WHITEHORSE -- An 18-year-old aboriginal student combing ground left bare by the melting alpine snow pack last summer has found a broken shaft of a hunting dart estimated to be more than 9,000 years old. Cody Joe, with the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, was among students scouring the melting ice patches on Yukon mountains for clues into the way of life thousands of years ago.

Joe also found a leather hunting pouch sewn with sinew.

Radiocarbon dating has put the dart shaft at 9,300 years old and the pouch at 1,400 years old. They are being kept along with similar artifacts in a Whitehorse storage facility.

The dart shaft is in pieces, but when assembled, it measures about 38 centimetres long. It would have been part of a complete dart that would have resembled a thin spear and would have measured about two metres long, archeologists estimate.

Finding such important artifacts for aboriginal students can be significant, said Diane Strand, Champagne and Aishihik's heritage officer.

"We have had students go out there and they have had a real profound change about who they are and where they come from," Strand said at a news conference displaying the scores of artifacts that have been recovered from ice patches since 1997.

She pointed to one artifact that is unusual not because of its age -- the dart is only 1,260 years old -- but because of the insight it provides into the level of sophistication her ancestors possessed.

Down both sides of the dart are two feathers running parallel, sewn to the side of the shaft with sinew that's threaded through the quill of the feathers.

Strand said it's amazing to think that well over a millennium ago, her ancestors had the tools to pierce the quill with such a fine hole without damaging the aerodynamics of the feather.

The use of bows and arrows was thought to have begun in the Yukon about 1,300 years ago.

Greg Hare, a Yukon archeologist, said the 9,300-year-old dart would have fitted into an atlatl, a throwing board.