REMAINS of a long dead house mouse have been found in the wreck of a Bronze Age royal ship. That makes it the earliest rodent stowaway ever recorded, and proof of how house mice spread around the world.
Archaeologist Thomas Cucchi of the University of Durham, UK, identified a fragment of a mouse jaw in sediment from a ship that sank 3500 years ago off the coast of Turkey.
The cargo of ebony, ivory, silver and gold – including a gold scarab with the name of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti – indicates it was a royal vessel. Because the cargo…
