Free Republic

Lake Constance is a 63km-long central European lake... formed by the Rhine Glacier during the ice age and is a Zungenbecken or tongue basin lake.No evidence of Palaeolithic finds have been found in the vicinity, but archaeologists have previously discovered stone tools (microliths) and hunting camps, suggesting that Mesolithic hunter gatherers frequented the area without settling.Neolithic activity dates from the middle and late Neolithic, when the so-called pile dwelling and wetland settlements were established on Lake Überlingen (Lower Lake Constance), the Constance Hopper (a bay in Lake Constance) and on the Obersee (Upper Lake Constance).In 2015, a 20 km line...

Alice Weidel, the parliamentary group leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, is being formally investigated for violating campaign finance laws, the public prosecutor’s office in the southern city of Konstanz announced Tuesday. The AfD branch in Lake Constance is accused of receiving large sums of money from a Swiss company in the leadup to Germany’s 2017 general election. The vote saw the AfD become the largest opposition party in the Bundestag. The donations from abroad, paid in 18 tranches, reportedly amounted to more than €132,000 ($150,000). The prosecutor said the probe would target Weidel and three other...

This is what may have happened around 3,200 BC on the Lake of Mondsee (Lake Constance), resulting in the exodus of a metalworking community that lived there. When the site of this particular settlement was excavated in the 19th century, 595 stone axes and studded battleaxes, 451 arrowheads along with 12 copper axes and six daggers were discovered. These items represented highly sought-after status symbols, and would never have been left behind intentionally, unless of course the settlement had been abandoned as the result of a disaster. Well preserved foods such as charred hazelnuts, grain and pieces of apples were...

The people of the Mondsee Lake settlement were apparently relatively advanced within this cultural group. They had metallurgical skills, which were rare in Europe. They cleverly searched the mountains for copper deposits, melted the crude ore in clay ovens and made refined, shimmering red weapons out of the metal. In dugout canoes... they paddled along the region's river networks and sold their goods in areas of present-day Switzerland and to their relatives on Lake Constance. Even Otzi the Iceman had an axe, made of so-called Mondsee copper. At approximately 3200 B.C., says Binsteiner, the master blacksmiths were struck by a...