Yang Junxi is living the dream of every geek with a metal detector—except he didn't even need a metal detector. The 11-year-old boy from China's Jiangsu province was playing next to the Laozhoulin River in early July when he decided to wash his hands. As he dunked them into the water, he felt something graze his hand, pulled it out, and brought it home to show his dad, reports Xinhua . Now experts say "it" turns out to be a 3,000-year-old bronze sword, probably from either the Shang or Zhou dynasty—"the dawn of Chinese civilization," as the BBC puts it.