was hiking in bowl of fire and saw this. thought it was a lithic at first, then thought maybe a tooth ? or is it just a very serrated flake of rock ?

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It's the same thing Hooper found in the hull of the boat:

Day Hiker wrote:It's the same thing Hooper found in the hull of the boat:

glad i wasn't there when it was wet...

Looks like a silicatious precipitate of some kind. Not a fossil or human artifact. Looks too hard for calcite but could be.

Not enough info. In Hidden Valley, on the other side of the Muddies, you will find shallow caves with lots of flint and obsidian chips -- exotics -- left over from the flaking of spear and arrow points (by the Native Americans). Sometimes the flakes are just near potholes (that hold water in the cooler months).

Bowl of Fire has lots of stuff slumped and washed down from the higher limestone peaks to the N -- fragments of calcite veins and such.

The original post, the rock looks of sedimentary nature, though if silicate, somewhat harder though not ideal for flint knapping tool objects. Those are best from flints and obsidian material, though when scarce, other rocks are used. The object's serrations lie in the harder layer, which show signs of knapping, so I reckon it's a human artefact, especially as the serrations are on one side, therefore, used as a cutting, slicing tool.

Looks like a piece of chert - a form of silica similar to flint but different mainly in color (jasper is another variation). It is somewhat common in Utah where there are sandstone formations - Moab, Escalante, etc. It does look like it might have been knapped to make some sort of cutting or scraping tool out of it.

I reckon this is a piece of rock (used as a tool) that was carelessly discarded, in hopes it
would eventually be rediscovered by a future SP-member who didn't know what the hell it
was, but wasn't afraid to ask on the forum pages.

... and, this happened light-years before the phrase "Ace is the place with the helpful hardware folks," was developed, meaning that native people had to improvise and
live off the land with only the "bare necessities" such as the piece of rock shown here.

RayMondo wrote:The original post, the rock looks of sedimentary nature, though if silicate, somewhat harder though not ideal for flint knapping tool objects. Those are best from flints and obsidian material, though when scarce, other rocks are used. The object's serrations lie in the harder layer, which show signs of knapping, so I reckon it's a human artefact, especially as the serrations are on one side, therefore, used as a cutting, slicing tool.

this is exactly what i thought when i 1st saw it, seemed a poor choice for knapping, but those serrations are definitely not natural so then i thought maybe a tooth instead. either way i was pretty excited to see it, and any possibility of it being an early human tool is really cool.

and thanks fro all the replies form everyone.

Yes they are among the first stone tools made by humans. And their types have shown the history of transcontinental migrations. Notably, that the first settlers to North America may have originated from France, long before the Vikings found a sea route (Iceland, Greenland).

A most significant hypothesis is the Solutrean which demonstrates similarities between the Solutrean industry of France and the later Clovis culture (Clovis points of North America), and suggests that people with Solutrean tool technology crossed the Ice Age Atlantic by moving along the pack ice edge, using survival skills similar to that of modern Eskimo people. The migrants arrived in northeastern North America (between 15 and 20,000 years ago).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solutrean_hypothesis

My origins are both French and Viking!

Could it be a biface Where did you find it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biface