Finder Henk Paas hopes that he has earned a piece of cake because he was the first to find an ‘exit’. “It’s a bit miraculous,” he laughs. It is not the search technique and Paas no longer bends over every stone. “It’s luck and experience. Fate also determines a lot, it’s just what you get.”
The vast majority of stones are thrown back onto the ground in this way. Although not every pebble is valuable, splashing and rooting in the sand is especially fun. With such a large group, the search is almost never carried out at the same time; normally the amateur archaeologists often do it alone. “We can pick up a lot of stones this way. The chance that you will find something only increases,” says Niekus.
If microscopic examination shows that the stones are indeed more than 50,000 years old, they will then be taken to the archaeological depot in Nuis. According to the archaeologist, traces of Neanderthals are quite scarce.
Niekus: “We discovered a site years ago near Norg. That is the largest Neanderthal site in the Northern Netherlands. There is also another site nearby, where some Neanderthals were also found in the early 1970s.”