For sale: Priceless bit of history

VERO BEACH, Fla. — For nearly three years, an artifact that might be the oldest piece of artwork in the Americas lay under the sink of an amateur fossil collector’s mobile home.

It was pure luck that James Kennedy noticed it at all.

Cleaning his fossils one day last year, the 39-year-old Vero Beach man spotted a small carving on a piece of mammal bone. The image looked like a mastodon, a prehistoric cousin of the elephant.

If authentic — and a team of scientists at the University of Florida thinks it is — the carving would be thousands of years older than Stonehenge in England, the pyramids in Egypt and Florida’s Everglades. It also would offer rare tangible evidence that humans lived in Florida during the last Ice Age, alongside now-extinct mammals such as the mastodon, mammoth and saber-tooth cat.

Already, one anthropologist involved in studying the artifact has dubbed it the “oldest, most spectacular and rare work of art in the Americas.”

But scientists fear that the rare artifact may be lost to public view forever. Kennedy plans to sell it at an auction, much as any private art collector might sell a Picasso, instead of giving it to a museum. The auction, which hasn’t been scheduled, is being advertised online.

Kennedy, who says he has severe epilepsy and lives mainly on Social Security checks, is unapologetic about the sale.

“That’s like having the lottery ticket and someone walks up and says, ‘You should donate it,’” Kennedy said. “Well, no. You would say, ‘No.’”

Kennedy said he found the artifact on private property, with the owner’s permission, within walking distance of Vero Beach’s “Vero Man” site along a canal south of the city’s airport.

The “Vero Man” archaeological site, discovered in 1915, is one of just two in the Western Hemisphere where human remains were found with those of extinct Ice Age mammals. At the time, the discovery of “Vero Man” was controversial because conventional wisdom among scientists said humans had arrived in the Americas from Asia long after the extinction of animals such as the mastodon and mammoth.

Since the 1950s, the site has been left alone. That may change now with Kennedy’s find.

The University of Florida team, which studied the artifact for several months last year, is trying to raise money for a fresh excavation of the “Vero Man” site. The scientists hope Kennedy’s artifact, which was featured last summer in National Geographic, will generate excitement for the project.

The City of Vero Beach and Indian River County both passed resolutions in support of protecting the site.

Richard Hulbert, a paleontologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, said the researchers discussed trying to raise money to buy Kennedy’s artifact, but the price was too high. Kennedy wanted at least $1 million, Hulbert said.

They “quickly realized that the funds would be better spent on the excavation,” he said.

Part of the reason, he said, is that Florida’s hot, humid climate destroys carbon found in bones, making it impossible to determine the age of Kennedy’s artifact directly using the typical method, radiocarbon dating.

To date bones there, scientists instead do radiocarbon dating on objects found in the same sediment level as the bones, said Kevin Jones, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Florida who was brought in to run tests on Kennedy’s fossil. The age of the objects then helps them figure out the age of the bones, he said.

Scientists at the university studied Kennedy’s artifact, not to date it exactly, but with the intention of proving it to be a fake, said Barbara Purdy, a retired professor of anthropology.

Jones used energy dispersive spectroscopy — basically a fancy X-ray — and a scanning electron microscope to study the bone in great detail. Both tests provided microscopic views of the artifact, allowing scientists to compare the age of the engraving with the age of the bone.

Jones even scratched the artifact to compare the appearance of the new marks with the prehistoric ones.

All evidence suggested that it was the real thing, the team concluded. Its age will remain something of a mystery.

“Thirteen thousands (years), 14,000, 15,000,” Hulbert said, “we don’t really know.”

The exact age, researchers say, is less important than what the artifact tells us about early humans. The artwork’s detail suggests that the artist saw a mastodon up close, he said.

Such a rare find “helps capture the imagination of the public,” Jones said. The image of “that carving should be on flags hanging outside the Smithsonian.”

With Kennedy’s sale, the fear is that it will end up somewhere far less prestigious. “It could end up in someone’s closet and, in that sense, it has disappeared,” said Tom Stafford, an Ice Age geologist and president of Stafford Research Laboratories of Lafayette, Colo., who was involved in testing the artifact.

Even so, the scientists handed the artifact back to Kennedy once the testing was over.

Kennedy’s sale of the artifact is legal if he found it, as he says he did, on private property with the owner’s permission. By law, fossils found on state land typically are the state’s property.

He’d like to see it go to a museum, particularly one in Florida. But he isn’t donating it and, for now, it’s in a safe deposit box.

The reasons, he said, are easy to understand.

Kennedy is unable to work a steady job because of his disability, and his medication is expensive. He used to do odd jobs such as repairing motorcycles, but he once severely burned himself when he had a seizure while working with a blowtorch.

Kennedy has been hunting fossils since age 16, when he found a mammoth tooth while fishing in a Vero Beach canal.

He lives in a mobile home. He has aging parents, a “sweetheart,” a daughter and a stepson.

“I asked Dr. Purdy how much something like that’s worth,” he said. “I can’t describe the look on her face or the tone of her voice. She said, ‘This is priceless.’

“She’s looking at it from a scientific standpoint. Walk down the road and pick up a checkbook that says $100 million — that’s what happened to me.”

« National AP

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