A Little Boy Found a Strange Stone on the Beach. Archaeologists Told Him It Was a Neanderthal’s Hand Ax

During a recent visit to a local museum in southern England, a 9-year-old boy felt a pang of recognition. The small axes on display in the Worthing Museum’s Stone Age exhibition resembled something in his own bedroom: a shiny, carved rock he’d found while playing on Shoreham Beach in West Sussex a few years earlier.

The boy, Ben Witten, brought his find to the museum, where experts concluded it was a Neanderthal hand ax—carved by an extinct group of humans between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago.

Many similar artifacts have been found in Europe and Asia. Neanderthals made such tools by chipping away at flint to sharpen them into triangular shapes. They might have used the axes for cutting, digging, butchering animals or chopping wood.

The ax that Witten found likely dates to the late Middle Paleolithic era. The pointed tool is “so rare that most qualified archaeologists would never find one themselves,” according to a statement from the Worthing Museum. It’s small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, but it stood out to Witten when he spotted it on the beach.

“I was looking around, and I saw this shiny flint rock,” Witten tells BBC News’ George Carden. “I just thought it looked different [from] all the other different pebbles and stones.” He took it home and kept it in his room, and he says he was always “losing it and finding it.”

After Witten realized that his carved rock might have historical value, he and his mother, Emma Witten, emailed pictures of it to James Sainsbury, the Worthing Museum’s curator of archaeology.

“When I saw the email saying ‘beach find,’ I thought, ‘Here’s another pebble,’” Sainsbury tells the Argus’ Annabel Stock. But as soon as the archaeologist saw the photo, he knew Witten’s “interesting stone” was the real deal.

“Neanderthal hand axes are rare in Sussex,” Sainsbury tells Fox News Digital’s Ashlyn Messier. “This is the first to be found in years. The nature of the find, being made by a young local boy on the beach, makes it doubly special.”

Witten’s ax is bifacial—the same on both sides—and shows “very little sign of wear,” Sainsbury tells the Argus. But experts aren’t sure how it made its way to the beach. It may have surfaced during construction to protect the beach from erosion, or it may have been dropped by a Neanderthal near the spot where it was found.

“The sea would have been further away than it is now,” Sainsbury adds. “We don’t know exactly what the Sussex coast looked like back then.”

Witten has lent the hand ax to the Worthing Museum, where it will be displayed until February. After that, it will be returned to Witten and his family.

“I hope people realize that they don’t need specialist training to find interesting archaeology,” Sainsbury tells Fox News Digital. “Coupled with that, it is incredibly important to report any finds so they can be properly recorded. Otherwise, that information is lost forever.”

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.