For the second time in a year, a team of divers emerged from Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin toting a remarkable piece of history. Nestled in a corrugated plastic bed and floating on two rafts was a 3,000-year-old canoe – the oldest canoe to be discovered in the entire Great Lakes region by 1,000 years, Wisconsin Historical Society archaeologists said. The people who lived along the shores of Lake Mendota are the predecessors of the Ho-Chunk Nation. Several tribal members called the canoe's retrieval a formal recognition of the history they always have known. "Our oral history dates us back for thousands upon thousands of years," Casey Brown, public relations officer for the Ho-Chunk Nation, said. Now, "there's scientific proof of the stories that we've been telling and just the longevity of our people in this area."