Cool Discovery in Vero Beach, Florida

Sometimes a story shows up on the inside pages of my newspaper that strikes me as big news, even though it didn't make the front page or even the television broadcast. In this case it isn't really important news -- just interesting, even fascinating.

A man in Vero Beach, Florida, who is unemployed due to epilepsy, asked a property owner a few years ago if he could look on his land for fossils. The guy agreed, and he found some bones there, which he took home to clean up and study. He threw them under the sink in his mobile home. A few months ago, he pulled out one of the bones, a piece of ivory from a wooly mammoth, and while cleaning it up realized someone had etched a design into it. It was a carving of a mastadon.

He knew that what he had found had some value and considered selling it at a flea market, but decided to take it to a more sophisticated fossil hunting friend, who was extremely enthusiastic about the find. He convinced him to take the bone to the Univesty of Florida to have it authenticated. Scientists there agreed to 'authenticate' the find because they were almost postitive it was a fake. They had long ago decided that humans and mastadons did not co-exist in Florida. All of the elephants had died out before man arrived, they thought.

But they did all of their tests on the bone and concluded it was real and that it had been carved thousands of years ago -- before the pyramids were built in Egypt, before Stonehenge, before the Everglades were the Everglades. It's the oldest artwork anywhere in the world with the possible exception of the cave art in France. They estimate that the carving was made over 13,000 years ago, and they think that the man or woman who carved it must have been looking at a mastadon at the time because it's a very good likeness.



The ivory carving of the mastadon is priceless.

Now scientists are begging the man who found it to donate it to the Smithsonian or some other museum so that it can be put on display. They don't want it to fall into a private collection never to be seen again. But the man can't afford to be philanthropic to this extreme (he's unemployed and barely subsisting), so he is putting it up for auction. He will entertain bids of at least $1 million.

I liked this story because it's about buried treasure, the enduring value of art, and how something of great value might be under the sink.