strontium

Archaeologists Track the Birth, Life, and Death of the 3,000-Year-Old Egtved Girl

She was dressed in a knee-length skirt and a short woolen blouse when she was buried in an earthen mound in southern Denmark. She was only a teenager when she died. Her small body was wrapped in a blanket and placed in an ox hide-lined coffin made of oak. Beside her, tucked within a small cloth sack, were the cremated remains of a six-year-old child. Now, over 3,000 years later, scientists are able to trace the young girl's journey across an ancient landscape.

Finding the Origins of Chinook Salmons Through the ‘Otolith’ of the Inner Ear

Over the course of many years researchers have sought out to find exactly where Alaska’s Chinook salmon are hatched. The process is known, the migratory patterns are mapped, yet for any given fish caught in the wide open ocean, the story of its origins are often shrouded in mystery—but now that has changed. With a simple chemical marker, accumulating in the inner ear bone of the salmon known as an “otolith”, researchers now believe that they can trace the origins of any Chinook salmon back to the exact waters from which they came before they emerged in Alaska’s Bristol Bay.

Recommended Stories

Real Time Analytics