The Ancient B.C Tools Frozen In The Yukon | Secrets From The Ice | Odyssey

if you love ancient history then this is the channel for you history hit tv it's like netflix but dedicated just to ad-free history documentaries including a huge library of ancient history content from the ninth legion to boudicca to the first britain simply check out the details in the description below and make sure you use code odyssey on sign up [Music] [Music] if you're really lucky and you're right on the right day you can clamber up in the ice and pick up the object exactly where it melted out a mysterious story of ancient humans is melting out of the ice this type of artifact this is going to be more than a thousand years old in northern canada the frontier of archaeology and climate change we're not getting just the stone we're getting the whole weapon and we were absolutely flabbergasted [Applause] my mind immediately goes to what's the story behind it wow how old do you think that is well but the surprises don't stop with the artifacts you now have a human being i mean this could be you know your relative prehistoric secrets frozen in time until now oh my god [Music] in a government lab in the yukon a collection of ancient hunting tools that holds the secrets to a missing chapter of human history this one here is my particular favorite and i don't know if you can see this but this small segment about three inches long it's got a couple of twists of sinew on it and parts of a feather that are still wedged underneath that sinew this is actually the piece that started the whole ice patch phenomena when we got the radiocarbon date back at 4300 it's just all the lights went on and we saw that this was one of the oldest preserved organic artifacts found ever in canada organic artifacts that's the key wood and feathers and sinew that otherwise would have rotted away centuries ago instead they were preserved in the southern yukon's ice patches but what is an ice patch anyway and how is it different from a glacier we've lost about 10 square kilometers worth of ice the really big difference is the glaciers move for ice to move it needs to be about 30 to 40 meters thick so roughly 100 feet or more [Music] and when the ice is that thick because of its own weight it deforms under its own weight and it starts moving [Music] so the 1960s that a little kind of research camp up here behind us we have a crash cessna aircraft this uh crashed probably about 50 years ago when i first worked here about 10 years ago it was about a kilometer up later from here the moving glacial ice has actually carried the plane wreck down to this spot [Music] if that plane had crashed on an ice patch it would have remained in the same place so nice patches because they're not moving the material that falls on the surface really becomes preserved in place and things can be preserved for thousands and thousands of years so ice patches can be big but not as big as glaciers and they've been sitting in the same place for thousands of years that is until now their rate of melting is unprecedented and while the rapid thaw is scary for climatologists greg hare and christian thomas have chanced across an entirely new scientific discipline ice patch archaeology chris was just walking along the edge of the ice we're about three meters from the edge of the ice here and he found there a dart shaft that has melted out of the ice and looks like perhaps it's been caught in the meltwater channel and moved in several pieces down to where we see it now when you look around this landscape there's there's no trees so the only way for a substantial piece of wood like this to get up here is for someone to actually bring it up so so when we see wood we automatically know it's an artifact this type of artifact this is going to be more than a thousand years old you wouldn't find this in a non-frozen site that would have rotted away hundreds of years ago so so we know this is pretty fresh out of the ice there's a good fit right there chris looks like it perfect oh good one chris good eye another fragment of the dark you know people hypothesized that there were feathers on the end of these weapons actually finding ancient examples of the weapons allows us to know how people position feathers on the shaft so that we don't have to hypothesize we can look to the collection and measure and see how they constructed these things and how they intended them to fly the yukon used to be an archaeological backwater then suddenly the artifacts were being disgorged and canada was leading the way and unraveling the many secrets of the melting ice [Music] you might think what they have just found is an old arrow it's not it's a technology that predates bows and arrows by thousands of years it's a hunting tool called an atlatl [Music] an atlatl is a carved piece of wood that allows the hunter to hurl a dart with greater force over a greater distance than he could by simply throwing a spear [Music] this is where members of the world atlatl association meet to compete and see how well they can compare to other thrillers there are actually atlatl leagues around the world but most of the best dart throwers are here ryan grossmeier is an engineer at the university of missouri grossmeier has taken the dimensions of those ancient wooden atlatl shafts found in the yukon and made exact replicas to study how effective they were as hunting tools these are all accurate replicas of individual darts that have been recovered from ice patches on mountain tops when they're thrown at little darts have to flex a lot to fly properly the dart shafts wobble wildly in the air from the force of the throw but then amazingly find their mark on the target the feathers are important for keeping the dart flying straight when you apply force to the back end of the dart it can cause the dart to spin around like this the feathers are what start the dart spinning and cause the back end to stay behind the front end otherwise you can have the darts spin around in flight these darts from the yukon are actually very sophisticated they are more sophisticated in fact than any modern dart that modern competitors are throwing this would have taken a lot of time to do with stone tools but i think it was integral to how these fly accurately [Music] okay the official order uh in terms of accuracy there are competitors here today who can easily hit a dinner plate sized target from about 20 meters ryan grossmeier and that's definitely accurate enough to take down something like a caribou or any kind of deer [Music] in my mind i envisioned say half a dozen hunters in pursuit of a herd of caribou one or two get hit by the darts and meanwhile the darts that missed the mark perhaps got buried in the snow and then incorporated into the ice [Music] so it's like a giant deep freeze anything that's been lost either on the ice or at the edge of the ice or happen to die around the ice often becomes entombed in the ice for hundreds or thousands of years and we happen to be in the decade or in the century that that ice is melting we don't know how old this particular ice patch is the oldest thing we found from here i think is 900 years old but it other ice patches are as much as 9 000 years old so it's it's a real window into the past we have got you know a preserved record of ancient people's hunting techniques and and traditions looks like what we got here is maybe a swan or goose leg bone that's been split and one end of it's been ground into a point likely used as an awl for punching uh holes and leather and materials for repairing objects my mind immediately goes to the what's the story behind it because i've got a storyteller mom i always am like oh i wonder how how did that get there what's the story around the the person who prepared it so this is definitely the first time i think we found an all right on a nice patch it's one of the first times we've found a non-projectile point on the nice patch that's a beauty is it a woman's tool or a man's tool is it a um how did they lose it in this valley here or this next one over there this is friday creek that runs down into this area the artifacts are telling a story that the elders heard about from their grandparents that these mountains were once overrun with caribou we're at the ridge between the friday and alligator ice patches [Music] and this is a stone hunting blind that's one of a series of seven blinds that run along the crest of this ridge and i first came here in about 1999 and art showed us where these blinds were when did you first know about these blinds art oh boy i can't i was about eight or nine years old let's assume there were people behind each set of blinds and the caribou or sheep would go through them and then you'd shoot them with your arrow or your dart [Music] we didn't find anything organic that we could date but last year two years ago was the first time that we came here we found a couple of broken spear points and from our work within the ice patches we know that uh the spear points were used right up until 1200 years ago and they were replaced then by antler arrow points and because we've got spear points right next to these blinds we know they're older than 1200 years old were there a lot of caribou up here [Music] i don't know why but they they disappeared from this area in 1898 because you asked the old-timers about the caribou they'll say that there was so many caribou in those mountains back there you think the whole mountain is moving with caribou and the in these these snow patches proves it see all those dark streaks in the ice that's all caribou dung and when caribou biologists first found it in the mid 90s it was stunning news no one knew how it got there because as far as anyone knew the herds had disappeared a century earlier [Music] it was amazing like you could see as it was melting out the caribou dung almost like it had been deposited days ago in some cases uh quite fresh looking so we knew that this was this wasn't some phenomenon in recent time that it had to have been laid down by generations and generations of caribou so we just said well we better collect some of it as they were scooping up their dung samples don russell and his partner found the pieces of what they thought were bits of an arrow shaft and they took them back to white horse [Music] then they said first of all it's not an arrow shaft it's that little chef and then we run a date on it because it looked like an arrow shaft and i said oh that's pretty cool run a date it comes back over 4 000 years old and we oh i think the fecal sample that i collected was i think 1600 years old and the uh the atlatl dart was 4300 years old so that kind of started the whole thing [Music] and uh all of a sudden we're not getting just the stone we're getting the whole weapon we're getting you know the spears with the stone points the wooden shafts and the feathers and the sinew we're getting the arrow the air shafts with the feathers and sinew and the ochre on them [Music] and we're seeing for the very first time as archaeologists the whole weapon [Music] and we were absolutely flabbergasted that's we've never had access to that knowledge before right it was you know what we could learn from talking to the elders about life in the old days and all of a sudden we have an error we can date it we know exactly that it's you know 150 years old or 300 years old or we can take a dart and say oh no this one's 6 000 years old so we couldn't do that with stone now we could they could get an age on the artifacts because organic material can be carbon dated stone can't the ice was melting and at the base of the ice sometimes on the surface of the ice there were artifacts just lying around and it was just it was amazing that summer summer of 1999 it was every day the helicopter would come back with new amazing artifacts that nobody had seen before it was incredible so the dung and the artifacts were very old but a big question remained why were they finding it all up so high in the mountains why weren't the hunters simply killing animals in the valleys where they didn't need to expend so much energy climbing it turns out they were hiking up to where their prey was finding relief from the summer heat one of the things is that caribou are very well adapted for cold conditions and not very well adapted for warm conditions so it's a opportunity to help them thermal regulate so that by congregating on the ice by laying down on the ice they can stay cool but i think more important than that was avoiding harassing insects see how those caribou are twitching like that they're being harassed by the warble flies and the butterflies you can just see the whole animal shaking and shimmering to try to get rid of those yeah it's only hot days in summer when you find them on the ice in snow patches up on the high mountains we went up to an ice patch to get some water to drink on a hot day and a big mountain caribou came right up to us and he didn't see us his eyes were drooping and his tongue was hanging out he was hot and he was bothered and there was a cloud of flies the warble flies is like a bee it looks like a bee and it buzzes around like a bee and drives them nuts but it doesn't bite them it lays eggs on on the legs on the fur as they hatch a little larva would drill into the skin and go through the bloodstream up to the back and then they just leave a nice little hole which is okay on a fur you can't see the holes but on a piece of leather full of holes not very many people can appreciate that [Music] when they get onto the ice those insects stay off to the sides they can't fly they don't congregate around the caribou so the caribou get relief when they're on the ice and then it's it's a matter of question of if the caribou is 20 meters away or 40 meters away can you hit it with the dart can you shoot it with the arrow do you have to get closer [Music] i said holy that's a long ways to throw a spear or a long ways to throw a adult [Music] but to throw to to throw a a good adult adult you you know you got to put your hand back like that and you have to have that momentum to be able to to to throw that's technology and that is experience imagine the anticipation each summer heading up here to see what these ice patches have to offer up next but imagine too that the artifacts are your family heirlooms left there by your ancestors each piece that is found carries with it a loaded double meaning this is one of our um i suppose most illustrious artifacts it's a moccasin that was found at the gladstone ice patch a number of years ago and it was only through the efforts of our conservator that it was determined that it was actually a moccasin she spent hundreds of hours conserving this material she said it was like working with wet toilet paper trying to put this on a mount and get the the right shape and everything and it slowly emerged that this was a moccasin this has been dated at it's about 1500 years old and this is certainly the oldest moccasin ever found in canada the massive gladstone ice patch is the biggest one in the yukon and it's been producing artifacts for years gladstone is in the traditional territory of the southern toshoni in order for greg to visit the ice patches he has to get permission from the different first nations whose members are eager to go up and take part themselves he found this projectile point old do you think that is well it's uh it's a tip for a throwing dart and this this part of the ice patch has actually produced a bunch of uh dark shaft fragments they're all between and 3009 thousand years old so it's pretty hard to say what this is but you can see it's pretty good quality church this is a really nice little stone point the artifacts that the items that the lance points or the atlanta points or the arrow shaft or arrow points that that that come out of these ice patches um they're just part of the story of this land um they're they're not the story itself they're only one part of that story they're part of that caribou story they're part of my grandma's life they're part of my great grandfather's life and and that has all given us life here to today so when we look at some of those items and that that's like um it's the stories are alive yet the artifacts really help solidify that that narrative i think and um and then for our younger generation they are able to have that tactile proof that um we have history here tactile proof one of the key jobs for an archaeologist is to ground human history within the landscape to reveal to us that people were here and to tell us what they were doing this is central norway that petroglyph carved into the rock depicts a reindeer a first cousin to the caribou of north america experts think this was etched into stone 6000 years ago and tells a story of how important reindeer were to the people who hunted this land past the tree line up in the dovra mountains the ice patches look incredibly familiar just like the yukon they too are melting revealing their own secrets these really in in norway and in the yukon these high mountain alpine locations are removed from the villages and the the town centers and places where archaeology is usually done and have not been very well investigated and now for the first time we're seeing the importance of of the margins and we're seeing just how adventurous and how uh comfortable people were at high elevations there's a one piece of shaft here why uh this one is hard to say it could be 800 years old could be until about 300 years old somewhere between it martin kalanin is an irishman who studies ice patch archaeology at the university of trondheim this spot lies between central norway and the coast and it was heavily traveled by people we now know as mountain vikings in the middle ages in the late middle ages they've really started to use this place a lot and i think it has got something to do with it is relatively close to the village or to the village at that time and that this was their local snow patch in a way martin ends up getting a lot of his artifacts from trusted local collectors who know what to look for tor breton is a park ranger with a keen eye for spotting new items in the melt water [Music] he and his colleague meet martin in the opto parks office to unveil their latest finds that's wonderful yeah when you see the arrow and realizes that ah it's narrow it's like uh hard to describe it feels like an electrical shock in a good way at first you say oh that's narrow shaft can i find the arrow head where's the rest of it oh yes it's complete i found at least 47 different artifacts arrows or pieces of bows found over several years in small fragments so maybe 250 different pieces from arrows or both i find it it was like this when i found it when i tried to lift it it broke to me that tells a story about my ancestors because my ancestors who did hunt up there and i'm i'm also a reindeer hunter and on a warm day i would hunt on an ice patch so this shaft melted out and was found about in the middle of the snow patch um yeah found in different fragments but as you can see they fit together and um it's there's nice preservation on this we have the uh the knock at the back which the archer would have held when he released the string from the bow the last person to touch this arrow before ingle found it on thursday was probably the hunter 16 or 1800 years ago as he released the arrow hunting and the question is whether they belong together and this is part of the fragments uh game if it doesn't fit we're gonna have to go back there and look again for there but i think i think it fits but i don't dare get the hammer wonderful one of the things that's difficult about the snow patch archaeology is that the ice patches that go from being heaven for old objects frozen in ice stable and it's the perfect environment for organic material like wood or bone or antlers [Music] but the moment the objects come out of the ice then then it becomes hell because then it's very important to get to secure the object straight away once they are thawed the wooden artifacts are damp even soggy they'll need to be dried out and then treated with preservatives [Music] in a burial ground near vong in norway these mounds mark graves from the viking era archaeologists estimate that there are between 750 and 800 people buried here going as far back as 1500 years ago the thing to remember is that the people that lived here in scandinavia during the viking age they also were farmers hunters they worked in the in the landscape around them and some of the arrows that we find on the snow patches they may have belonged to the people that are lying in the graves here in fact you find arrowheads in the graves and some of the graves they're exactly like the arrows that we find on their ice patches as they melt well not exactly the metal hunting points recovered from the viking graves are corroded by chemical elements in the soil you can get an idea of what they would have looked like when they were new from their shape but when you see a similar point recovered from the ice where those chemical elements aren't present well just look at it it's pristine it was found early in the morning and the way the light was shining on the snow patch and it just really had melted straight out of the ice it's almost as if the hunter was there the day before and had lost it so it actually it actually sort of captures what ice patch archaeology is about just trying to be there at the right time and save the object as best we can a metal point is something they dearly love to find in the yukon but that artifact hasn't turned up there yet the key strategy in both places is to be ready to spend the summers keeping an eye out for what gets offered up next what we're seeing here is a little knob at the top where the with the bow would have been stringed and you can see a fragment of the arm of the bow of course it would have been much longer at that time but the hunter would have held it perhaps here and only this part has been preserved maybe perhaps this is where exactly where it broke so this may be one of those other moments where the hunter has strung his uh arrow he's drawn his string and the and instead of loosening an arrow the bow has cracked and then it was discarded on the snow patch so there may have been wailing and lashing of teeth around this piece in the 80s there was one or two little fights 2000 early 2000 2003 it just explodes it explodes in central norway southern norway we start to hear news from canada southern yukon they've got hundreds of fines and then we realized wow this is something very different and i think that this is applies to glacial archaeology as a whole that we are everybody in a kind of a rescue mode and we're trying to find the best way to document the things now here and now the real detailed research and study of these things is going to come you know decades and centuries in the future this is research material and this is material for archaeology for archaeologists for generations this is the front line of the archaeology of climate change i think that there's a lesson been we're being shown something here that when five thousand six thousand year old objects are starting to melt out of alpine ice that something is changing in the in the mountain landscapes and you know there are lots of other indications around us this is only one of many different signs that there is something changing in there in the nature that surrounds us with the speed of climate change people know now that anything could come out of the ice next and with each discovery the past speaks more loudly more clearly challenging us to interpret our human story in dramatically different ways [Music] [Music] the significance of finding even the bones that you you're not sure if it came from last year's hunt or 40 years ago the hunt is that the ice that persists up here preserves everything so this could be ten years old it could be three thousand years old you just can't tell from uh from looking at it yet you literally have to collect everything that you find and and uh do the scientific tests later because we found that these uh when you collect everything you create this incredible archive of animal life in the alpine that can be studied for genetics or trace elements and you can really learn a lot about the past we've got sheep we've got caribou we've got bison we've got wolves we've got bears basically anything that was living around the ice and died on the ice even if it wasn't hunted by humans could be preserved in the ice probably the best example we have is this sheep skull we found this beside an ice patch a few years ago and when we started to do the analysis on cut marks we decided to radiocarbon radiocarbonate this one and we sent in a very small sample and this one turns out to be about 4 500 years old so it's far older than we thought it was going to be but it's the best example we have of someone in ancient times butchering one of these these animals so these are stone tool cut marks across the brow of this sheepskull you know people have in their mind the iconic spear points and arrow points and scrapers and those kind of things but actually when you get to an archaeological site and you're digging you almost never find those perfect preserved spear points and arrow points what you find are the waste flakes the debootage that comes off when people are making stone tools so this this represents a very general uh archaeological site in the subarctic where you have hundreds it's not thousands of waste flakes and when i look at this collection today it just pales in comparison to what we're learning from the ice patches or the quality of tools and i think this is really typical for most archaeological sites in the subarctic [Music] we're at the gladstone ice patch and sheila just found another stone spear point you can see it is you know that's either basalt or darcy another day another historic find it's within that range this time it's the stone hunting point from the tip of an atlatl you're getting a better your eyes starting to get trained greg hare is with college student nansana murphy a member of the champaign asia first nation yeah it really stands out and with anthropologist sheila greer and you can shape it they chose the old people knew what they were doing they chose rock that they could shape like i have seen somebody personally pick up and a stone tool and go you mean this is made by my ancestors and you go yeah i don't know it's crazy i love it it's so cool to know that this has been here for like hundreds of years and you're just seeing it now for much of the 20th century the residential school era cut first nations children off from their relationship to the land i was five when i was taken from family and not here i don't know people really realize what kind of impact that had on communities [Music] the discovery of that first artifact in 1997 coincided with a yukon native culture beginning to find itself again hardly anyone was doing traditional carving and there were no traditional dancers like the dhaka kwan troop now look preserving culture and a connection to the land are one and the same for those young people now that are going to be the caretakers they're the ones that are going to look after the land they have to know where they come from and we're trying to do make sure that the young people that participate in ice patch work have that expanding knowledge of this land here that they call their homeland [Music] like you can feel it um viscerally right through your body when you're picking up a piece it's like whoa like which ancestor actually touched this like who was that person where did they what do they look like how do they live you know it's not just an artifact it is a piece of who you are 20 25 years ago no kids in the yukon would have known what an atlatl was or a throwing dart and today if you go around to almost any school in the yukon all the kids know what a throwing dart is or an atlatl is they know how to make them they know how to throw them and that's you know that's a cultural shift that has just taken place in 20 years the early ice patch discoveries also coincided with the yukon first nations signing their land claim agreements it gave them power and it gave them a say in how heritage would be handled and interpreted and then in 1999 this happened some sheep hunters in northern british columbia just across the border with yukon found a body melting out of the ice [Music] scattered pieces of his belongings including his spruce root hat his gopher skin rope a bag of tools and various wooden implements indicated that this was no recent casualty you now have a human being you now have a relative and that that really struck home to the community and you know like you want to know who this person is you really want to find out i mean this could be you know your relative and you really need to know it's beautifully made not just finely made it's gorgeous we really had to get into the driver's seat we really had to um as a first nation we really had to um to get to get control that was i think the the biggest task that we had to ensure that we're not going to allow people scientists or whomever to come and um dictate to us or tell us how we were going to be treating our own relative since the early 90s people around the world have been finding bodies melting out of the ice lost climbers hikers two soldiers missing since the first world war and utsi etsy is world famous a 3 300 year old ice man who has been studied ever since he thought out of the alps in 1991. one thing about etsy though no indigenous group ever claimed him as their own it was a different story in north america take the 9 000 year old skeleton of kennewick man a bitter fight ensued in washington state over who should have control of his remains the government or the first nations no one in the yukon or bc wanted a repeat of that you know everybody had a sort of bad taste in their mouth from the kennewick man situation champion asiac and the bc government were able to come to a resolution that allowed science to take place uh and still honor the the cultural values a resolution born out of compromise not only with the scientists but also within the first nations communities there were people who felt it was a bad idea to disturb the remains of this man whoever he was even now images of the body cannot be shown because of sensitivities and respect for the dead i think my the biggest lesson for the community is that i need to honor what my ancestors i need to honor what my ancestors have taught me so they gave this lost man a name kwade dansen chi southern toshone for long ago man found and then they told the scientists from the bc government that they could study his remains and belongings but only for a year you know science had their results out of the project but also the the rights and the respect for other people's beliefs or the first nations beliefs and they they've also been respected in the process too so this balance or this uh this compromise agreement to me it seems to me from the outside at least to be a very canadian solution to a canadian situation and we knew from the very beginning at the end there would be it would be cremated so we really tried to take the best samples we could and do the best analysis we could at that time we were really surprised when we looked at his bone which gives you sort of a 10-year record of diet of all these breakfast lunches and dinners over 10 years and it was almost entirely marine diet so it looks like that his uh he would have been spending most of his time on the coast the scientists managed to isolate quade dan sinchie's mitochondrial dna and determined that he was connected to native groups from the pacific northwest i mean given the radiocarbon dates suggest that you know he's somewhere between 200 and 300 years old it makes sense that he would be related to people and that was the height of the trade between the coastal clinget and the interior athabascans was in that period of time so people were back and forth a lot for many people that was a really profound discovery and uh made the importance of quite that much more significant even more significant was news that kode dan sinchi was related to 17 people who were living today makes you feel really solid you know um yes we do belong yes this is you know our traditional territory and it just um it's right in your bones it's in your blood and you feel really good about it you know when we got the phone call from pearl it really it affected me and it stayed with me for a long time i was curious about what he was doing up there where he was going what his history was who his family was back then and and most of all how he passed how he died and because he was found alone that's where the science scientific knowledge and the traditional knowledge you know they come together and they they agree with each other and also so we buried his ashes back in the mountain of where he was found and we did it in a very we we held a pot watch and we did it in a very respectful manner of having elder advice from from the coast and the interior my personal belief is that he would have wanted to share with the world [Music] what he had to offer no one really knows why quade dan sinchie was crossing the ice towards the interior but the message he delivered a few centuries after his death is profound for the people who live here now that this vast and open wilderness has been a human place for a very long time [Music] huddled into an overlook at snohetta norwegian hikers learn about the animals up in their local mountains and how ancient hunters headed up to the ice but the story gets more complex in the traditional territory of the southern sami people they were reindeer herders and their history here goes back thousands of years martin kalanin is just laying the groundwork to start searching the sami ice patches no artifacts yet but its early days [Music] the story of the sami is almost identical to government treatment of the yukon native people so they had a really strong policy making the summit children go to boarding schools had to talk speak norwegian and they all alone norwegian to in schools and they had teachers coming from the south being teachers in this area and it was forbidden actually to teach in the sami language ice patch mountain so these sami are hoping archaeology can help them reclaim part of their culture i think that there will come all the things in the eyes that we haven't seen before and i think this kind of findings will be a way to establish that prehistory and say that this is what happened so what are you they you are it will be a way of reclaiming history i think it would be very important to see to have something to say that look this is my story the story in this area is long it's a multi-ethnic context it's not the one group over the other it's it's that's that is part of the job of archaeology is to to to help to add the past as a quality to our life and try to weave in the past in our present it doesn't really belong to one or the other group that are here today now the point of that for me is that if you come there from a norwegian ethnicity you say you see that aha this is my past but it's also important to remember that southern sami also reached back into the past and say ha ha this is my past too and they have the same feeling of belonging and the deep time to this this landscape as the the norwegian visitors have as well [Music] at times it resembles a scavenger hunt over a good yukon summer like this one the discoveries just keep on coming okay so we got three pieces of an arrow here it's kind of interesting because these two broken pieces one's the small end so that's going to be at the proximal end of this arrow and the other piece beside that is probably going to go at this side so let's just see what we got here it is a lovely straight arrow shaft put that back and let's see what these other pieces look like oh look at that that's the knock knocked in that's a beauty nice nice nice nice nice oh really nice i'm not exaggerating to say that most archaeologists would die and found they'd gone to heaven to be able to find something like there's not just archaeologists you know anyone we have a nearly complete era the opportunity to find something like this that's just melted out of the ice after a thousand years it's incredible greg hare's team has learned that even the most inconsequential looking ice patches deserve attention they know that in another age hunters might have stalked there it's it's one of those things that you would never have predicted like when you're at university and you're studying things you'd never predict that the opportunities within archaeology would change so dramatically that you'd be involved in something that is kind of redefining the discipline i'm just going to take some video of the context here greg here is going to remove the artifact and we'll see what we got here [Music] oh cool it's got an end blade on the end and there's i've seen you the binding the end blade to it a massive copper point attached to the end of the caribou antler arrowhead feathers is that a feather all right let's see what you got okay it looks like uh it could be another stick it has that general shape oh my god here oh my gosh yeah oh my god isn't that something wow yeah that's that's that's amazing isn't that something oh my goodness oh it's perfect it was seeing the the full uh barbed antler point with actually with a copper and blade that that's something we haven't seen before here in the yukon it's just a perfect piece and uh yes we finally have one oh my god that is stunning it's nice it's just beautiful wow this is our new poster child it has just been elevated the craftsmanship of this copper hunting point attached with sinew to a barbed antler is astounding when the team ran carbon dating tests on it later they found out it was 850 years old further tests showed that the point was processed from local copper nuggets so the metal was not an outside trade good whoever lost this lost not just a weapon but something of value perhaps a talisman there's an amazing story here embedded in just this one piece bit by bit the ice is giving up its secrets [Music] we've only got one chance at this you know 10 years from now many of these patches may have either melted out or the artifacts that were present have melted out and they're gone now so we've got this one opportunity and we're trying to make sure that we

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 2,645,531

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, secrets from the ice, prehistoric documentary, neolithic history, yukon hunting ice, Odyssey, odyssey

Id: WNq_pqUEcb8

Length: 50min 6sec (3006 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 21 2021