January
20
/ 2014
The Neolithic flint mines at Spiennes in Belgium, which cover more than 100 hectares, are the largest and earliest concentration of ancient mines in Europe and reflect an extremely high level of human technological development for the era. The people who dug the mines, some 6,000 years ago, are regarded as the oldest miners in the world, and the flint production they undertook occurred on an almost industrial scale with thousands of shafts and pits bored into the earth. The flint mines were added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 2000 for providing exceptional testimony to early human inventiveness and application, marking a major milestone in cultural and technological development, and providing an outstanding example of Neolithic mining of flint
