Archaeologists Found a 66-Pound Stone Underwater. It May Be the World’s Oldest Anchor.

3 min readThe three-acre uninhabited rocky islet of Hespriholmen, a few miles west of Norway’s mainland, had been a point of intrigue to archeologists and historians for more than a century after its discovery, serving as an example of a Stone Age greenstone quarry. Now, experts believe they’ve found something even more momentous under the North Sea: the world’s first anchor.Researchers returned to the prehistoric quarry, used between 5,000 and 9,000 years ago and rediscovered in 1923, to study how Stone Age inhabitants maneuvered and mined underwater stone used in ceremonial axes throughout Norway. During this 2015 reexamination, they uncovered a stone that stood out from the rest. Weighing 66-pounds, the deliberately rounded stone featured a groove running the full circumference.“I’m absolutely convinced that this served as an anchor,” Leif Inge Astveit of the University Museum of Bergen told Forskning Norway in a translated report. “Such a find almost anywhere else would not have been so remarkable, but when it’s lying here in a waste heap from an Early Stone Age quarry, I have no doubt.”Located about 65 feet below the surface of the water, the possible ancient anchor certainly fits the bill. “It seemed very well balanced,” said archaeologist Arild Skjaeveland Vivas of Stavanger Maritime Museum, “easy to pull up with a simple rope.”If Astveit and Vivas are correct, it makes it the oldest stone anchor ever found, created well before the current title-holder, a Mediterranean discovery from the Bronze Age. “We think this is an incredibly exciting find,” Vivas said, while conceding more steps need to be taken to verify the find. “It has to be published and peer-reviewed before we can say anything for certain, but we’re a group of specialists from all over Southern Norway with expertise in underwater Stone Age archaeology.“None of us has ever seen anything like it,” he added, “This is very special.”The find is even more intriguing, as there is no record of Stone Age vessels having anchors. Instead, boats were typically brought directly onto the shore to be docked.The need for an anchor at this particular spot may be due to the conditions on this particular islet. “It’s truly dangerous water and a strange place to find yourself,” Vivas said. “This is a place they could only have visited when there was little wind and only small swells.”Having a stone anchor a boat may have allowed people to successfully pull the greenstone they came for from the water while the boat remained steady against the pull of the tide.Hein Bierck, a professor emeritus at the NTNU University Museum and Stone Age expert not involved with the project, agrees with the team’s assessment. “It’s quite exciting, and very unusual” he remarked, noting that he hasn’t seen anything like the grooved stone. “But based on the position where it was found, the fact that it was lying exactly there, I would think it’s an anchor from the Stone Age.”If they’re right, and the rounded stone is the world’s earliest-known anchor, it provokes the question of what type of boat it had once anchored. Boats made from hollowed logs were a popular choice in Denmark during the Stone Age, but there’s no historical record of Norwegian variations of the vessel. Experts believe a log-made boat would have struggled around Hespriholmen, proposing instead a raft or a boat made of skin, such as those used by the Inuit communities farther north.Researchers initially visited the remote site hoping to discern how much greenstone Stone Age people mined, now believing it was as much as 15,000 cubic feet (the same as nearly 40 large truckloads). They came away with a possible answer for not just how much they hauled away, but how those Stone Age miners managed to do it.Tim Newcomb is a journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. He covers stadiums, sneakers, gear, infrastructure, and more for a variety of publications, including Popular Mechanics. His favorite interviews have included sit-downs with Roger Federer in Switzerland, Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles, and Tinker Hatfield in Portland.