Ancient Beetles

A farmer, in East Anglia in 1970, dug up a piece of old wood in one of his boggy fields. When he was splitting it for the fire, he was horrified to find some large, dead beetes entombed in the bored wood. Worried that his farm could be infested with a new beetle pest, he sent the wood (plus beetles) to the Natural History Museum in London, where the insects were identified as Oak capricorn beetles. The farmer was assured he would not have an infestation, as the beetles were non-native, being usually found in Southern France and Hungary. More than 40 years later, accurate dating technology was applied to the beetles (https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/jan/28/east-anglian-beetles-shed-light-on-uk-climate-4000-years-ago). Remarkably, the beetle carcasses were found to be 3800 years old! The scientists suggest (they might well be right) this finding tells us something about the climate (much hotter?) in that part of England almost 4000 years ago. There is, of course, another possibility. The wood could have come from a human artefact (a ship?) made in southern Europe, at the time the pharoahs were building the pyramids.