Archaeologists find 7,000-year-old 'perfectly preserved skeleton'

Archaeologists found a skeleton of a person who lived around 7,000 years ago in excellent condition during the renovation of a town square. 

According to Live Science, the skeleton was discovered in the town square of Słomniki — which is situated in Poland. 

Archaeologist Paweł Micyk said that fragments of pottery and flint were found with the skeleton. The pottery — belonging to linear pottery culture — suggests that the burial took place around 7,000 years ago.

The skeleton was preserved with the help of loosely packed soil in which the burial took place, as this soil contains non-acidic chemical makeup.

"At the moment, we are unable to determine who the buried person was," said Micyk. However, further information will be revealed by an analysis done by an anthropologist.

"This is an exciting and very important discovery indeed," said an adjunct professor of archaeology, Małgorzata Kot.

"The burial belongs to the earliest Neolithic farmers who crossed the Carpathians from the south and entered Poland in the 6th millennium."

Kot said that little is known about these farmers, their culture and burial practices. "They bury their dead either within the settlements or in separate cemeteries, but cemeteries are very rare," she added.

"You must imagine that these early farmers were entering an absolutely new land for them. Land of the deep forest of Central European Lowlands. Land of harsher climate but also a land already inhabited by other people," Kot said.

She added that they would have come across hunter-gatherers who were already living there, highlighting that they both coexisted for about two millennia, however, it is unsure how they interacted.