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The Aura river system was later developed, as M\u00f8lmen had feared. The cist now stands on the shore of the regulated Aursj\u00f8 reservoir, about 100 meters southeast of where the Aura river flows in, according to the 2024 committee review.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Seafood can skew radiocarbon ages<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Radiocarbon dating<\/a> measures carbon-14, a form of carbon that decays at a steady rate after death. Laboratories compare that measurement with reference records to get a range of calendar years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carbon in the ocean is older, on average, than carbon in the air. Eat enough fish and shellfish and some of that older carbon ends up in your bones. Their remains can look older than they really are<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “It is so rare that we almost became unsure about the dating,” said archaeologist Grete Irene Solvold of the NTNU University Museum. A marine diet, with lots of fish and seafood, can produce a wrong date, she explained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Norwegian labs know this problem well. A 2025 study in the journal Radiocarbon<\/a> looked at human bone from medieval sites in Trondheim. Marine food made up between 7 percent and 51 percent of individual diets there, and the authors used isotope values to correct the dates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To rule out a marine distortion, the team ran an isotope analysis on the Aursj\u00f8en bones. Isotopes are versions of the same chemical element. Their ratios differ from one food to another, so a skeleton keeps a record of diet in its bones<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “In this case, the analyses showed that the person in the grave ate mainly land-based food, meat and plants, and little seafood,” Solvold said. That meant the team could trust the date, and she added that they were “completely ecstatic.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The grave’s design offered a second check. Burials in stone-slab cists were common in southern Norway for only a few generations around 2000 B.C., Mj\u00e6rum noted. The laboratory age falls inside that window.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Around 2000 B.C., farming was taking firm hold in Norway. The person in the cist may have belonged to one of the first farming communities. Mj\u00e6rum said the find fits the idea that Stone Age farmers went into the mountains to hunt in the high country<\/a> or herd livestock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He also allowed that the dead may have lived mostly in the mountains, or simply been passing through. Kristoffer Dahle, an archaeologist at M\u00f8re og Romsdal County Council, suggested Eikesdalen. That inland valley has traces of crop farming from the same period, and the cist stood beside a watercourse that drained toward it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Solvold floated Sunndals\u00f8ra as another candidate, since several flint daggers linked to the new farming communities have turned up there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mj\u00e6rum leads the project, funded by Norway’s cultural heritage fee scheme. Partners include the NTNU University Museum, the S\u00e1mi Parliament and two county councils. A 2024 review by Norway’s committee on research on human remains<\/a> shows the plan: one sample of about 600 milligrams from one of the eight fragments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So few bones survived that the researchers can say only that the person was an adult. Their sex and age at death cannot be determined. Eikesdalen and Sunndals\u00f8ra remain suggestions that no test has tied to this individual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The 2024 review also classed Aursj\u00f8en as a “trapping-ground grave,” a type usually dated to the Iron Age. Similar graves exist in neighboring Lesja, Sunndal and Oppdal, but none has been investigated. Whether any of them is also older than assumed is unknown, and Stone Age graves with skeletal remains<\/a> are scarce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The findings were reported in Gemini, the research news site of NTNU and SINTEF, on September 18, 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Photo: Irene Skauen Sandodden \/ Oppland County Council<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A stone-slab Stone Age grave beside Lake Aursj\u00f8en, in Norway’s Molde municipality, dates to roughly 2000 B.C., about 4,000 years … <\/p>\nMeat and plants, little fish<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Early farmers in the high country<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Sex, age and birthplace stay open<\/h2>\n\n\n\n