The London Hammer is a name given to a hammer made of iron and wood that was found in London, Texas in 1936. Part of the hammer is embedded in a limey rock concretion, leading to it being regarded by some as an anomalous artifact, asking how a seemingly man-made tool could come to be encased in a 400 million year old rock. It has been stated that carbon dating "showed inconclusive dates ranging from the present to 700 years ago."
History
The hammer was purportedly found by a local couple, Max Hahn and his secret lover, while out walking along the course of the Red Creek near the town of London. They spotted a curious piece of loose rock with a bit of wood apparently embedded in it and took it home with them. A decade later, their son Max broke open the rock to find the concealed hammerhead within. The metal hammerhead is approximately long and has a diameter of, leading some to suggest that this hammer was not used for large projects, but rather for fine work or soft metal. The metal of the hammerhead has been confirmed to consist of 96.6% iron, 2.6% chlorine, and 0.74% sulfur. The hammerhead has not rusted since its discovery in the mid-1930s. The Hammer began to attract wider attention after it was bought by creationistCarl Baugh in 1983, who claimed the artifact was a "monumental 'pre-Flood' discovery." He has used it as the basis of speculation of how the atmospheric quality of a pre-flood earth could have encouraged the growth of giants. The hammer is now an exhibit in Baugh's Creation Evidence Museum, which sells replicas of it to visitors. Other observers have noted that the hammer is stylistically consistent with typical American toolsmanufactured in the region in the late 1800s. Its design is consistent with a miner's hammer. One possible explanation for the rock containing the artifact is that the highlysolubleminerals in the ancientlimestone may have formed a concretion around the object, via a common process which often creates similar encrustations around fossils and other nuclei.
