I went to a beach in the Tasmanian wilderness once where every rock (smaller than your head) was perfectly round.
The carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium etc atoms that compose the hand were created before that igneous rock was formed.
As Joni Mitchell implied, we are all nuclear waste.
It’s a statistical certainty that some of the calcium, at least, was once K[sub]40[/sub] much more recently than that. Still nuclear waste, though 
We are quibbling over our own conceptions of the terminology
No, own conceptions doesn’t enter into it from my side. Both roundnessand sphericityare actual geological terms of art. And it’s possible to have high sphericity and low roundness. Geology can be weird that way.
10% of your body is over 13 billion years old.
me too :eek:
science is so…fascinating. I wish I could think of a better word to describe it. It IS mind-blowing that we humans can co-exist with something that’s so…old!
Yeah, and if the river happens to be flowing through a tunnel or crevasse in a glacier, the rubble will typically end up as an eskerwhen the glacier is gone; somewhat counter-intuitively with the coarser stuff deposited on top of the finer sand! Rullstensås – Wikipedia
I have about half a dozen of these, none as large as the OP’s. The first was found in my grandparents garden. In a town that never had any serious industrialization, so my guess that it might have been used in a ‘ball mill’ seems unlikely. However said town is on the terminal moraine of the last ice age. I’ve found a couple in the rocks they put in parking lots instead of plants.
Also, gastroliths ain’t exactly round!
CMC fnord!
I was thinking about this as well. Where I live there are many places where the Native Americans, or, ahem First Nation people ground various food items, using favorite rocks as a pestle - once such as the OP, used for a long time, would become round, and as stated, fits nicely in the hand. Perhaps the rock is a grinding stone? Not sure if that activity or food prep was common on Vancouver island.
In my opinion there is no reason to think that the stone’s shape isn’t natural. You can find lots of very rounded stones like it on a pebbly beach, especially when the rock isn’t stratified. It might have been carried to the find spot by humans, but I’d want to rule out local morraine as a source.
There are beaches on Lake Michigan entirely made of such stones. If you are going to claim they were tools used by generations past, the population must have been enormous and they must have been doing a heckovalotta pounding.
More likely, they are a product of nature. A rounded stone near a lake or river or in a glacier’s path is about at natural as I can ever imagine.
I don’t think anyone’s saying that the rock was rounded by people, just that it looks like the already-rounded rock was used as a tool.
Except those goose gastoliths. Damn, those are pretty.
It certainly looks to us armchair archaeologists like it could be used as a tool of some kind, but what we’re pointing out is that there is a vast number of pebbles like it in the world that have never been used as a tool, and so the odds are against it.
An expert would be able to tell if there are marks on the stone that indicate tool use (though would they be able to distinguish marks from 4000 years ago from marks from 40 years ago?) But you’d really have to look at the soil/moraine it came from to assess probabilities.
When I was a kid tooling around in the high desert on motorbikes with my cousins, one of them found this nearly round piece of obsidian and gave it to me. (I’d call it “egg shaped” except that it’s rounder than that. No “pointy” end.)
I still have it. A student with a rock tumbler offered to smooth it out for me (it had a sand coating on part of it) but it turned out to be snowflake obsidian and that wouldn’t work.
If a glass-like substance like obsidian can get fairly round naturally, I have no problem with a granite-like rock being rounder.
…and so wouldn’t have wear marks.
In some cases, yes. Stuff like degree of weathering on exposed surfaces in the wear marks, or analysis of organic material in them. There’s a couple of disciplines devoted to this, called microwear analysis and use-wear analysis.
I’d overlooked the OP’s comment on possible wear marks above. We’d still want to get an idea of aging (googling ‘granite patina’ doesn’t help much!) and to rule out natural or modern day causes of the abrasions.
Neat stones catch my eye too, I"ve found a few small tools, unifaces, preforms, small points, paleoindian possibly.
THere are a few online forums where you can learn about pre-columbian tools etc. Generally good info if your willing to search and wade through the forums.
https://forums.arrowheads.com/
http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/north-american-indian-artifacts/
If you want to show your rock, get good clear close ups just don’t say it fits in thehand therefore it must be a tool that seems to trigger some of those guys in to yelling. But lots of info and pictures of other similiar rocks to make comparisons with and decide what you have is a tool or just a rock.
Space aliens?:eek:
Seriously, it looks like any old rock you might find in or around streams and rivers and whatnot.