600 Million-Year-Old Mystery: Unearthing a Metal Vase from the Precambrian Era
An article that appeared in the Scientific American magazine on June 5, 1852 reported the discovery of a "curious and unknown vase that jumped out of solid stone, five meters below the surface". Stratigraphic investigations revealed that the level of the ground where the vase was discovered corresponded to the Precambrian era, about 500 million years ago.
The archives of many magazines from the last century contain articles reporting discoveries of objects that should not exist. One of them concerns the discovery of an enigmatic metal vase discovered in 1852 after dynamiting a rock quarry in Dorchester, Massachusetts.
More than 150 years later, many questions raised by the discovery are still the subject of heated discussions, between those who affirm the authenticity of the find and those who say that it is instead a modern artefact that ended up by chance among the rubble of the explosion.
The fact is that the discovery was reported in an article published in the June 5, 1852 edition of the Scientific American magazine entitled "A relic of a lost time", which reads as follows:
"A few days ago, a powerful blast was made in the rock at Meeting House Hill, Dorchester. The explosion took out a gigantic mass of rock, with some boulders weighing several tons and fragments scattered in all directions. Among these, a metal object broken in two by the explosion was identified. By joining the parts together, a bell-shaped vase emerges, approximately 18 cm high and with a base with a diameter of approximately 15 cm".
Many scholars believe that the object did not come from inside the rock, but that it was a more recent object that accidentally ended up in the ground and was judged, in good faith, as if coming from the heart of the rock formation. Actually the object resembles recent artifacts.
However, reading the Scientific American article, the witnesses do not seem to have any doubts about the provenance of the object in question. In fact, we read:
"This curious and unknown vessel jumped out of the solid stone, fifteen feet below the surface. There is no doubt that this curious object came out of the rock."
The article describes the object as an ancient metal vase, similar in color to zinc and with several silver parts. To the side there are six floral figures, splendidly inlaid with silver, the result of the exquisite skill of an ancient craftsman. When the article was being written, the item was in the possession of a certain Mr. John Kettell.
The article reports the opinion of Dr. JCV Smith, who is said to have examined hundreds of household utensils in his travels in the East, but never observed anything like the Dorchester artifact.
The dating of the object was determined based on available geological information about the Dorchester area. According to a recent geological map of the Boston (Dorchester) area released by the US Geological Survey, the stone defined as the Roxbury conglomerate was formed in the Precambrian era, over 600 million years.
At that time, the conditions were being created for what was later defined as the "Cambrian explosion", the paleontological event consisting in the birth in a very short time on a geological scale of the majority of complex animals, which occurred approximately 530 million years ago, in the Cambrian, accompanied by the differentiation of other groups.
Therefore, 600 million years ago, the most advanced form of life on planet earth was represented by simple algae floating in the sea. How is it possible that the Dorchester Jar indicates the presence of metal art work in North America over 600 million years ago? Yet, somehow this beautiful and enigmatic work of art ended up buried somehow among these ancient rocks.
The Scientific American article, citing the legend, describes the artifact as a “metal vessel perhaps forged by Tubal Cain, the first inhabitant of Dorchester,” a descendant of the biblical figure Cain. Is this a subtle way by the author of the article to wittily indicate the extreme antiquity of the object?
Certainly, many ooparts look like objects similar to those produced in the modern age. Some say that it is actually because they are recent objects that seem to come from ancient times due to a series of fortuitous events. Others think that human civilization has flourished and then wiped out multiple times throughout Earth's history, with extremely advanced cultures arising from time to time!
