Messed up Archaeology

I find nothing more humorous than the outlandish theories people come up with concerning artifacts of prior civilizations.  I hold to the idea that people today are exactly the same as people any number of yesterdays ago.  Same needs, activities, desires to understand their surroundings, etc.  But, today's group of educated believe that the obvious explanation of an anomaly can not be good enough - no we must look to the unprovable ...  If nothing else just lie and make something up!  You really do have to be careful of what can be found in print - much less on the internet!  Question - question -question!

I was cruising through my local junk store and seeing what kind of back issues of magazines they had.  There, I found three copies of, "Boundary Waters" magazine.  Hmmm, now I been to a place call Boundary Waters back in high school and wondered if it was the same place ....  So, I flipped open the first copy and there was an article about something I had actually done - and OMGosh!, they boy, were out in left field as to what had happened!

The article talked about the "well known" dolmen situated above a lake in the remote Quetico Provencal Park of Ontario in Canada.  Dolmens are considered to be pre-historic graves from the stone age of Europe - 7,000 BC +/-.  Mind you, there has never been ANY bones or funerary artifacts ever found associate with one.  And here in Ontario, in the middle of nowhere - sits one!  How could it have gotten here?  What European had traveled the distant past to have created this?  And on the article goes into the limits of imagination ...

It was 1972 and I had been working hard for three years to save up money to go to Hudson's Bay, but as plans firmed up, the 12 of us decided to on a canoeing trip from Ely, Minnesota and see how far we could paddle canoes north.  Sounded great to me!

It has been so many years I can not remember how far we did make it.  I know that once back at Ely, the daily spotter planes had verified we had made the longest canoe trip since the 17th century!  So, lots of parades, free food and we were treated as returning heroes, completely unexpected by us.

But back to that dolmen ...

On our way home, camped on an island and rested our aching muscles.  Usually we would fish for dinner, hunt berries and roots - anything to feed our starving stomachs - yeah, we miscalculated food so badly we had run out of food on day 8 of 30!  eepha!

Our only other activity was to throw rocks in the water, the bigger the splash the better!  So, when we found a great launching pad, with a huge rock laying behind it - well, you have to get that rock to fly off the island into the water!  It was simple to get the rock into launch position using the idea of the lever and block idea:

Lift one edge of the rock, brace it with a rock; lift another edge, brace it; repeat until the rock can be easily rolled down onto the launch point.

Then, start all over again, lifting the rock until it was ready to be easily pushed over and down into the water for a world class splash!

But, the tree limbs we were using as our levers, broke and we were now stuck.  We tried to lift the rock and flip it but nope it was more than 12 teenagers could topple!

So, we went back to fishing ...

And forty years later, our rock still sits, now a piece of Ontario's imaginary history ...