Also found was the skeleton of a sheep with two added legs.
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Also found was the skeleton of a sheep with two added legs. The extra legs came from another sheep, the researchers said.
Bournemouth University
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Iron Age Fashion: Photos
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This tunic was found randomly bundled up in an hunting area on the Norwegian Lendbreen glacier at 6,560 feet above the sea level. Radiocarbon dating established it was made between 230 and 390 A.D.
Vivian Wangen
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Relatively short and constructed from a simple cut, the greenish-brown tunic would have fitted a slender man about 5 feet, 9 inches tall. It featured a boat neck, had no buttons or fastenings, but was simply drawn over the head like a sweater. The pre-Viking tunic showed hard wear and tear and had been mended with two patches on the reverse side.
Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo/Photo: Marianne Vedeler
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The tunic is woven in a weave called diamond twill that was popular over large parts of northern Europe at that time. The image shows a detail of the sleeve fabric (left) and the pattern of a section of the irregular diamond twill (right).
Marianne Vedeler; Pattern drawing: Lise Bender Jørgensen
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The tunic is not the only textile item recovered from the Norwegian ice patches. Approximately 50 fragments await dating and analysis. As global warming progresses, more can be expected.
Vivian Wangen
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Weird, "hybridized" animal skeletons, including a cow-horse and a six-legged sheep litter the bottom of storage pits in an Iron Age site in England, archaeologists have found. One pit even holds the bones of a woman with a slit throat laid on top of animal bones, the scientists said.
In Ireland, BBC revealed an interesting animal hybrid. A sheep and a goat bred together to create a baby geep.
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The unusual remains belong to an ancient people who lived in southern England from about 400 B.C. until just before the Roman invasion, in A.D. 43, said dig co-director Paul Cheetham, a senior lecturer in archaeology at Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom.
It appears that the people dug the pits to store food such as grain near their dwellings. They had "no decent way of refrigerating stuff" back then, and the chalky earth would have provided a cool storage area, Cheetham told Live Science. [ See Photos of "Hybridized" Animal Sacrifices from Ancient England]
The people would have used each pit for only a year or two before digging a new one. Just before they abandoned a pit, it appears, the people buried a hybridized animal in it, sometimes with the flesh still attached, possibly as a way to honor the gods, Cheetham and his colleagues said. (When skeletons are well connected, or articulated, it indicates that the individual had ligaments and flesh holding it together when it was buried, the researchers said.)
These "hybrids" would have been formed from the body parts of various other animals.
"[They were] creating combinations of prized animals as an offering to particular deities," said dig co-director Miles Russell, a senior lecturer of prehistoric and Roman archaeology at Bournemouth University. "What this meant precisely to the tribes we don't know, as nothing sadly was written down from the period and we have no record of the names or nature of the godsbeing invoked."
The archaeologists found all kinds of mix-and-matched animals in the pits. Many contained combinations of horse and cow body parts — such as a cow skull with a horse jaw and a horse skull with a cow horn sticking out, resulting in something that looked like a bizarre unicorn.
Some pits contained man-made items, such as combs made from bone and weaving needles. Others held sheep and cow combinations and the entire bodies of sacrificed dogs and pigs. In one pit, the archaeologists found a decapitated sheep's body with a cow skull on its rear.
Such animal sacrificesare not to be taken lightly, the archaeologists said. Cows, sheep and horses were likely the basis of the economy and also a food source, "so to dispose of an animal like a pig is quite a big thing to do," Cheetham said.
Archaeologists also found the skeleton of a woman buried facedown on a bed of bones. A cut mark on her collarbone suggested someone had sliced her throat, Cheetham said.
"People were not buried in the Iron Age in this part of Britain," he said. "We don't know what they did with their bodies. They either cast them into water or exposed them," leaving them out in the elements.