When Most People Find They Have A Fake,

it is a time of disappointment,

but for some scientists it was a time for joy, they were studying ancient jewelry found in southern Europe and assumed that six beads were made of amber, the gemstone formed from naturally-hardened tree sap, that were thought to be the real deal, have now discovered that they are manufactured fakes, archaeologist Carlos Odriozola tells the story,

“Indeed, these beads resemble amber so well that we got first confused when [the analysis] did not match an amber pattern,” Odriozola said. “At that moment, we got very excited about the possibility of having found an amber fake.”

Odriozola and colleagues unearthed amber-looking beads from two burial sites in Spain. Two beads were found in an archaeological site near Seville in southern Spain called La Molina that dates to the third millennium B.C. Four other beads came from Cova del Gegant near Barcelona and date to the second millennium B.C. The beads looked so much like the real thing that the researchers didn’t notice they were fake until a chemical analysis revealed differently, as it happens real amber jewelry is rare, manufactured amber intended to pass as the real thing can tell us a lot about the culture that produced it, for the full story have a look here about the discovery of the counterfeit amber at Discover magazine, the fake market has come on since then, apparently you can now buy genuine copies of most things! photograph Odriozola et al., 2019).