A homeowner in Boulder, Colo. is trying to learn more about the person who buried a stash of tools in his front yard. But that may be hard to figure out since the tools are about 13,000 years old.
An anthropologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder says there has been only a handful of finds of items as old as the tools -- ever.
In what is now a yard in Boulder, someone took dozens of stone tools for cutting and scraping and burried them in a hole, perhaps for safekeeping, 13,000 years ago.
Patrick Mahaffy was building a new waterfall and pond in yard when he discovered the tools.
"When they were doing the hand work right here they put the shovel in and it sounded completely different," Mahaffy said.
He says the landscapers uncovered a hidden cache of stone tools buried in the earth.
"It was all fairly tightly packed in a relatively small space you can think of it as being 18 by 18 or so."
There were 83 pieces all found hidden together.
"A single person, or two people, or something like that, had this stuff in their gear and dug a hole and picked these pieces and decided they were going to leave them there and come back next year, and then they didn't," said Douglas Bamforth, CU Anthropology Professor.
Bamforth says forensic tests showed proteins on the tools from four different animals: bears, sheep, horses and camels.
"Camels and horse became extinct right at the end of the Ice Age, which is right around 13,000 years ago," Bamforth said. "So the presence of that protein on that tells us they can't be younger than that."
"I think it's magical to be able to connect to a people that lived on our land 13,000 years ago," Mahaffy said.
Mahaffy says most of the artifacts will likely end up in a museum, but he plans to take a couple of the smaller pieces and re-bury them back in the same place where they were found.
Those stone tools were found under about 18 inches of earth near Chautauqua Park in an area which anthropologists say was never disturbed despite all the homes built in the neighborhood.
I want to bury the cock sucking piece of shit that broke into my garage last week and stole my tools!
Sort of like in the movie "Casino" when Joe Pesci and his brother get beaten almost to death with baseball bats and drug to a deep hole in a corn field and buried alive? (in their tighty whities)
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If you are in a horror movie, you make bad decisions, its what you do.
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