Sunday, January 19, 2014

Wait, they found what?

They what? They found a second Stonehenge in 40 ft. of water in Lake Michigan?  That’s what Mark Holley a professor of underwater Archaeology  at Northwestern Michigan College thinks he found in Lake Michigan’s Traverse Bay. In 2007 archeologists were using special sonar to look for a series of pre-civil war boats that were sunk in the area.  They found the boats as well as a pier, an old buggy and some junk cars.  The archeologists something more  interesting than they bargained for  on the bottom. They found a series of  upright stones arranged in a Stonehenge-like manner. The sonar also picked up a number of other rock patterns including a large rock that appears to have  prehistoric carving of a mastodon on it. Divers were sent down to investigate and photograph.

The boulder with the carving is  3 .5 to 4 ft. high and 5 ft. long.  Photos show a surface with numerous fissures, some may be natural while others are of human origin.  Viewed together,  they look like the outlines of a mastodon-like back, hump ,head ,trunk, tusk, ear and legs.  “We couldn’t believe what we were looking at” Said Greg MacMaster, president of the underwater preserve council. Specialists that have been shown pictures of the  boulder  with the markings want more evidence before they confirm that its an ancient petroglyph. The experts want to actually see it, unfortunately experts in petroglyphs generally don’t dive so that’s a bit of a problem.  If this is real it could be as much as 10000 years old. It could prove that both humans and mastodons roamed the upper Midwest  at that time.  Maybe we need to get petroglyph experts into a dive class and the take them on a road trip to dive the boulder with the carving. What’s next pyramids in Lake Winnebago?


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