Heard a museum guide say the bone was 1,200 years old and nobody in the room flinched

Kim Carr · 2026-10-21T18:30:04.535999+00:00

Last Saturday I tagged along on a tour at the natural history museum here in Austin, and the guide held up a cast of a jawbone from a site in West Texas and said it was about 1,200 years old. What got me was how the whole room just nodded and moved on, like that number was normal. I stood there doing the math and it hit me that someone chewed on that exact bone over a thousand years before any of us were born. It made me wonder how often I hear big dates like that and just let them slide past me. Does anyone else have a find or a site that only clicked for you once you sat with the number for a minute?

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Heard a museum guide say the bone was 1,200 years old and nobody in the room flinched | Archaeology Discoveries - SMM Buzz