In 1936, a couple, Max Hahn and his wife, walking along Red Creek, near the town of London, Texas saw a piece of loose rock that had a piece of wood protruding.
They took it home where it was untouched for ten years. It was then in 1947, that their son, Max, broke open the rock to find a hammer inside. This “London Artifact”, as it is sometimes known, has a 6 inch long hammerhead that has a diameter of 1 inch.
The metal is 96.6% iron, 2.6% chlorine, and 0.74% sulfur. The encasement rock is like lime stone that has been dated up to 400 million years old. Obviously, this is a problem since the tool inside resembles miner’s hammers of the late 1800’s. The wooden handle is petrified with a portion that has turned to coal.
One possible explanation for the rock containing the artifact is that the highly soluble minerals in the ancient limestone may have formed a concretion around the object, via a common process (like that of a petrifying well) which often creates similar encrustations around fossils and other nuclei in a relatively short time.
In 1984, creationist Carl Baugh bought the artifact wanting to prove it was a “monumental ‘pre-flood’ discovery”. You can see the London hammer as it is now on display Baugh’s Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Texas.
