http://www.foxnews.com/science...ian-mountaintop.html



A rare copper arrowhead discovered on a remote Canadian mountaint is almost 900 years old, archaeologists have confirmed.

The arrowhead, which is at the tip of a perfectly preserved antler arrow, was found sticking out of an ice patch in Canada’s Yukon Territory. The find, which was made in 2016 on an unnamed mountain, surprised experts.

“It was found near the top of a snow-capped mountain in South West Yukon,” Yukon Archaeologist Greg Hare told Fox News. “It was an incredible discovery, we really didn’t intend to be on that [ice] patch on that day."

Viking technology.

quote:

Originally posted by ScreamingCockatoo:
Viking technology.

Yep! And a new wrinkle in history.

It's amazing how much we don't know about ourselves. That is incredible. Imagine finding that at random in the middle of "nowhere".

You could put your eye out with that thing

I guess we'll have to rethink our assumptions about the use of metal in the Americas.

quote:

Originally posted by 4x5:
I guess we'll have to rethink our assumptions about the use of metal in the Americas.

Imagine a metal bow....

Very cool find.

I was kind of confused by the article on that I saw online - it kept referring to the copper head and an 11-inch (jagged!) section of antler as an "arrow". Some of the Indians up north have used spears with what I guess you'd call separable war heads. The idea was that you'd tie a line to the head both so that both it and whatever was speared could be recovered. I kinda wonder if that's what that is.

Copper was mined in North America 6-9,000 years ago
https://www.mpm.edu/research-c...h/old-copper-culture

There's been some fantasy that the Copper age, then the Bronze Age, was driven by Europeans mining American copper.

My thought is this is a fore shaft that would mount an on a wood shaft. I did see one remark that it took two weeks to make
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...st-nations-1.4485895

I talked to my Viking buddy. He said they didn't go that far west and they were into bronze at the time.

quote:

Originally posted by EasyFire:

quote:

Originally posted by ScreamingCockatoo:
Viking technology.

Yep! And a new wrinkle in history.

Vikings roamed further than originally thought. It alsocould have been the result of trade. At any rate an interesting find.

With the barbs on the antler (and assuming that part of the description is correct), it looks like a fishing spear to me.

Although no one talks about it in this era of all cultures were equal except for those in Europe which were, of course, morally—if not technologically—inferior, prior to 1492 people in the Americas were literally in the stone age. This may have been an example of the first tiny steps toward working with metal other than gold in the south for ornamental purposes, but it couldn’t have been very widespread.

Interesting it wasn't blind luck but an active project:

Archaeologists have recovered about 250 objects from melting ice patches in Southern Yukon, almost all of which have been bows and arrows or throwing darts.

“The advantage of the ice patch project is that most of what we’re finding has an organic element that lets us radiocarbon date it,”

That's pretty damn cool no matter how it gets explained.

From this 900 years ago, to today's nuclear weapons is an amazing leap in technology.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Icabod:
Copper was mined in North America 6-9,000 years ago
https://www.mpm.edu/research-c...h/old-copper-culture[QUOTE]

Based on the link from Icabod, the mystery is not that it exists, but how it ended up in the Yukon.

"These results provided conclusive evidence that aboriginal use of Great Lakes copper began during Middle Archaic times, circa 4,000 B.C"

That may not be much of a mystery. There have been finds up in the Four Corners Area (where UT, CO, NM and AZ meet, for those who don't know it) of chocolate from Mexico, bird feathers from Guatemala and pipes made of stone from Minnessota. The Mississippi was a huge trade route, centered at different times on Cahokia (southern IL/MO border) and the Caddo settlements in north Louisiana. If something like flint could travel hundreds of miles, something like copper might travel thousands.

Basically there were trade networks across the continent long before the honkies showed up.

I read the article. I'm not up on when metals started to get used.

But other than finding a very old copper arrow head, is there anything else significant to the story? Does it up end any historical timelines or point to the idea that it must have been aliens?

No, the big deal is that Indians weren't supposed to have used worked metal for weapons (especially something semi-disposable like spear heads, harpoon heads or arrowheads) before Europeans came around. So now the question is whether they were mining, smelting and working copper earlier than we knew or whether some Euros might have showed up in the Americas earlier than we knew.