Researchers have identified a fingerprint associated with a vehicle at the center of a crime mystery. But the vehicle isn’t a getaway car—it’s an ancient Scandinavian wooden plank boat, and the fingerprint is over 2,000 years old.
In a study published last week in the journal PLOS One, researchers present new analysis of the cordage and waterproofing materials used to build the Hjortspring boat, Scandinavia’s oldest known wooden plank boat. It lives to tell the tale of a mysterious—and unsuccessful—raid on a Danish island in the fourth century BCE.
“Built from lime wood planks lashed together with cordage, the boat represents the maritime technology used by some of Northern Europe’s earliest seafarers,” the researchers wrote in the paper.
An attack by sea
Over 2,300 years ago, a group of up to four boats assaulted the Danish island of Als—and failed. The defenders put the enemy’s weapons in one of the boats and sank the whole thing into a bog. That’s what researchers suggest happened, anyway. This final act, likely an offering of thanks for their victory, unknowingly prolonged their victory’s memory by thousands of years. In the 1880s the exceptionally preserved boat was found in the bog of Hjortspring Mose. One important detail, however, has faded from the annals of history.
“Where these sea raiders might have come from, and why they attacked the island of Als has long been a mystery,” Mikael Fauvelle, an archaeologist at Lund University and co-author of the study, said in a university statement.
However, Fauvelle and his team’s recent analysis has revealed an astonishingly direct trace of these anonymous attackers—part of a fingerprint on a fragment of the plank boat’s caulking material, or material used to prevent leakage. In this case, tar. While a fingerprint analysis isn’t as useful in identifying ancient criminals as it is for modern ones, it’s still a striking reminder that these failed warriors from over 2,000 years ago are exactly the same kinds of humans we are today.
The pine forests of the Baltic Sea
The tar itself may have added another piece to the puzzle of the boat’s origin. Its analysis revealed that “the boat was waterproofed with pine pitch, which was surprising. This suggests the boat was built somewhere with abundant pine forests,” Fauvelle explained. While researchers had previously suggested modern-day Germany’s Hamburg area as the origin of the attackers and their boats, Fauvelle and his colleagues now think they hailed from the Baltic Sea region.
Furthermore, “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. The team also carbon dated the boat’s lime bast cordage to between 381 and 161 BCE, confirming that it dates back to the pre-Roman Iron Age.
Tree ring counting, which could link the boat’s wooden planks to where the trees were felled, would be the most certain way to reveal where the boat came from. Moving forward, “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,” Fauvelle concluded.
It remains to be seen what further research will reveal about the anonymous attackers. But I bet they’re hoping to remain unknown as they look down at us from whatever afterlife they believed in. I, for one, wouldn’t want the whole world to know about my botched attempt so many centuries later.
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