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Out-of-Place Artifacts (London Hammer / Coso)

What do you think about this?

Sometimes a single object refuses to fit the timeline we have built for it. Collectors call them out of place artifacts, things that turn up where, by every rule we know, they should not exist.

Take the London Hammer. In 1936, near London, Texas, a couple walking a creek bed found a chunk of rock with a piece of wood and iron poking out of it. Cracked open, it held an iron hammerhead on a wooden handle, the stone seemingly formed around it. The rock it sat in was far older than any blacksmith. Skeptics say the hammer itself is maybe a century or two old, and that minerals in the hard local water cemented ordinary rock around it quickly, no mystery required.

Then there is the Coso artifact, found in California in 1961 inside what looked like a geode. Sliced open, it revealed a metal core wrapped in ceramic, and believers claimed it was hundreds of thousands of years old. A closer look showed something stranger and more ordinary, a 1920s spark plug, its casing crusted over with rust and clay.

The honest answer is that most of these objects, examined carefully, turn out to have simple explanations. And yet they keep surfacing, and the questions keep coming.

Makes you wonder how we would even recognize a truly out of place object if we found one, when our first instinct is always to explain it away.

Genuine anomalies, or just nature and rust playing tricks on us? What do you think these objects really are?

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