Noah Cordle, a 10-year-old Virginia boy on vacation in New Jersey was wading in the water of Long Beach Island when something sharp poked him in the leg. That something turned out to be a smooth, black, 2.5 inch arrowhead.

Cordle showed his find to his parents who called the Archaeological Society of New Jersey. To say that the curators were impressed is probably an understatement. Archeologists estimate that the jasper arrowhead is somewhere between 8,000 and 11,000-years-old.

When the arrowhead was made, in the late Mesolithic or early Neolithic era, New Jersey was a icy tundra, similar to modern northern Canada, and sea levels were much lower, which would have meant the shoreline was farther away. It is believed that the people who fashioned the artifact intended to use it to hunt fish or mastodon.

It is possible that the arrowhead was unearthed by a beach-replenishment project in the area following superstorm Sandy.

According to Greg Lattanzi, president of the Archaeological Society of New Jersey and assistant curator of the archeology and ethnography bureau of the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton, the people who made it were likely nomadic hunter/gatherers who roamed the tundra in search of food, shortly after the retreat of the glaciers.

“I was basically blown away. Finding these points is rare. Only one other one recorded had washed up on a beach,” he said, “on Island Beach State Park in ‘94 or ‘95,” Lattanzi told Deleware Online.

While the arrowhead legally belongs to Cordle, he has said that he plans to donate it to a museum near the area where it was discovered. First though he plans to take it to show-off to his fifth grade class.