(Press-News.org)
A fingerprint has been found in the tars used to build the oldest known wooden plank boat in Scandinavia, which provides a direct link to the seaborne raiders who used the boat over 2,000 years ago. By analysing the tar itself, Lund University researchers are closer to solving the long-standing mystery of where the attackers in the boat came from.
WATCH VIDEO: Archaeologist describes moment he discovered ancient fingerprint
In the 4th century BC, an armada of boats attacked the island of Als off the coast of Denmark. Traveling in up to four boats, the unknown attackers were defeated, with the defenders sinking the weapons of their foes into the bog in one of the boats, most likely to give thanks for their victory.
“Where these sea raiders might have come from, and why they attacked the island of Als has long been a mystery,” says Mikael Fauvelle, archaeologist at Lund University.
The boat was discovered in the 1880s in the bog of Hjortspring Mose, excavated in the 1920s, and is now known as the Hjortspring boat. It is the only example of a prehistoric plank boat that has ever been found in Scandinavia. The finding is unique – since it was sunk in a bog as an offering, it was exceptionally well preserved. To this day, the Hjortspring boat has been on display at the National Museum of Denmark.
When the researchers unexpectedly located parts of the boat that had not been chemically preserved, they were able to study these using modern scientific methods.
“The boat was waterproofed with pine pitch, which was surprising. This suggests the boat was built somewhere with abundant pine forests,” says Mikael Fauvelle.
Several scholars had previously suggested that the boat and its crew came from the region around modern-day Hamburg in Germany. Instead, the researchers now believe they came from the Baltic Sea region.
“If the boat came from the pine forest-rich coastal regions of the Baltic Sea, it means that the warriors who attacked the island of Als chose to launch a maritime raid over hundreds of kilometers of open sea,” says Mikael Fauvelle.
So, exactly where did someone unknowingly leave their fingerprint in the tar, as a silent message to future generations? The best way to conclusively address the mystery of the boat’s origins would be through tree year ring counting which could match the planks on the boat to the area where the trees they came from were cut down.
“We are also hoping to be able to extract ancient DNA from the caulking tar on the boat, which could give us more detailed information on the ancient people who used this boat,” concludes Mikael Fauvelle.
DETECTIVE WORK LED TO DISCOVERY:
The latest findings are the result of careful detective work by the researchers.
The team wanted to find material from the boat that had not yet been subjected to conservation. This involved going through the archive at the National Museum and reading old correspondence, detailing when and where materials had been shipped between different storage areas and museums in Denmark.
“When we located some of the boxes of materials, we were very excited to find that they contained samples from the original excavation that had not been studied in over 100 years,” says Mikael Fauvelle.
HOW THE RESEARCHERS EXAMINED THEIR FINDS:
The team used a wide range of modern scientific methods to study the Hjortspring material. They were able to carbon date some of the lime bast cordage used on the boat, giving them the first absolute date from the original excavation material and confirming its pre-Roman Iron Age dating.
They also used x-ray tomography to make high resolution scans of the caulking and cordage material found on the boat. This included making a digital 3D model of the fingerprint found in some of the caulking tar.
They used gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to study the caulking material and to see how it was produced. In addition, they worked with modern rope makers to create replicas of the ships cordage to study the rope-making process used in the boat’s construction.
The research was carried out in collaboration with the research program Maritime Encounters at the University of Gothenburg.
END
SAN ANTONIO — December 10, 2025 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientists are collaborating with researchers at UT San Antonio to study how space weathering can alter the lunar surface materials to help interpret regional and global far-ultraviolet (FUV) maps of the Moon.
The study looked at how such weathering influences the FUV spectral response. By analyzing just a few grains of returned samples from the Apollo missions, the team gained important insights into the evolution of the lunar surface shaped by solar wind and micrometeoroid impacts over eons, said SwRI’s Dr. Ujjwal Raut.
Using modern instruments and investigative techniques, the team gleaned ...
The cosmos has served up a gift for a group of scientists who have been searching for one of the most elusive phenomena in the night sky.
Their study, presented today in Science Advances, reports on the very first observations of a swirling vortex in spacetime caused by a rapidly rotating black hole.
The process, known as Lense-Thirring precession or frame-dragging, describes how black holes twist the spacetime that surrounds them, dragging nearby objects like stars and wobbling their orbits along the way.
The team, led by the National Astronomical Observatories at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and supported by Cardiff University, examined AT2020afhd, a tidal disruption event (TDE) ...
ST. LOUIS, MO., December 10, 2025 - Andrea Eveland, Ph.D., Principal Investigator and member at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, will lead a multi-institutional project to deepen the understanding of sorghum, a versatile bioenergy crop, and its response to environmental challenges. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program supports the three-year $2.5 million project for Genomics-Enabled Understanding and Advancing Knowledge on Plant Gene Function.
Tailoring crop productivity to variable growing environments, including resilience to and recovery from weather episodes such as flash droughts, is critical ...
December 10, 2025 – A new study in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior (JNEB), published by Elsevier, evaluated a 12-week home-delivered food and education program among adults in Northwest Arkansas. Participants received diabetes-appropriate grocery boxes along with diabetes self-management education materials in English, Spanish, or Marshallese. The intervention was designed and implemented by researchers at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) Institute for Community Health Innovation (ICHI) using ...
CAMBRIDGE, MA - In everyday conversation, it’s critical to understand not just the words that are spoken, but the context in which they are said. If it’s pouring rain and someone remarks on the “lovely weather,” you won’t understand their meaning unless you realize that they’re being sarcastic.
Making inferences about what someone really means when it doesn’t match the literal meaning of their words is a skill known as pragmatic language ability. This includes not only interpreting sarcasm but also understanding metaphors and white lies, among many other conversational subtleties.
“Pragmatics is trying to reason ...
Plate tectonics can be visualized like large moving parts on the earth’s crust. The constant movement of the plates causes major stresses, and, as a result, deformations or earthquakes occur on the plate boundaries. “Every year the Eurasian and African plates are moving 4-6 mm closer to each other. The boundary between the plates around the Atlantic Ocean and Algeria is very clear, whereas in the south of the Iberian Peninsula the boundary is much more blurred and complex,” explained Asier ...
SAN ANTONIO — December 10, 2025 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and Trinity University will study Thermus thermophilus, a thermal bacterium with highly stable proteins, to advance scientific understanding of stability mechanisms that could pave the way for advanced treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, ALS and cancer. The project is supported by SwRI and Trinity through a new grant program designed to encourage collaborative research.
Thermus thermophilus is extremely heat tolerant and produces thermostable enzymes and proteins. Originally isolated ...
Using lung cancer biospecimens from the Sherlock-Lung study, an international team led by National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers, identified key factors that drive tumor evolution and influence outcomes. Overall, the findings, published Dec. 10, 2025, in Nature, describe a previously unknown origin of some aggressive lung cancers.
From whole-genome sequencing of more than 1,000 lung cancer cases, the team focused on 542 lung adenocarcinomas with diverse clonal architectures. Among them were a collection of aggressive tumors enriched with ...
A single signaling pathway controls whether immune cells attack or befriend cells they encounter while patrolling our bodies, researchers at Stanford Medicine have found. Manipulating this pathway could allow researchers to toggle the immune response to treat many types of diseases, including cancers, autoimmune disorders and those that require organ transplants.
The research, which was conducted in mice, illuminates the mechanism of an important immune function that prevents inappropriate attacks on healthy tissue. Called peripheral immune tolerance, ...
Researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine have uncovered a surprising new function for immune cells: preventing excess weight loss. In a recent study, the team demonstrates that when the body is exposed to physiological stressors, such as low temperature, neutrophils — a type of white blood cell — infiltrate fat tissue and release signals that slow fat breakdown. The researchers hypothesize that this mechanism helped our early human ancestors preserve vital energy stores when food ...
