The bronze artifacts' standardized appearance and weight points to their use as an early form of European currency. To qualify as money, lead author Maikel Kuijpers, an archaeologist at Leiden University, tells Live Science's Mindy Weisberger, ancient objects must have also been used in exchanges and produced in large quantities. (Bronze Age humans' development of metal casting streamlined the creation of duplicates; these "near-identical copies" may have "laid the mental groundwork for the invention of weighing tools and technologies" that followed, notes the Times.)