What’s That Doing There?

 

Archaeologists spend a lot of time digging things up. I like, on occasion, to state the obvious! As the science of archaeology has evolved over the last century, existing techniques have improved, and new ones developed, that enable artefacts to be dated with reasonable accuracy. Dendrochronology can be used to date wood through tree ring analysis, radiocarbon dating can date an object containing organic material by measuring the amount of radioactive decay, and stratigraphy can date an object by the layer of rock or soil in which it was discovered. In addition, the style or type of an object can be used to date it by comparing it to other known examples,

 

Occasionally, however, an object turns up for which science can offer no logical explanation. In these cases, rather than being displayed and admired, they tend to be shut away in the storage facilities of museums and universities, in the academic equivalent of the ‘too hard basket’. Typically , these are objects or other evidence for human existence that appear to be in a contextually impossible place. In other words, they are found in a stratigraphical layer that pre-dates human existence. The Scottish born American biologist Ivan T Sanderson,  proposed the use of the collective term ‘Out of Place Artefacts (OOPArts)‘, and the phrase is today commonly used to define such items.

 

Whilst many objects do exist which present no apparent explanation, there are, of course, those artefacts that transpire to be the result of mistaken interpretation, or just a product of plain fabrication. As it is my intention to be as concise as possible, I shall not  provide details of objects where a satisfactory explanation has been established. What follows, therefore, are examples of OOPArts that continue to defy rational explanation.

 

Quarrymen working near Rutherford in Scotland in 1844, were stunned to find a piece of gold thread embedded in rock eight feet below ground level.

 

In 1851, a clumsy Mr Hiram de Witt, dropped a lump of gold bearing quartz that he had earlier purchased in California. To his surprise, when the rock broke apart, a 2 inch iron nail lay inside it. Apparently it was straight, had a perfect head, and was only slightly corroded. Another nail partly embedded in a piece of stone, was reported in 1845. The stone had come from a quarry in Kingoodie, Scotland.

 

On a cold day in 1891, Mrs Culp from Morrisonville, Illinois, was breaking coal into manageable sized lumps, when she spotted a chain in the middle of the pile. When she picked it up, she noticed that each end of the chain was firmly embedded in two different lumps of coal. The lumps fitted together perfectly, and had been a single piece of coal before Mrs Culp had broken it in two. Coal is formed over deep time, and is the result of dead plant matter being crushed and sealed underground. Whilst some coal is thought to be as old as 2 billion years, most is believed to have been laid down between 360 and 300 million years ago, when forests of ferns grew in vast tropical swamps.*

 

More quarrying, this time in Aix-en- Provence, France, revealed something even more astonishing.  Between 1786 and 1788, large quantities of limestone were required for a building project, and quarrying had reached almost fifty feet below ground level. At this level, workmen were flabbergasted to find the stumps of stone pillars. Digging further, they came upon petrified wooden tool handles and some coins. These items were found to be on top of a wooden board several feet long. The board was also petrified, indicating great age. The limestone at this level is 300 million years old!

 

In 1983, a shocked Professor Amanniyazov reported the discovery of, what appeared to be  human footprints, in Mesozoic strata. As Director of Turkmenistan’s Institute of Geology, he was in the process of uncovering over 1,500 dinosaur tracks, when to his utter disbelief, he he came across human like footprints mingled among those of the dinosaurs. The feet that left the prints, must have passed by at least 150 million years ago.

 

Astonishing Footprints

 

A  skeleton of a modern human, minus head and feet, resides in the British Museum. It is the skeleton of a woman of about 5 feet 2 inches in height. Nothing exceptional about that, except that it was found encased in  limestone, on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. Modern techniques have dated the rock in which she was found, to 28 million years. The limestone block containing ‘Guadeloupe Woman’ was put on display at the museum in 1812. Following the publication of Darwin’s ‘On The Origin of Species’,  it was removed to the basement, where it currently resides.

 

Guadeloupe Woman

 

So what does all this mean? Well we know that our earliest ancestors, Homo erectus, first put in an appearance in Africa, between 1 and 2 million years ago, and that we were not capable of making metallic objects at that early stage in our development. The earliest evidence of metalworking by humans is less than 10,000 years old. The earth itself is thought to be about 4.5 billion years old, and the earliest multicellular organisms appeared somewhere in the region of 1.7 billion years ago.

 

Given our understanding of the process of evolution, it does not seem possible that intelligent life could have developed earlier than our own ancestry, although we are dealing with an immense period of time. However, could an entire society really have risen and fallen without leaving a trace on the surface of the planet? Well, yes! If mankind disappeared from the earth tomorrow,  it is estimated that all trace of man made structures would have completely vanished within about 50,000 years. Most mainstream scientists, however, dismiss the possibility of another form of intelligent life having developed earlier than modern humankind. They also pour scorn on the suggestion that intelligent life from elsewhere in the universe may have colonised the planet for a period of time.

 

What then do we make of Out of Place Artefacts? It seems almost impossible that an earlier civilisation could have inhabited the earth, and yet there they are. Ultimately, your guess is as good as mine. Food for thought though, don’t you think?

Sources:

http://www.ancient-wisdom.com/ooparts.htm

* geology.about.com