"It just speaks to how well some of these things can be preserved under the right conditions," he said. It has a powerful 10,000 rpm motor that can cut through the toughest materials with ease. While it may be just a piece of wood, to hold it in your hands is exciting, Murray said, adding that it may have survived because it was under the water line where oxygen couldn't break it down. The Dc-501 Ryobi Electric Carving Knife is a great tool for cutting and carving wood, plastic, rubber, and other soft and hard materials. "This is, for our collection, the oldest item we have," said Jeremy Murray, the historical society's curator of collections. The new artifact is also unique to the Carver County Historical Society, which is a registered repository for archaeological artifacts. Whitfeld said the museum wants to do an anatomical study to nail down the wood's species, and officials hope it can be displayed as part of a Minnesota natural history exhibit. The wood - which is probably black spruce or white cedar - is the only item Whitfield knows of in the Bell Museum collection that comes from that period, he said. It took a "sharp eye and a keen interest" to recognize it, he said. It's somewhat uncommon to come across such wood, Whitfeld said, and discovering it was "pure luck," since a person wouldn't know where to look. "It provides a date for when there was glacial activity in the area - that's an interesting, significant finding." "It was really cool to actually verify ," Whitfeld said. When the ice sheet melted, the glacier deposited the items it had collected, he said, including the wood. "I was excited - that's something I've always hoped I would find, or I would see." There is a museum in Salisbury Maryland and a great competition in their mane. The Ward Brothers - 20 Century decoy carvers who lived in Maryland on the Chesapeake Bay. The pair both have an interest in geology and history and suspected the wood, which had remained solid, "was from the glacial period," Gary Kassen said. Allen Houser - 20th century Native American sculptor who did some beautiful wood carvings as well as many bronzes. Joel Kassen carefully scooped out the relic and brought it to his brother's Chanhassen home. He found that unusual, since he was digging about 18 feet underground - deeper than anyone had dug in recent centuries and far below where a log would typically hide, said his brother, Gary Kassen. Joel Kassen was installing new sewer lines in a Carver farm field in June when he noticed his excavator was hitting wood. The smaller one will stay at the University of Minnesota's Bell Museum of natural history. The wood split into pieces during excavation - the larger of two chunks, which is 2 feet long and a few inches in diameter, found a home last week at the Carver County Historical Society as the oldest item in its collection. The uncommon find, which survived the last Ice Age, offers a window into a time when parts of Minnesota were covered in glaciers. A Goodhue, Minn., man stumbled upon wood buried deep in the ground while doing excavation work in Carver County last summer, later discovering the artifacts were 14,000 years old.
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