True Left

Over five thousand years ago in the Tyrolian Alps, a hunter was shot to death in a high mountain pass. His body would be covered by a glacier and preserved until its discovery in 1991. 

What can this unprecedented level of preservation tell us about not only Ötzi the Tyrolian Iceman… but the Copper Age world that he came from?

Archaeologists discovered a late-Neolithic road submerged underwater off the coast of Croatia.

The submerged ruins of a 7,000-year-old road are hiding underwater off the coast of the Croatian island of Korčula. The Neolithic structure once connected the island to an ancient, artificial landmass.

Archaeologists announced the discovery of the "strange structures" in a May 6 post on Facebook, describing them as the remains of a roadway that are now submerged about 16 feet (5 meters) beneath the Adriatic Sea. The road consists of "carefully stacked stone plates" measuring roughly 13 feet (4 m) wide. The stone pavers had been buried by mud over the millennia. Archaeologists think the stone roadway was built by the Hvar, a lost maritime culture that resided in the area during the Neolithic period (6000 B.C. to circa 3000 B.C.).

"We [also] found late-Neolithic ornamented pottery, [a] stone axe, bone artifacts, flint knives and arrowheads," Mate Parica, an assistant professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Zadar in Croatia who took part in the excavation, told Live Science in an email. "[The] pottery findings help[ed] us to attribute this site to [the] Hvar culture."

The archaeologists think the roadway once linked a nearby Hvar settlement, called Soline, to Korčula. Archaeologists discovered Soline, which is also submerged but once resided on an artificial landmass, in 2021 during a previous archaeological survey. By radiocarbon-dating wood found at the site, they determined that the settlement dates to roughly 4900 B.C., according to the translated statement.
"People walked on this [roadway] almost 7,000 years ago," Igor Borzić, an archaeologist at the University of Zadar who also took part in the underwater dig, said in the statement.

Because the settlement's remains are surrounded by several islands, it's protected from large ocean waves,” according to Reuters.

The Copper Age, also called the Chalcolithic (English: /ˌkælkəˈlɪθɪk/; from Greek: χαλκός khalkós, "copper" and λίθος líthos, "stone") or (A)eneolithic (from Latin aeneus "of copper"), is an archaeological period characterized by regular human manipulation of copper, but prior to the discovery of bronze alloys. Modern researchers consider the period as a subset of the broader Neolithic,[a] but earlier scholars defined it as a transitional period between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. It is also considered the first phase, of three, in the Metal Ages.[2]

The archaeological site of Belovode, on Rudnik mountain in Serbia, has the world's oldest securely dated evidence of copper smelting at high temperature, from c. 5000 BC (7000 BP).[3] The transition from Copper Age to Bronze Age in Europe occurred between the late 5th and the late 3rd millennia BC. In the Ancient Near East the Copper Age covered about the same period, beginning in the late 5th millennium BC and lasting for about a millennium before it gave rise to the Early Bronze Age. Nevertheless, a study in the journal Antiquity from 2013 reported the discovery of a tin bronze foil from the Pločnik archaeological site dated to c. 4650 BC, as well as 14 other artefacts from Bulgaria and Serbia dated to before 4000 BC, showed that early tin bronze was more common than previously thought and developed independently in Europe 1,500 years before the first tin bronze alloys in the Near East...[4]