A ‘gold thread’ was reported in The Times of 22 June 1844 as having been found by quarrymen. According to the account, a few days earlier, the thread was found in a quarry close to Rutherford Mill (Raxton, Borders Region, Scotland) embedded in the rock at a depth of eight feet (1.8 m). The local rock is of Early Carboniferous date (360-320 million years old). The source of the story seems to have been The Kelso Chronicle, a newspaper local to the discovery, which had been sent the piece of thread.
Like all of these nineteenth-century stories, the details are purely anecdotal; there is no supporting evidence that the thread was really found by the workmen, no description of the thread is given and there is no means of knowing the circumstances of the discovery. How securely “embedded” was the thread? How long was it? How was the rock being quarried? Without answers to questions such as these, this anecdote remains precisely that: a tale with no supporting evidence that is difficult to take as serious evidence. And evidence for what? Those who use this type of curiosity often have vague agendas, which may include attempts to undermine our understanding of geological chronology, evidence that humanity has existed on earth for much longer than is usually believed, as evidence for alien visitors and so on.
Seems like golden thread would be a difficult commodity for work men to falsely produce or acquire. was anyone even making gold electrical wire in 1844? it’s also an expensive hoax, who ever places it, say the workmen, upon “discovering” it, can’t make any claim to it without raising suspicion. so you’re out the cost of what ever it takes to acquire gold thread in 1844. which isn’t even getting into how it could be embedded in the rock.
on the other hand, gold is one of the few stable metals, that if worked in the distant past could be expected to wait, in a stable fashion, for discovery untold millions of years later, depending of various factors.
and, for those who prefer alien explanations, gold wiring happens to be a commodity likely used in a space vessel. an alien explanation has many advantages, one being we don’t have to change our current chronology of human presence, if the artifact can be attributed to an extraterrestrial who just stopped by for a visit.
it would of course be wonderfully helpful if there was more information, such as: how long was the thread? how thick was it? how available was a substance like this at this time? where is it now? are there photos? etc. has anyone tried to track it down? maybe it’s still in someone’s collection.
We don’t actually know that the supposed gold thread even existed: all we have is a newspaper report, so your complaint that “it’s also an expensive hoax” doesn’t apply. Even if the thread did exist, how do we know that it was really gold? Might it have been pyrites or copper?