Today a local archeological dig revealed that roadwork on 520 dates back to at least the early 17th century.
“Excavation of the upper layers turned up unusual items: Bill Gates’ Lakeside class ring, a Frederick & Nelson credit card, even a strange ticket stub referring to the ‘Seattle Pilots,’ whoever they were,” said UW archeologist and professor Dr. Manfred Leitman. “But then we unearthed something fascinating! You see this fossilized skeleton? We call him ‘Asphalt Man.’ According to carbon-14 dating, he was deposited in the roadbed just east of Foster Island sometime between the Eocene and Epicene eras, coinciding with the DOT funding cycle. Evidently he was a tar-mixer for the construction crew. The marks on his body together with the position of his lunchbox suggest that he died because he wouldn’t share his Twinkies.”
Although a literally groundbreaking discovery, Professor Leitman said many other local roadwork sites are probably even older.
“It appears we’ve opened a can of paleolithic worms—now the engineers on I-405 say they have a Bronze Age specimen from that work site near Factoria, which means that might be the oldest roadwork site in the region,” Leitman said between taking puffs of a pipe. “A team down south is also claiming the British Museum may have stolen the Elgin Marbles from the I-5 construction zone in Fife.”
At press time, new evidence that people have been wanting cars out of Pike Place Market since the Pleistocene era was reportedly going to keep it that way forever in order to honor the millennia-old tradition of local never-ending debate.
