(CNN) – Discovering prehistoric artifacts is already amazing. But finding them in the depths of the belly of a huge alligator … that’s another thing.
Shane Smith, owner of Red Antler Processing in Yazoo City, Mississippi, was digging in the stomach of a 4.5-foot alligator when he found a pair of objects he could not identify. The animal was taken to process the meat and its skin.
The objects turned out to be artifacts of Native Americans dating back thousands of years, which he said he later discovered thanks to an expert.
“My first instinct was, ‘It can’t be. There’s no way this can be possible,'” Smith told CNN. “Naturally you think ‘Oh my God, this alligator, you either ate an Indian or you ate an animal that the Indian shot’. But, you know, obviously the alligator isn’t thousands of years old.”
Smith thought the objects — a projectile tip that was part of a hunting tool and something that looked like a fishing bait — were interesting enough, so he posted it on his store’s Facebook page.
Geologist James Starnes looked at the photos of the artifacts and was able to tell quite a bit about their history, based on his research of Native American artifacts found in the Mississippi Delta. Starnes is the director of geology and surface mapping at the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality.
A plumb line, left, and a projectile tip from an “atlatl dart tip” were found inside a caiman on Sept. 2.
The prehistoric artifacts found in the caiman
He described the objects as a plume, which is a teardrop-shaped metal object of unknown use, and an “atlatl dart tip,” which is a spear or dart used for hunting, Starnes said.
“Native people in North America, especially Mississippi, probably date back more than 12,000 years,” he said. “That technology was what they would have brought with them.”
The use of plumbing is “hotly debated” among experts, Starnes said. It looks like a fishing weight or a net weight, which is what some claim was used for.
But it’s made of hematite, an “exotic” material that could have come from as far away as the Great Lakes region, Starnes said. Using an object as “ornate” for something utilitarian as fishing seems unusual, he added.
The plumbing appears to belong to the late archaic cultural period, which runs from 1,000 to 2,000 BC, Starnes noted.
The brown rock, which was part of the tip of the atlatl dart, would have served as the basis for the hunting tool, Starnes said. He described it as a base with an arrowhead attached to the end.
“These things were done before the arrival of bows and arrows in North America,” he explained.
Now, the big question
How do these artifacts get into the stomach of a giant alligator?
Alligators are known to eat all sorts of things. This big alligator had fish bones and scales, teeth, bones from small mammals, hundreds of persimmon seeds and stones, Smith said. The size of the stones ranged from a 25-cent coin to a silver dollar, he added.
This alligator was captured Sept. 2 by John Hamilton, who found it in Lake Eagle, north of Vicksburg, Mississippi, Smith said.
Among the alligator’s catcher, Smith and others, the group estimated that alligator was between 80 and 100 years old, Smith said.
While the contents of his stomach were something worth mentioning, there was another strange thing Smith recently found in an alligator.
Another large alligator, also found in 2021, had a “45-caliber bullet inside its stomach,” Smith said. “The weird thing about this is that the bullet hadn’t been fired by a gun. It was a clean bullet, so you wonder how it got there.”
“They’ll eat just about anything”
Finding artifacts from this antiquity is common in this region of Mississippi, Starnes says.
“Because this area was so populated for such a long period, the artifacts appear in very unusual places,” Starnes said. “They can erode from the surface, or they can be exposed due to things like rain events, construction projects.”
The use of stone was popular in archaic times, he noted.
“You can imagine that one of those places that has that amount of stone material is eroding off the shore, pretty easy to pick up by an alligator, especially looking for it, you know, just something to eat.” , he said. “Alligators will eat just about anything.”