When saw cuts into 6,000-year-old wood
Tim Evans
The Indianapolis Star
Louisville Courier-Journal
__________________
Edinburgh, Indianapolis (US):
To the untrained eye, the two giant logs didn't look much different from the thousands of others waiting to be turned into veneer at the Amos-Hill Associates mill.
But scientific estimates that the oak logs may be 6,000 years old attracted a crowd Thursday to watch mill workers cut into the chocolate-colored wood.
There were academic types and foresters, lumbermen and just-plain-curious gawkers -- all eager to see what happened when the saws ripped through sections of a mammoth tree pulled from beneath 40 feet of sand and gravel in Jackson County last summer.
From a scientific standpoint, the saws revealed no immediate new information about the mysterious past of the tree, which researchers think was felled by a catastrophic event long before civilization took hold in the Western Hemisphere.
Scientists at Purdue University, Hanover College and Hillsdale College in Michigan are studying pieces cut from the logs in January. Anthony Swinehart, an associate professor of biology at Hillsdale said, based on how deep the tree was buried, he and others estimate its age at 6,000 years. And it could be much older -- perhaps 30,000 years. Swinehart said the tree was probably uprooted and deposited in its final resting place in the White River bottoms by the last glacier that crept across Indiana.
feb 18, 2006
Tim Evans
The Indianapolis Star
Louisville Courier-Journal
__________________
Edinburgh, Indianapolis (US):
To the untrained eye, the two giant logs didn't look much different from the thousands of others waiting to be turned into veneer at the Amos-Hill Associates mill.
But scientific estimates that the oak logs may be 6,000 years old attracted a crowd Thursday to watch mill workers cut into the chocolate-colored wood.
There were academic types and foresters, lumbermen and just-plain-curious gawkers -- all eager to see what happened when the saws ripped through sections of a mammoth tree pulled from beneath 40 feet of sand and gravel in Jackson County last summer.
From a scientific standpoint, the saws revealed no immediate new information about the mysterious past of the tree, which researchers think was felled by a catastrophic event long before civilization took hold in the Western Hemisphere.
Scientists at Purdue University, Hanover College and Hillsdale College in Michigan are studying pieces cut from the logs in January. Anthony Swinehart, an associate professor of biology at Hillsdale said, based on how deep the tree was buried, he and others estimate its age at 6,000 years. And it could be much older -- perhaps 30,000 years. Swinehart said the tree was probably uprooted and deposited in its final resting place in the White River bottoms by the last glacier that crept across Indiana.
feb 18, 2006
