ShareThisPatrick Mahaffy was just getting a little routine landscaping done outside his home at the foot of Flagstaff Mountain -- a work crew was shaping a small drainage ditch -- when a shovel hit stone.
The "chink" of the impact sounded odd, so the crew poked around, and just 18 inches beneath the soil surface they made an extraordinary find: 83 stone tools left in a cache 13,000 years ago by people who used the sharpened rocks to butcher ice-age camels.
Of course, the biochemical evidence that the tools were used for prehistoric camel slaughter -- along with the discovery of protein residue from sheep, bear and horses -- didn't come until later, when curiosity drove Mahaffy, who guessed the tools were just a few hundred years old, to call the University of Colorado.
His call was routed to anthropologist Douglas Bamforth, who tends to field questions from locals who have found something odd in the dirt.
"Sometimes they're interesting things, and sometimes they're just cool rocks," said Bamforth, who studies the culture and tools of Paleoindians, who lived in the Boulder area at the end of the last ice age.
But a good anthropologist leaves no rock unturned, so to speak, and so he headed out to Mahaffy's front yard the next day, discovering among the artifacts the first tool found in North America that is known to have been used on the hide of a prehistoric camel.
"This is the only time in my career that this is ever going to happen to me," Bamforth said. "To have something like this appear -- to have it be what it turns out to be -- it's quite spectacular."
Bamforth sent the stash of tools, which were left neatly in a shoe-box-sized hole by people who probably intended to return for them later, to Robert Yohe at California State University in Bakersfield for chemical analysis. The proteins on the artifacts, which were tested three times to ensure accuracy, were compared against the known biological makeup of mammalian families.
"I was somewhat surprised to find mammal protein residues on these tools, in part because we initially suspected that the Mahaffy Cache might be ritualistic rather than utilitarian," Yohe said in a news release.
The camel proteins also helped date the tools because, as Bamforth points out, we haven't had camels on the Front Range for quite some time.
"We know (13,000 years ago) there were elephants and camels and horses and ground sloths," he said, "animals you'd be really surprised to see in downtown Boulder."
At that time, when the receding glaciers of the last ice age would have been prominent along the foothills of northern Colorado, all kinds of large mammals roamed North America, including woolly mammoths, dire wolves, short-faced bears, saber-toothed cats and woolly rhinos.
Eagle-eyed Boulder County hikers, gardeners and wanderers have found evidence of some of these animals and the people who hunted them in the area before, Bamforth said. But the tools found recently in Boulder are from only one of two caches from the Clovis era ever discovered in North America. The other was found in Washington state.
Artifacts found on private property belong to the land owner, Bamforth said, except in some cases involving human remains. Mahaffy said the tools found on his property will likely wind up in a museum, except for a few smaller pieces, which will be reburied where they were found.
Bamforth said he worries some land owners may not report discoveries of artifacts, fearing that any projects they're working on could be stopped, but in reality, archaeologists have no such power.
"We can learn a lot from them -- it's a huge value to archaeology," Bamforth said. "It helps us to tell a piece of history. We really appreciate it when people are willing to share these kinds of things."
So Bamforth tries to return all the phone calls he gets from inquiring locals. One never knows when the next prehistoric camel-butchering knife might be found. In fact, he recently got an intriguing call from a person outside of southeast Denver.
"They had found a ring-shaped mound," he said. "I'd really like to call them back, if only I hadn't lost their number. If they read the article, I hope they give me a call."
(Laura Snider writes for the Daily Camera in Boulder, Co.)
