Ancient Copper Tools Found in a Wisconsin Gravel Pit in 1952 — The Menominee Say They Began Nearby

In June 1952, a thirteen-year-old boy named Donald Baldwin was digging in an abandoned gravel quarry on the edge of Oconto, Wisconsin, when his shovel turned up a human bone. What he had opened was a cemetery roughly six thousand years old, older than the Great Pyramid of Giza. Robert Ritzenthaler and the Milwaukee Public Museum mapped about forty-five people, laid to rest with awls, spear points, a fishhook and a bracelet hammered from Lake Superior copper, a whelk shell from the southern coast, and a whistle carved from the leg bone of a swan.

The video follows the first radiocarbon dates from Willard Libby's Chicago laboratory, the long redating that followed, the ancient copper pits of Isle Royale and the Keweenaw, and the six-ton copper mass found on log cribbing in 1848. It gives the "lost race," Minoan sailor and ancient machine stories their strongest form, then puts the rest of the evidence on the table.
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