Artifacts from Heaven
“Thunderbolts of God”—from England to Japan and from Norway to Africa, that was how men once explained the stone axes and arrowheads which they found buried in the earth. The philosophers and scientists of the Renaissance dug a little deeper, and one of them came up with the verbose and remarkable suggestion that these stones were made “by an admixture of a certain exhalation of thunder and lightning with metallic matter, chiefly in dark clouds, which is coagulated by the circumfused moisture and conglutinated into a mass (like flour with water), and subsequently indurated by heat, like a brick.”[1] Some found a simpler explanation: these artifacts were iron tools petrified by time. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Michele Mercati, physician to Pope Clement VIII, saw the truth: “They have been broken off from hard flints by a violent blow, in the days before iron was employed for the follies of war; for the earliest men had only splinters of flint for knives.”[2] The English historian William Dugdale said much the same thing in Antiquities of Warwickshire. The theory was not generally accepted, however, until the Spaniards found American Indians making arrowheads and stone axes without the aid of thunder, lightning, or God.