4,000-year-old Dartmoor burial find changes British Bronze Age history

A 4,000-year-old burial has been discovered at White Horse hill, Dartmoor, England which has rewritten the history of the British Bronze Age.

About 4,000 years ago, a young woman's cremated bones - charred scraps of her shroud and the wood from her funeral pyre still clinging to them - was wrapped in a fur along with her most valuable possessions, packed into a basket, and carried up to one of the highest and most exposed spots on Dartmoor, where they were buried in a small stone box covered by a mound of peat, the Guardian reported.

The bundle contains a treasury of unique objects: a tin bead and 34 tin studs, which are the earliest evidence of metal-working in the south-west; textiles, including a unique nettle fibre belt with a leather fringe; jewellery, including amber from the Baltic and shale from Whitby; and wooden ear studs, which is the earliest examples of wood turning ever found in Britain.

The ear studs were made from spindle wood, a hard fine-grained wood often used for knitting needles; and the unique arm band, plaited from cowhair and originally studded with 34 tin beads which would have shone like silver.

the charred scraps of textile may have been the remains of a shroud, and fragments of charcoal from the funeral pyre.

Jane Marchand, chief archaeologist at the Dartmoor National Park Authority said that any one of the artefacts would make the find remarkable.