10-Year-Old's Beach Find Will Be the First of Its Kind in the Smithsonian's Collection

A 10-year-old from Virginia was vacationing with his family in New Jersey last summer when he found an artifact that was worthy enough to join a prestigious museum's collection.

According to Smithsonian Magazine, Noah Cordle was boogie boarding in Long Beach Island, New Jersey, when he felt something in the sand that wasn't a shell. Cordle and his family would later learn after a trip to the New Jersey State Museum that he had found an up to 14,000-year-old clovis, a pointed tool used by Native Americans.

The clovis found by the fifth grade student was recently brought to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History as the first of its kind from New Jersey to join the collection.

This fifth grader found a 14,000-year-old Clovis point, likely unearthed from Hurricane Sandy https://t.co/MR7qe4bFsc pic.twitter.com/rSpUcyXt3s

— Smithsonian Magazine (@SmithsonianMag) November 4, 2014

"There will be no end of students and scholars coming to look at Noah's Clovis point, so we're very pleased to have it -- but we're even more pleased that Noah found it and brought it to us," Dennis Stanford, a researcher with the museum, told the Washington Post.

Greg Lattanzi, president of the Archaeological Society of New Jersey, told the Asbury Park Press he was "blown away" when he saw the boy's clovis.

"Finding these points is rare," he added to the newspaper.

Lattanzi said he thinks reconstruction post-Superstorm Sandy, which occurred in 2012, helped bring the artifact to the surface.

Cordle told the Post that he was interested in science before finding the clovis, but the discovery "brings it up to a whole new level."

(H/T: Grind TV)

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