A 9-year-old boy is being credited with finding an ancient hand axe that a museum in England claims is from the late Middle Palaeolithic period.
According to the BBC, Ben Witten, who is from West Sussex, England, found the ancient hand axe at Shoreham Beach when he was six years old, believing that it was a shiny rock.
“I was looking around and I saw this shiny flint rock,” Witten told the BBC. “I just thought it looked different [from] all the other different pebbles and stones.”
After discovering the artifact, Witten kept the axe in his room for three years until he visited the Worthing Museum, toured the Stone Age exhibit, and recognized that his shiny rock was similar to one of the artifacts.
In a recent post on Facebook, Worthing Museum wrote, “Our archaeologist James had a special surprise on Sunday when Ben Witten brought in a rare hand axe that he found on Shoreham Beach!”
Museum officials noted that the 9-year-old boy “kindly loaned” the “incredible find” to the Worthing Museum and that the artifact would temporarily be on display for guests to enjoy.
“They said it’s their best find in ten years. Now it’s in a case in the museum. I was really excited, my heart was beating really fast,” Witten told the BBC. “I did want to keep it, but I felt like it would be better there than in my hands.”
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Announcing the young boy’s historic discovery on Facebook, the Worthing Museum said, “The hand axe dates to the Late Middle Palaeolithic (60-40,000 years ago!) and was almost certainly made by a Neanderthal. Ben found the flint axe in the upper shingle at Shoreham beach, so it is very difficult to say with confidence whether the axe was originally lost there or whether it was dredged up from offshore river deposits during work to strengthen the beach defences.”
James Sainsbury, Worthing Museum’s curator of archaeology, told Fox News that the 9-year-old’s artifact is “by far the oldest item shown to myself in 10-plus years.” The curator described the discovery of Neanderthal as “rare in Sussex” and noted that the artifact’s discovery by a “young local boy on the beach, makes it doubly special.”
According to Sainsbury, the hand axe has been loaned to the museum until next February. After the artifact is displayed in the museum, it will be returned to the 9-year-old boy.
“We will get it recorded with the British Museum’s Portable Antiquities Scheme, ensuring there is a record of the find for future generations,” Sainsbury told Fox News.
Pictures of Witten and the ancient hand axe were shared recently on X, formerly Twitter.
