THE exciting find of a stone hammer, probably used to pound ochre, adds thousands of years to the time man is believed to have exploited Forest iron ore.
It also makes the strongest possible case for protecting the scowles, or ancient workings which ring the edge of the Forest basin where iron ore seams outcrop, says its finder, Jonathan Wright.
"It could now be said that that the exploitation of ore goes back 10,000 years rather than the 2,500 years previously thought," he said.
"Some even said the ore wasn't really mined until the Romans came only 2,000 years ago."
His find, from a site near Drybrook, has been greeted as ground-breaking by the county archaeology department, which initially judged the hammer and round pounding-stones that accompanied it as not very interesting.
However they are now sure the stone was shaped by one of our ancestors so that it could be strapped to a handle with withy, making it a very efficient tool.
"The fact that this has just been lying around on top of the ground is quite amazing and it makes it all the more necessary to protect the scowles, many of which are being used as rubbish infill sites," said Jonathan.
"Apart from being really beautiful in their own right, goodness knows what else might be discovered on these sites.
"There has been a tendency to say, 'well, we've got Puzzle Wood as a representative of the old workings and we don't need to keep anything else'.
"Using them as rubbish dumps is short-sighted to say the least."