Recently, Carrie Brown was taking a stroll through the rocky grounds of Orkney, Scotland when she stumbled upon a shocking discovery. After she and her partner noticed a peculiar rock sticking out of the dirt, they decided to dig a little deeper. What they uncovered, buried in a makeshift grave, laid a nearly complete skeleton of a 4,000-year-old child.
Archaeologists arrived onsite and spent the next several days carefully removing and preparing the bones for carbon dating. However, the mystery remains as to how the child died and if it was a boy or a girl.
Carrie believes winter storms are the reason why the child has since been uncovered. "There have been heavy storms here over the last few months. Things get covered up then uncovered. There is a fair chance there is more."
The child — who is believed to have been around 10 years old at the time of death — lay almost perfectly preserved in the sand. As the Daily Mail reports, the remains appear to predate one of Orkney's most important archaeological finds, uncovered on the same island after storms. In 1985, a local farmer found a collection of bones jutting out from an exposed sandbank. Later uncovered was a viking boat, an iron sword, a quiver containing eight arrows, a bone comb, and a set of gaming pieces found to date back to between 875 and 950 AD.
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32-year-old Carrie Brown found an almost complete skeleton of a 4,000-year-old child in Orkney, Scotland. The child is believed to have been between 10 and 12 years old at the time of death.
This incredible discovery is said to date back to the early Neolithic period. If that's the case, then the child would have been buried under the sand around the same time as the pyramids were being built in Egypt.
Archeologists arrived at the scene and spent the following days carefully excavating the skeleton. The remains were fully removed for carbon dating.
Here is a close-up shot of the child's skull. The mystery remains as to how the child died, and if this is the skeleton of a boy or girl.
Evidence of human occupation of the remote Orkney Isles appears at around the fourth millennium BC.
Could there be more skeletons to uncover? Possibly. The woman who made this shocking discovery believes winter storms are the reason why the child has now been uncovered.
