanwhile, the femur is with Simon.
‘Cat can’t bite’
“I hadn’t really thought about where I was going to keep it, but it has to be somewhere the cat can’t bite,” he says.
“I want to have respect because I was a person.”
“This bone was part of someone’s leg, who walked around here for over 5,000 years.”
The Thames proved to be a veritable treasure trove of historical artifacts. the so-called’mudkarkers‘ –people looking for valuables by the riverside– found many of the items in the Museum of London.
In the capital, a license from the Port of London Authority is required to carry out this activity. It is illegal to search for or remove artifacts of any kind from the riverbank without a permit.
But on this occasion, Simon was doing his civic duty, and so far no one was upset that he had recovered the bone.
Technical aspects aside, it was just a chance discovery that made one of his morning paddles that much more interesting.
Source: Folha
