We always wonder why the person who hid the money failed to retrieve it. Did they become senile and forget about the money? Did they fall dead while waiting for the right moment to spend their hoard? We almost never know.
I was reminded of cases such as these recently when reading of landscapers in Boulder, Colorado who were digging in a man’s yard when they struck a rock. They pulled up the rock and thought it appeared that it had been shaped. They dug up 82 more rocks from the same hole and each too appeared to have been chipped and flaked into deliberate shapes.
The man contacted a university, they sent experts to look at his rocks, and eventually they determined that the rocks had indeed been shaped by the hand of man. They had lain in the earth for 13,000 years. They had been buried together, probably wrapped in the hide of an animal. They had never been dug up until discovered by the suburban landscapers doing yard work.
Stories like this amaze me. Clovis man once roamed precisely where an accountant lives on a cul-de-sac in a comfortable neighborhood? When we play basketball in the driveway, we’re dribbling the ball on the same land where an extended family of prehistoric nomads once eked out a stark and tenuous existence?
I have been to Colorado a few times and even now, after our planet has warmed up a bit, it’s clearly a pretty cold place, at least in the winter. And from what I have read, it was even colder 13,000 years ago. When landscapers digging a hole to make an artificial fish pond dig up stone-age tools that are several thousand years old, I can’t help but wonder what was going in the ancient cold land that caused some person to bury them. Is it possible that the motivation could have been similar to the reasons that other later people secreted wads of cash behind their medicine cabinets?
13,000 is a really long time in the history of man. 500 generations of men have lived since that time. It boggles the mind, 500 generations, when you consider the fact that people we consider the ancients, such as the Romans, lived “only” 80-100 generations ago. 500 generations ago nobody wrote or read anything, nobody planted anything, nobody raised livestock. Nobody owned anything made of metal. These things that we consider commonplace weren’t absent only in Colorado. They existed nowhere on Earth. People survived under those conditions by doing two things. They found things they could eat, such as nuts, berries, grubs, mushrooms, bark, insects, snails. And they hunted down larger things such as horses, mammoths, bison and such. If they were going to eat something they either had to find it, or they had to follow it and kill it.
Now to me, that sounds like a pretty tough life. And to live that way, you would have to be extremely knowledgeable. You would have to know which grasses and mushrooms were safe to eat, where you could find them in the spring, where you could find them in the winter. You would have to know when the bison would be numerous, where they were going, what things comforted or spooked them. You would have to know how to make things that would help you kill the bison, you would have to know how to use those weapons. You would have to know where the passes were that would let you cross mountains in your search for food, you would have to know where the fords were that would let you cross the rivers.
And if all that is isn’t tough enough, you would have to eat, sleep, poop, cook, walk, talk, have sex, make weapons, make scrapers and awls, make shelter, scrape hides, dry sinew, and make clothes in bone-chilling cold for a good part of the year. And if you made any major mistakes, such as setting up camp too high in the mountains, or setting up camp too low where the drifts would engulf your people, or failing to intercept the right herds, or failing to set aside enough dried meat to get through the winter, then everybody you cared about would die. Including you.
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