On Wednesday, according to Todd Feathers in the Boston Globe, a New Hampshire scallop fisherman found something unusual in his catch.
“As Mike and Padi Anderson sold their catch of scallops on the dock Wednesday night in Rye Harbor, N.H., it was not just their shellfish that drew people’s interest. It was an object that looks like a 6-inch-long tooth that Mike had dredged up from the ocean earlier that day. …
“A crew member e-mailed a picture to a geologist from the University of New Hampshire, and a short while later the verdict came back: The tooth almost certainly belonged to a woolly mammoth. …
“The tooth weighs about 5 pounds and still has remnants of the root that connected it to the mammoth’s gums, Mike Anderson said in a phone interview from the deck of his boat, the F/V Rimrack. …
“The Andersons, who are married, will have to wait until William Clyde, the geologist, returns from a trip to South America before they can confirm that the tooth once belonged to a mammoth, but for them, the preliminary ruling is enough.”
Anderson seems excited to head back out for more archaeology. More.
Reminds me of John Hanson Mitchell and his book Ceremonial Time, which describes his attempts to sense and experience 15,000 years of life around his home in Massachusetts.
Finding a woolly mammoth tooth must really make one pause and think about big things.
Photograph of scallop fisherman Mike Anderson: Ionna Raptis/ Portsmouth Herald via AP
