Pocket stuffer

If you know me at all, you know I don't leave the house without my two Swiss Army knives and another little screwdriver that hangs off my key chain. I have such a dread fear of being caught unprepared for situations that require something to be cut or tightened or written that I make sure to always have a knife and screwdriver and at least two pens. 

So I think I would have fit in well with the Indigenous Australian people of long ago! And we are just now finding things like this bone tool they made thousands of years ago. And they were more tech-savvy than we knew, it turns out.

 What they did, they took a piece of bone from a kangaroo or wallaby or another marsupial and made a little piercing tool. We know they kept warm with possum-fur cloaks, and perhaps this device was used to fashion them...or maybe it was used as sort of a hunting arrow, way back 3,800 to 5,300 years ago.  We can't be sure; they didn't leave any sort of pamphlets.  A research team found this bone tool along the Lower Murray river in the southern part of  Australia, according to their findings published in the journal Australian Archaeology.

“Even one find of this kind provides us with opportunities to understand the use of bone technologies in the region and how such artifacts were adapted to a riverine environment,” lead author Christopher Wilson, a Flinders University archaeologist who is a Ngarrindjeri (Aboriginal Australian) man, said.

When I see news of this sort, I think of two things:

• we now can be sure that men have always wanted something in their pockets besides loose change and their hands.
• we should think about what we will leave behind for posterity. Imagine if a giant meteor knocked Earth off its orbit one afternoon this month, rendering our current civilization just a set of hazy memories. And then, imagine archeologists digging through our stuff centuries from now, wondering why we carried car keys, Altoids, bandannas, and nasal sprays.  I say, let's all start making sure we have something completely unexplainable in our possession at all times...something that future generations will puzzle over for years.

Mine will be this little necessity: