This museum quality ancient cane is crafted from possibly the most unique material I use. The handle is a piece of wood from an ancient kauri tree that has been buried in the ground for 40,000 years! That's right, this wood dates back to the earliest cave paintings at approximately 40,000 BC. For perspective, The Bering land bridge between Alaska and Russia broke apart approximately 20,000 years ago and the Woolly mammoth went extinct 8,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. It's hard to fathom 40,000 years! Wood like this is called "sinker" wood. A tree lives a typical life span but when it dies and falls it is covered in peat moss or falls into a bog, both of which create an oxygen deprived environment that perfectly preserves the wood. Ancient Kauri is the oldest "workable" wood in the world, the only wood that is older is petrified wood which is no longer wood but stone.

The shaft on this cane is highly figured Australian Mountain Ash wood, its light, bright, and highly chatoyant. In the divider is a piece of matching ancient kauri wood with three pieces of bone from the Steller’s Sea Cow. This unique bone is from an extinct marine animal that was hunted out in the 1700’s by Western explorers. The animal’s story is a sad one that tells the familiar tale of Man’s failure to respect the fragility of nature. The Inuit people hunted this Sea cow species for thousands of years, this bone is from St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea and was excavated from ancient Inuit hunting grounds - its thousands of years old. Total length measures 38" and can be shortened to fit.

Ancient kauri wood has an excellent chatoyance and golden shimmer to its grain. the handle on this cane has a special grain complexity of independent bands and contrast that adds to its rarity - most ancient kauri wood is straight grained.


M A T E R I A L S

Handle – Ancient Kauri from Northern New Zealand
Divider –Brass, bone, and Kauri
Shaft – Ancient Kauri from Northern New Zealand
Rubber tip