By James Hanlon
Leader Staff Writer
Mike Kubiak was clearing the ground for his backyard garden, when he picked up an odd looking stone.
“As soon as I looked at it I thought, ‘Wow, that’s the shape of an axe!’ Just like that, it just jumped at me,” Kubiak said.
The roughly flat, rectangular stone is seven inches long, three and a half inches tall and a half inch wide.
“It looks like it’s been worked on by hand with flint knapping.” He says the shape is a “typical Clovis-style axe head.”

He wants to get it looked at by an archaeologist. He called several local institutions, but they are unable take a look right now while everything is closed.
He didn’t find any arrowheads or anything else nearby. Kubiak bought his house on W. Drahner, near Coats Rd., in 1991. This is the first he’s found anything like this at the property. Though, “I definitely got my eye out, looking for more,” he says.
Kubiak is an outdoorsman and a woodworker, so he recognized what he was looking at. Most people wouldn’t have picked it up, he thinks, or if they did, they would have just thrown it into a pile of rocks.
“I’ve always got my eyes open looking for arrowheads and stuff like that. It’s just my nature,” he said. This axe head is “probably the oldest thing I’ve ever found.”

It doesn’t look like a finished head to him, either. Axe heads in museums are “a little bit more finely done.”
He speculates it could have been a practice piece or a work in progress that chipped, then the maker didn’t like it anymore and stopped working on it.
To Kubiak, “it doesn’t look bad at all.” But to Paleolithic a hunter trying to make something to use for his livelihood, Kubiak realizes it probably didn’t make the cut.
“What was the last person thinking about when he had this in his hands?” Kubiak wondered once he realized what he was holding. “Was he thinking about killing a beaver or maybe a mastodon? It’s totally wild.”

  axe head, Mike Kubiak