Out-of-place artifact

An out-of-place artifact (OOPA, OOPa, or OOPart) is any object displaying evidence of a technology that, according to uniformitarian or related paradigms, ought not exist in the particular geologic stratum in which it rests. OOParts are one of the most troubling controversies for archaeology today.

History of OOParts

The report in 1572 of a six-inch nail found in Peru and presented to the Viceroy of Peru as a gift might be the oldest OOPart report on record. More than eighty OOParts have been alleged since then.

Types of OOParts

The OOParts fall into three main categories:

1. Evidence of modern or even more-advanced technology from either an ancient culture (e.g. the Saqqara Bird in Egypt) or a location in a geologic stratum regarded as far too deep to be contemporary with man.
2. Fossilized human remains. The alleged lack of such remains is one of the most common reasons cited to discount the Flood account.
3. Evidence of dinosaur-human cohabitation on earth. This varies from ancient artwork depicting creatures supposedly not discovered until centuries later, to side-by-side human and dinosaur tracks.

Modern technology in ancient times

These artifacts are found among other artifacts of an ancient culture. The difference between these and the other artifacts among which they are found is that they represent a technology that the civilization under study was not supposed to have. They include:

1. The Baghdad Battery, an apparently spent dry cell in a six-inch yellow clay pot, found in the Baghdad Museum in 1938.
2. The Dendera Tubes. More specifically, these are images on an Egyptian bas-relief of tube-like structures in the hands of Egyptian priests or acolytes. At least one electrical engineer has stated that the objects depicted in that bas-relief are Crookes tubes, which were the forerunners of the cathode-ray tubes still in common use in television receivers.
3. The Ashoka Pillar in Delhi, India. This wrought-iron shaft supposedly dates to an Indian king who died in 413 AD. The metal, which ought to have crumbled into rust long ago, remains in excellent condition.
4. The Antikythera Computer, a geared structure recovered in 1900 from the wreck of a merchant vessel that, to judge from the other cargo it carried, apparently sank sometime between 85 BC and 50 BC. This object was a highly sophisticated and easy-to-use orrery that predicted the annual motions of the sun and moon in the earth's sky.
5. The Saqqara Bird, a seven-inch object, first thought to be a bird figurine, but then recognized as a model airplane. This was found in 1898 in the tomb of Pa-Di-Imen and dates to 200 BC.
6. An Inca pendant, dated from 500 to 800 AD, that turns out to be a model of a high-speed aircraft, possibly a jet. More remarkably, the object's apparent rudder fin bears an engraved Hebrew or Aramaic letter beth.
7. The Crystal Skull of Lubaantum, a 7-inch-long skull cut from a single piece of clear quartz found among Mayan ruins in 1927. The artisan who fashioned it evidently cut the quartz against the axis of crystallization, a feat no modern jeweler could possibly accomplish without shattering the quartz into fine dust. Moreover, the artisan cannot have used any metal tools, because his work bears no scratch marks. Analysts have concluded that the production of this artifact would have required 300 man-hours using any conceivable modern method.
8. The Cabrera Stones. These are 20,000 stones that appear to be illustrations from a medical textbook. The surgical techniques depicted in these illustrations rival or even far surpass any surgical techniques in use today, and even include encephalic transplantation.

Modern technology in deep time

These are artifacts buried in geological strata where no artifact of any human civilization, ancient or modern, ought to exist, or at the very least are in strata that are supposed to be older than the oldest written records.

1. The Bullet-Punctured Skull of Zambia, a human cranium, supposedly of the paleolithic era, that bears evidence that the person involved was shot to death with a rifle. Local geological evidence indicates (by uniformitarian standards) that the skull is 38,000 years old.
2. The Wonderstone Spheroids, now numbering 200 or more, found in a silver mine in South Africa. They are of a nickel-steel alloy that cannot be terrestrial or meteoric. A museum curator has observed one of these spheroids rotating within its setting, apparently under its own power. Yet the miners who excavated these spheroids found them in a stratum that ought to be 3 billion years old.
3. A brass bell with an iron clapper, found in a lump of coal. Uniformitarians commonly insist that all the coal in the world formed 280 to 300 million years ago.
4. An iron pot found within a lump of coal in Thomas, Oklahoma. The same consideration applies to this object as applies to the bell mentioned above.
5. The London Hammer, a hammer found in limestone in the Cretaceous stratum, supposedly 140 million years old.
6. An obvious notch, made with an ax, in a lump of petrified wood in the Petrified Forest of Arizona, USA.

Human fossils

Fossilized human remains, especially any such remains found buried in deep time, are among the most striking evidences against the uniformitarian model.

1. A fossilized human finger found in the Cretaceous Walnut Formation of the Commanche Peak limestone deposit. Sadly, the in situ provenance of the finger is lacking.
2. Skulls and other bones found within coal.
3. Malachite Man, consisting of the remains of ten individuals in a supposed 140-million-year-old stratum. Some of the bones have been partially petrified with malachite.

Dinosaur-human cohabitation

These are artifacts, artworks, or physical signs that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth together.

1. Stone depictions of stegosaurus in Khmer temple art. Accessed March 31, 2008.</ref>
2. Clay figurines of obvious dinosaurs found at Acambaro, Mexico.
3. The Paluxy River tracks near Glen Rose, Texas, USA. Tracks of Tyrannosaurus rex and other dinosaurs are found side-by-side with human footprints. Some of these human footprints are giant sized.
4. Human shoe prints found associated with trilobites.

Discussion

To conceive of anything being "out of place" requires a concept of the "proper place" of any technological artifact. For most OOParts now known, that concept depends on geological uniformitarianism and the related concept of deep time, because these artifacts were recovered from a geologic stratum allegedly millions of years old. For others, the concept of "technological place" depends on the widely-held concept of the linear development of cultures. Thus, for example, the Egyptians are not supposed to have developed any of the flight sciences, while the Saqqara Bird suggests that they, or else some other civilization that once held the land where Egypt now stands, did—centuries before Leonardo da Vinci would speculate on building a flying machine, let alone before Orville and Wilbur Wright would demonstrate their own prototype.

OOParts that violate the linear-development paradigm should shock no one. The history of the world is replete with examples of cultures conquering other cultures but not preserving all of the technological knowledge that the conquered had developed or amassed. The fall of the Roman Empire is an obvious example.

The finding of OOParts in deep-time-associated geologic strata is another matter. Only three possibilities exist, and each possibility has its devoted champions:

1. The artifacts involved are either forgeries or represent modern artifacts introduced into an archaeological or paleontological dig by accident.
2. The artifacts were placed in their respective locations by extraterrestrial scouts or soldiers in an earlier visit to, or occupation of, the Earth.
3. The artifacts are those of antediluvian civilization.

The best argument against the forgery possibility is the sheer number of such artifacts. In addition, some of the arguments advanced to discredit some of these artifacts raise more questions than they pretend to answer.

Concerning extraterrestrial scouts, that begs the question of where such scouts could come from. Recent evidence suggests that the Earth and the solar system are very special places, that almost had to be designed with human life in mind. More to the point, many of the artifacts found do represent a stunningly advanced technology. Others, however, represent a technology no more advanced than that of any civilization in existence as of the early twenty-first century, or even the middle twentieth. Their presence among the perhaps government-issue equipment of soldiers of a culture advanced enough to have interstellar space travel would certainly beg explanation.

This leaves the third possibility, that the artifacts found in geologic strata are in fact clues to the technology of pre-Flood man. If one abandons uniformitarianism, then one can readily interpret the entire geologic column as flood silt. The artifacts then would represent clues to the highest level of technological advancement that Noah had to work with when he designed and built his Ark. That level might be far higher than Bible scholars have previously assumed, and would go far to answering many of the technological objections that some have raised to the story of how anyone could even build a wooden cargo ship more than 165 meters long, much less how such a ship could ride through the onslaught of a 1.6-kilometer-high wall of water and then stay afloat for more than a year.

Early post-Flood cultures did not, of course, develop with more than a fraction of the technologies that OOParts represent. Some technologies, like the one responsible for the crystal skull of Belize, remain far beyond the capabilities of modern civilizations. To answer this objection, the novelist Shane Johnson, in his novel Ice, reminded his readers that most end-users of any given technology would never be able to reinvent those technologies even if asked or somehow forced by circumstance. The Global Flood destroyed every civilization then extant, and in the process destroyed or buried deep all traces of antediluvian technology—and the Bible nowhere credits Noah, Shem, Ham, or Japheth with any particular technological prowess outside of their obvious signal achievement in shipbuilding.