Archaeologists Thrilled To Discover Empty Hole Where A Stick Used To Be
The scientific community is celebrating a landmark breakthrough after successfully locating a rock cavity that used to contain a piece of wood.
BARCELONA, archaeologists around the world opened champagne this week after finding absolutely nothing inside a rock. The scientific community has called it a landmark in human history. Tens of thousands of years ago, a Neanderthal dropped a stick on muddy ground; the stick then rotted away completely, leaving an empty space behind. Modern excavation techniques have finally brought that space to light.
The missing wood turned up in a rock shelter in northern Spain. Experts spotted a suspicious void ringed by hardened mineral crust, then spent months studying it and poking empty air with specialised tiny brushes, mainly to confirm that it was still empty. They concluded they had located the precise point at which a tool stopped existing. The team sealed off the air at once and photographed the darkness inside the crust from several angles.
“Normally you find an old bone or chipped rock, which is frankly tedious because somebody has to pick it up, clean it and carry it back to the laboratory,” said chief void analyst Professor Horace Spindle, holding a small plastic bag containing air from the hole. “This is the holy grail. An entirely missing artifact. You look into the gap and imagine all the splinters you are not getting. It is the finest example of a stick not being there that we have uncovered.”
“It is the finest example of a stick not being there that we have ever uncovered.”
They needed measurements. So the team poured liquid silicone into the gap and waited for it to set. The cast came out shaped exactly like a slightly pointy piece of wood, prompting new theories that Neanderthals used sticks to point at things, poke things, or leave them on the ground for academics fifty millennia later. The silicone blob is now described as a priceless replica of garbage a caveman threw away.
Museum curators have already started planning an international exhibition around the historic hollow. Reinforced display cases are being built for the empty crusts, with laser security intended to stop anyone slipping a modern stick into a hole and ruining the pristine emptiness. Visitors will pay full price to stare at the gaps, then read long placards about how impressive the wood would have been if it had made even a modest effort to survive.
The exhibition has not impressed everyone. Rival archaeologist Dr. Penelope Scrapes of the Institute of Buried Debris says finding nothing happens all the time and does not deserve applause. Her team spent an entire summer digging a large trench in a muddy field and found no evidence of anything at all. They received no international coverage, she noted, and no extra grant money for failing to locate a prehistoric twig.
The Spanish researchers responded by ordering more silicone. They have requested another six million euros to search nearby caves for the missing owners of the missing sticks. If scans of the rock formations go well, the team hopes to locate the empty space where a Neanderthal once stood and make a full-body cast of the ancient hominid’s personal bubble.