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Sling Stone from the Red Crag, Bramford (Suffolk, UK)

The ‘sling-shot’ from
Red Crag, Suffolk (UK)

By all accounts, the Red Crag deposits in Suffolk were a veritable treasure-trove of out-of-place artefacts during the nineteenth century. A sling stone is another of the many objects claimed as evidence for impossibly early human activity. Allegedly shaped by scraping with flint, it was described as possessing a series of facets running from end to end across the entire surface of the object.

The photograph does not much resemble the claims being made. There are striations on the object, but they scarcely resemble marks made by scraping with flint. The lack of clarity in the photograph does not enable a confident identification of the marks to be made, but they look plausibly like natural bedding planes within the pebble. There are also problems with the age as stated in fringe sources: 5 to 50 million years old is not the date of the Red Crag Pliocene deposits, which are between 2.1 and 1 million years old.

This page was last updated on 7 May 2007
Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews