The recovery of a mysterious wooden pole at the bottom of Lake Huron is fuelling excitement among U.S. and Canadian researchers that they have found more evidence of a “lost world” of North American caribou hunters from nearly 10,000 years ago.

The scientists believe that these prehistoric Aboriginal People — who would have been among the earliest inhabitants of the continent — had a “kill site” along a ridge straddling the present-day U.S.-Canada border that was eventually submerged by rising waters when the glaciers melted at the end of the last Ice Age.

The two-metre-long piece of wood, found amid such a rock assemblage during a summer search of Huron’s floor for traces of human activity, was later dated to 8,900 years ago, the researchers revealed last month.

“The first thing you notice is that it appears to have been shaped with a rounded base and a pointed tip,” University of Michigan anthropologist John O’Shea stated in a summary of the team’s research.

“There’s also a bevel on one side that looks unnatural, like it had to have been created. It looks like it might have been used as a tent pole or a pole to hang meat.”

’Shea’s principal research partner, University of Michigan marine engineer Guy Meadows, told Postmedia News last March that the Lake Huron rock formations constituted “promising” — but not definitive — evidence of an ancient human presence, and that the team was keen to gather more compelling proof.

During this past summer’s field work, deposits of pine pollen and charcoal were also identified and sampled at the site where the pole was discovered.

"This was the stage when humans gradually shifted from hunting large mammals like mastodon and caribou to fishing, gathering and agriculture," said anthropologist John O'Shea. "But because most of the places in this area that prehistoric people lived are now under water, we don't have good evidence of this important shift itself- just clues from before and after the change.

"One of the enduring questions is the way the land went under water. Many people think it must have been a violent event, but finding this large wood object just sitting on the bottom wedged between a few boulders suggests that the inundation happened quickly but rather gently. And this in turn suggests that we'll find more intact evidence of human activity in the area."

In addition to the wood specimen, the U-M researchers have collected many other samples from the bottom of the lake that they hope will provide clues about the environment before it was submerged by the rising lake water. Some of the samples are now being analyzed at U-M, while others are being analyzed by a Canadian expert on submerged site reconstruction and microdebitage -- the examination of flakes of stone that are less than one millimeter in diameter, produced in large quantities when stone tools were made.

Initially stored in a PVC tube filled with lake water, the specimen's age has now been fixed using carbon dating. It is currently undergoing more detailed analyses to determine whether there has been human modification, which visual examination suggests