Tiny Bead, Found In Bulgaria, Is World's Oldest Gold

Every year, we discover something about our history on the planet through excavations around the world. In one such excavation, archaeologists found what may be the world’s oldest gold dating back to 4,500 B.C. The gold bead found was an eighth of an inch found in Bulgaria and it might be the oldest processed gold ever discovered in Europe and probably the world.

Reuters reported in 2016 that the bead predates the previous oldest gold object, the Varna Gold, which is a cache of gold found in a necropolis outside the Black Sea port of Varna. The Varna Gold cache was found between 1972 and 1991 and weighed about 5.8 kilograms. However, the new bead found in Bulgaria pushes the mystery back another 200 years.

Yavor Boyadzhiev, professor at the Bulgarian Academy of Science and in charge of the dig told Krasimiov, “I do not doubt that it is older than the Varna gold. It’s a really important discovery. It is a tiny piece of gold but big enough to find its place in history.”

The dig’s exact location was revealed to be a site called Tell Yunatsite near the modern town of Pazardzhik, much further inland than Varna. Boyadzhiev revealed that the settlement might be the first urban settlement in Europe as it looked to be a sophisticated town. He believes that the gold was probably manufactured at the site and used in a sort of religious worship. He also believes that it was a “highly cultured society” which has people who moved from Anatolia, today’s Turkey, around 6,000 B.C. The settlement was protected on all sides by a 9-foot-tall wall, but the town is speculated to have been destroyed by invaders around 4,100 B.C.

Tell Yunasite has been excavated since the 1970s and along with the Varna necropolis, it is a part of the emerging “lost” Balkan Copper-age civilization. Researchers believe the city to have had a well-developed trading network, industrialized metal production for the first time in history and may have even been the home to the creators of the world’s earliest known written scripts.