Doggerland was the ground that once connected Britain and mainland Europe and for more than 8,000 years, distinctive weapons-slender, saw-toothed bone points - made by the land's last inhabitants rested at the bottom of the North Sea. That was until 20th-century engineers, with mechanical dredgers, began scooping up the seafloor and using the sediments to fortify the shores of the Netherlands. The ongoing work has also, accidentally, brought artifacts and fossils from the depths to the Dutch beaches.
     Those jagged bone weapons are known to archaeologists as Mesolithic barbed points and prehistoric people likely fastened the points to longer shafts to make arrows, spears and harpoons, key for their hunting and fishing livelihoods. But scholars mostly ignored the barbed points dotting Dutch beaches because they weren't recovered from systematic digs of proper archaeological sites, like the barbed points found in the U.K. and continental Europe.
     Now a team, led by Leiden University archaeologists, has analyzed some of the washed-up weapons, performing molecular measurements to determine which species the barbed points were made from. While most of them were made of red deer bone, two were fashioned from human skeletons. Never before have archaeologists found unambiguous evidence that ancient Europeans carefully crafted human bones into deadly weapons.
     The study scientists puzzled over why Mesolithic people used red deer and human skeletons for their weapons, while other raw materials like antler would have been more readily available and durable. "This was not an economic decision," says archaeologist Joannes Dekker, lead author of the study. The economic move would have been for ancient hunter-gatherers to produce strong points, quickly from animal parts leftover from meals. The fact that the scientists found predominately red deer and human bones suggests, "There must have been some other reason, a cultural reason, why it was important to use these species," says Dekker.
     For scholars of European prehistory, the new results are tantalizing, but present more questions than answers. Because the study only tested ten points, washed ashore, scientists don't know how often, and under what circumstances, people armed themselves with human bones. "It's super interesting that they found two humans in there, out of ten analyzed in total," says Theis Zetner Trolle Jensen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen, who was not involved in the study. "But it might very well be that they found the needle in the haystack."
     Earlier this year Jensen and colleagues published a much larger study, which determined the animal types comprising 120 Mesolithic barbed points recovered from peat bogs of Denmark and Sweden. They found bones from red deer, moose, bovine and a few brown bear - but not one from Homo sapiens. And, they concluded the Mesolithic crafters chose bone types with preferable mechanical properties. The hunters picked their mediums for practical reasons, not cultural considerations.
     The differing results raise the possibility that only inhabitants of Doggerland turned human bones into deadly points during the Mesolithic. "It might be that there are strange people there... people that did different things," Jensen says.
     Although the new study analyzed a small number of artifacts, it showed the scientific value of artifacts washed onto Dutch shores. "Ideally we'd love [the artifacts] to come from securely excavated contexts," says Newcastle University archaeologist Benjamin Elliott, who was not involved in the research. But Doggerland sites lie beneath the North Sea, so out-of-context beach finds offer invaluable, accessible evidence. "We can't be snobby about it," he says. "We have to really embrace it and try to get as much information and understanding from those artifacts as we possibly can."

Edited from Smithsonian Magazine (21 December 2020)