Kingoodie hammer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Kingoodie hammer refers to an iron nail found in a block of stone in 1844 in the Kingoodie Quarry in Scotland. Sir David Brewster discovered the nail embedded in a Cretaceous block from the Mesozoic era. In 1985, Dr. A. W. Medd of the British Geological Survey stated that the sandstone bed from which the nail supposedly derives is Lower Old Red Sandstone (Devonian, between 360 and 408 million years old).
Because this would place the artifact hundreds of millions of years before humans evolved on the planet, the nail is considered to be an Out of Place artifact.
Metallic iron reacts with oxygen in the natural environment over geologically short periods of time. Iron artifacts found in the archaeological record are not found in a pristine state and often have reacted to form just a rust coloured stain in the earth. The theory has yet to put forward a mechanism to prevent the oxidation of this iron nail over 400 million years.
[edit] References
- Brewster, Sir David (1844). Report of Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Vol. 14.
- Charroux, Robert (1970), One Hundred Thousand Years of Man's Unknown History (translated from the French by Lowell Bair). Berkley Publ. Corp., p. 181.
