Palaeontology

Neolithic Danes made 'sun stone' sacrifices to banish volcanic winter

By T.K. Randall
January 18, 2025 ·  16 comments

The eruption would have been devastating. Image Credit: Pixabay / u_pcr38y8yfb These cataclysmic events, which occurred around 2900 BCE, would have seen the sun blotted out across the northern hemisphere, bringing about a volcanic winter with freezing temperatures which caused crops to fail and brought about a devastating famine.

For those living in the parts of the world impacted by the eruption, it must have been a worrying time.

Now evidence has been found to suggest that some of these people tried to take matters into their own hands by making special sacrifices aimed at bringing back the sun's warmth.

Archaeologists excavating sites on the Danish island of Bornholm found 614 flat pieces of shale that had been engraved with images of the sun as well as agricultural fields and crops.

Despite designs of this nature being very uncommon at the time, it appears as though the local people had taken the decision to bury all of them in a ditch during a single event - presumably as part of some form of ritual designed to banish the wintry conditions that had befallen them.The archaeologists who discovered the stones decided to team up with climate scientists who were able to confirm that a major natural disaster had occurred at that time.

"We actually found that this eruption had taken place and that it can be rather narrowly dated, but we wanted a little bit more than that, because we can say, okay, there's an eruption, but did it affect Bornholm?" Dr Rune Iversen from the University of Copenhagen told IFL Science.

To find out, the team looked at ancient sediment layers and tree rings to determine that there had indeed been a significant reduction in sunlight coinciding with the volcanic eruption.

"We are comparing this event to the Caesar volcano because it's basically of the same magnitude," said Iversen. "It has been described in the classical sources with harsh winters and bad summers."

"They talk about temperatures dropping by about seven degrees in the summer, for example."

"An average Danish summer can be pretty harsh in itself, but if you then subtract seven degrees, it's a really bad summer - so it's not good for the harvest."

Ancient society may have carved 'sun stones' to end volcanic winter https://t.co/LFXoYISNuw

- New Scientist (@newscientist) January 16, 2025

Source: IFL Science | Comments (16)

Tags: Volcano, Neolithic, Sun