The London Hammer – An Object Out of Time

What if one day we discovered an iPod in a previously unopened chamber of the Pyramid of Giza? Or a Snickers wrapper buried deep beneath Stonehenge? Will that discovery change the course of human history? Are we going to assume that it’s just a hoax and move on, or that we’re missing something and the discovery isn’t as important as we may think it is? What would our reaction to such a phenomenon be? Well, that’s actually not a hypothetical scenario, as we’ve already discovered an item so misplaced in time that there seems to be no logical explanation of its existence.

Enter the London Hammer. In 1934, a group of tourists was hiking near the town of London, Texas. One of them threw a stone, accidentally breaking it and finding something rather peculiar inside – a perfectly preserved hammer head, alongside part of the wooden handle. Finding the discovery to be interesting, the tourists brought the hammer to the attention of the local museum, who quickly deduced that since the hammer was embedded into the rock, then the rock must have formed around it in order to enclose it, and by that logic the hammer must be older than the rock. The kicker? The rock is over 400 million years old. If that doesn’t sound shocking to you, let me put it in perspective. The oldest known tools used by humans are 3.4 million years old. The very first species which would eventually evolve into homo sapiens lived between 7 and 5 million years ago. The dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, and that doesn’t even come close to the age of the hammer.

400 million years ago, the Earth was in the Devonian era, where the Earth was populated by giant mushrooms and most lifeforms still lived underwater. The only living creatures on the surface of the Earth were primitive anthropods who had previously evolved from ocean dwellers. And yet, somehow, somebody was using a hammer. Not only that, but the metal comprising the head of the hammer consists of 97% pure iron – a purity that can only be achieved with modern means. There is nothing to suggest that this is just a normal, everyday, store-bought hammer inserted into the rock, either – parts of it are still embedded into the 400 million year old rock. To say that this discovery is impossible would be a massive understatement, and yet it very much is. In a time period where no creature with anything resembling opposable thumbs lived, someone somewhere created a hammer using techniques that wouldn’t be discovered for another 400+ million years. Was that an ancient astronaut? A time traveler? Was the hammer somehow misplaced in time? Or is there a lot about history that we simply do not understand?