Some 10,000 year old stone tools – from a prehistoric bison when mammoths used to roam around – were found during an archaeological survey that was scheduled in order to clear the way for the construction of a mall, in western Washington. In that specific region there is only an additional handful of such tools which makes the discovery more impressive.

After a few chemical tests and analysis, one of the tools revealed traces of the food they were eating, including bison, deer, bear, sheep and salmon.

Robert Kopperl, the archaeologist who led the field investigation, told The Seattle Times: “We were pretty amazed. This is the oldest archaeological site in the Puget Sound lowland with stone tools.” He then continued to add: “The site appears to have been occupied by small groups of people who were making and repairing stone tools. This was a very good place to have a camp. They could use it as a centralized location to go out and fish and hunt and gather and make stone tools. It’s hard to find this kind of site west of the Cascades, because it’s so heavily vegetated and the Puget Lobe of the big ice sheet really affected the landscape.”

In more details, the people who made the discovery found some unremarkable artifacts at first, but soon reached deeper to a thick peat and some tools and fragments.

So it’s clear that prehistoric people inhabited this place once but there is still a lot of mystery surrounding the area. There are no immediate plans to display the artifacts publicly, as that kind of processes are indeed time consuming and could take from a few months to a year.