14 DAY TRIAL // A family of rabbits living in western Cornwall, England have high chances to go down in history as some of the greatest archaeologists ever to walk the face of the Earth.
This is because this group of hoppers has recently dug up a treasure that researchers estimate stayed hidden in the underground for about 8,000 years.
The treasure in question was unearthed by rabbits living in the proximity of Land's End, a headland and small settlement in said part of the United Kingdom.
According to Mirror, the rodents uncovered this so-called gold mine while digging new burrows for themselves.
What the animals have thus far pulled from the underground is not a treasure in the sense that it is a huge pile of gold and precious stones, the same source details.
On the contrary, this so-called gold mine is merely a collection of artifacts, i.e. arrowheads and flint tools, dating back to the Stone Age.
Still, the discovery is equally valuable to archaeologists, who are now making plans to carry out further excavations and hope to eventually unearth a Stone Age cemetery, Bronze Age burial mounds, and an Iron Age hill fort in the region.
“It seems important people have been buried here for thousands of years – probably because of the stunning views. It’s a million-to-one chance rabbits should make such an astounding find,” researcher Dean Paton said in a statement.
“They dug two little burrows right next to each other and all these-treasures were thrown out of the earth. No one knows the scale of it but it’s a gold-mine. A family of rabbits have just rewritten the history books,” he went on to add.
This newly discovered archaeological site is estimated to cover a surface of about 150 acres (about 60.7 hectares).
Archaeologists expect that it will take about 2 years to excavate it, and say that, although some of the artifacts have been unearthed by the family of rabbits, many other relics are surely still in the underground.