Touché?


Imagine crouching down to wash your hands in a river—not a particularly clean river, kinda soupy with algae—and feeling the tip of a 3,000-year-old bronze sword.

That’s what happened recently to an 11-year-old boy in China’s Jiangsu Province. He took the sword home, where it piqued local curiosity. “Some people even offered high prices to buy the sword,” his father said. “But I felt it would be illegal to sell the relic.” Archaeologists dated the weapon to either the Shang or Zhou dynasties—the dawn of Chinese civilization—based on its material, size, and shape. And to think, I once sat on an arrowhead in a lake in Wisconsin.   —Diane Richard, writer, September 11

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Image: unspecified

Source: Amanda Williams, “Chinese boy stumbles across 3,000-year-old bronze sword after he put his hands in a river to wash them,” Daily Mail, September 8, 2014