Three meters high, fifty meters wide: Fifteen graves from different eras were found in this Bulgarian mound. At the bottom was a child who was buried here around 5000 years ago. The drone image shows the pit in the middle right.
Image: Alexander Suvorov/University of Helsinki
In the Bronze Age, Europe was reshuffled. Migrants came from the steppes who still shape our genetic make-up today: Who were these people, what made them so successful? A search for clues.
Hhigh time to buy some umbrellas. The intense heat wave had now reached Bulgaria, and at almost 40 degrees Celsius it was almost unbearable in the blazing sun, for hours at that. So we stopped in at the hardware store, grabbed some bright green-blue umbrellas and matching stands, and headed up the hill. Our destination was not a dune, not a beach on the Bulgarian Gold Coast, where German party tourists like to cavort, but a dusty field about an hour’s drive from the Black Sea.
And the umbrellas shouldn’t give us shade when we’re lounging in a deckchair, but should protect bare bones from direct sunlight – and of course all those who were trying to carefully expose extremely fragile contemporary witnesses. In the current case, these were skeletons from the Bronze Age that had been lying in the ground for thousands of years and could now help to unravel a crucial chapter in the turbulent European prehistory.
