When 9-year-old Ben Witten found a small, pointy rock on a beach a few years ago, he didn’t think about what it might be. He just thought it was cool, so he took it home and put it in his bedroom. But after a recent visit to a museum, Ben learned that what he’d found was an axe that had been made by an early human called a Neanderthal!

Ben’s discovery came after he visited the Worthing Museum in southern England, where he lives. The museum had a Neanderthal axe on display that looked a lot like what Ben had in his room. This led Ben and his mom to send photos of Ben’s rock to the museum’s archaeologist, James Sainsbury. (An archaeologist is a scientist who studies ancient people by examining bones and human-made objects from the past.) Sainsbury told Ben that his suspicions were correct. The rock he had found at the beach is also a Neanderthal axe, and it may be 60,000 years old. 

“This is by far the oldest item shown to myself in [more than 10] years,” Sainsbury told Fox News Digital. “Neanderthal hand axes are rare in [this area]. This is the first to be found in years. The nature of the find, being made by a young local boy on the beach, makes it doubly special.”

Neanderthals were humans that evolved a little earlier than Homo sapiens (today’s humans) but died out about 40,000 years ago. The axe Ben found might have been used to cut, dig, chop wood, or butcher animals.