Millennia-old canoe discovered in museum hallway

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Why donā€™t you purify yourself in th water of Lake Minnetonka?

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Yes. That.

[nitpick=obligatory]If itā€™s 1000 years old, itā€™s ā€œmillenium-old,ā€ not ā€œmillenia.ā€[/nitpick]

Pretty cool, though! Wonder if itā€™s still watertight. Probably not if it managed to get underneath a lake.

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Yes, that should millennium, not millennia. Instant disappointment, even though itā€™s an interesting find.

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I canā€™t parse that headline. If it was in a hallway in a museum, then it must have been discovered already. Unless the test that updated its age was conducted in that same hallway, thereā€™s no reason to mention the hallway at all. Oh, except for the cutesy-sounding humor. I hate it when legitimate science headlines arenā€™t considered interesting enough on their own merits. Science fetish is not science.

There are tons of interesting archaeological and paleontological discoveries that were found, catalogued, and then forgotten in various storerooms, hallways, etc. Sometimes they are rediscovered and found to be very significant discoveries that have been ignored for a long time. This is one of those stories and this is why the ā€œmuseum hallwayā€ part is a significant part of the story.

Finding cool stuff in forgotten storage rooms is, to me, an interesting part of science. Itā€™s legitimate to report on it Iā€™m pretty sure.

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Iā€™ve got an old inflatable raft taking up space in my garage if anyone wants to carbon-date it.

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The hallway was an important trade route for the Mesoamerican Mound Builders, who traveled by water from the museum gift shop ATM to the vending machines in the break room.

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This reminds me of the ā€œMy Favorite Museum Exhibitā€ series of posts, which remains one of my favorite things ever on BoingBoing, and thatā€™s setting the bar pretty high.

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Thereā€™s no way Iā€™m going to date your old raft. What is this, sloopy seconds?

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Something something little man in the boat.

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Thatā€™s a really good point. Maybe some day weā€™ll have to add a caveat to ā€˜newā€™ discoveries, the same way we say (by white men) to ā€œnewā€ discoveries today. It might prove more fruitful to mount an expedition into old archives than into the field.

I wouldnā€™t carbon date your raft with someone elseā€™s accelerator mass spectrometer.

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This classic bit from Extreme Elimination Challenge seems to be missing a key piece of dialogueā€¦

I have just finished the 3rd installment of, " Your Inner Fish ".

http://www.pbs.org/your-inner-fish/about/neil-shubin/"
Hosted by Neil Shubin.
Paleontologist and evolutionary biologist.
University of Chicago.
Not one word about a landmark series.

This is " Deep Time for Dummies ".
PAID BY YOUR TAX DOLLARS.

So watch this series and learn how a fish, gave us all, opposable thumbs.

Neil Shubin has made 400,000 Million years of rocks ā€œfunā€.

  1. WTF?
  2. Hardly any of my tax dollars (as compared, to say, Military Brass Bands), and mostly, I think by FjohĆ¼rs Lykkewe

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