Photo by Glenn Asakawa, University of Colorado
Here’s a cool story: Guy digging around in his backyard makes a random discovery that could turn out to be substantially important:
Patrick Mahaffy was just getting a little routine landscaping done outside his Boulder home — the work crew was shaping a small drainage ditch — when a shovel hit stone.
The “chink” of the impact sounded odd, so the crew poked around, and just 18 inches beneath the soil surface they made an extraordinary find: 83 stone tools left in a cache 13,000 years ago by people who used the sharpened rocks to butcher ice-age camels and horses.
It sure made University of Colorado anthropology professor Douglas Bamforth pretty excited: “This is the only time in my career that this is ever going to happen to me,” he said. “To have something like this appear — to have it be what it turns out to be — it’s quite spectacular.”
There’s more info in this story:
The artifacts were buried in a coarse, sandy sediment overlain by dark, clay-like soil and appear to have been cached on the edge of an ancient stream.
“It looks like someone gathered together some of their most spectacular tools and other ordinary scraps of potentially useful material and stuck them all into a small hole in the ground, fully expecting to come back at a later date and retrieve them,” Bamforth said.
One of the tools, a stunning, oval-shaped bifacial knife that had been sharpened all the way around, is almost exactly the same shape, size and width of an obsidian knife found in a Clovis cache known as the Fenn Cache from south of Yellowstone National Park, said Bamforth. “Except for the raw material, they are almost identical,” he said. “I wouldn’t stake my reputation on it, but I could almost imagine the same person making both tools.”
“There is a magic to these artifacts,” said Mahaffy, the landowner. “One of the things you don’t get from just looking at them is how incredible they feel in your hand –they are almost ergonomically perfect and you can feel how they were used. It is a wonderful connection to the people who shared this same land a long, long time ago.”
The Clovis-era people, to put the age of this in perspective, would have hunted things like mammoths, as well as camels — when camels lived in North America. For the Manitobans in the mix: the Clovis era ended when Lake Agassiz broke through its shoreline and suddenly drained a bunch of freshwater into the Atlantic, cooling the climate dramatically (like 15 degrees C average).
Amazing to think that evidence of this was just buried in a guy’s back yard. I’m going digging this spring!
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