Dung clue to Hannibal's Alpine crossing

[Orm]

ORIGINAL: warspite1

I am sorry but the more I read this story the more I think its just a load of crap.









Sorry. Someone had to say it...

Don't be sorry. [:D] But you would be amazed how much information you can get out of a pile of s**t. [;)]

[warspite1]

ORIGINAL: Orm

ORIGINAL: warspite1

I am sorry but the more I read this story the more I think its just a load of crap.









Sorry. Someone had to say it...

Don't be sorry. [:D] But you would be amazed how much information you can get out of a pile of s**t. [;)]

warspite1

That's what Mrs W says everytime I open my mouth......

[Orm]

[:D] [:D] [:D]

[&o]

It is refreshing to laugh in the morning. But it would have been better if I had not been drinking tea at the same time...



On the serious side I doubt that a Lady as Mrs W would use such language. Especially about a gentleman as warspite1.

[gradenko2k]

ORIGINAL: Fallschirmjager

So horses from that era could of never used that pass for any other reason [&:]

Sounds odd to find some carbon dated horse dung and declare it belonging to Hannibal's army.
There are only a handful of routes through the Alps. Could not any number of other possibilities exist as why horse dung would be there?
Were those not trading routes as well?
To haul good around in that era you needed horses.

"Disturbed layer of soil" and "mass of sediment" suggests a large volume of horse manure within a small and specific time-frame corresponding with Hannibal's traversal of the mountains.

Yes, horses could have been trotting to-and-fro that pass for hundreds of years, but only an intense period of activity, such as an entire army's worth of horses passing through in one go, would have generated a dung deposit of that size and volume.