The Archaeology Iceberg Explained

Archeology is a fascinating field of science dedicated to unearthing humanity's shared past. For most people it's mainly about mummies and Stonehenge, but for archaeologists like me it's more than that. Today I change the explanation, I'm going to go deeper. on some of the strangest, darkest and just plain fascinating finds and stories in the history of archeology that the average person doesn't really get to hear about and I'm doing this in the

iceberg

meme format where at the top are the things that people generally know and as we get closer and closer to the bottom the topics will become more and more strange and more specific, are you ready? this is the

iceberg

of archeology the nose job of the sphinx this refers to the apparent absence of the great sphinx of giza the nose a popular legend claims that the nose was shot off with a cannonball by a pair of Napoleon Bonaparte's soldiers During the 19th century, however, this story is clearly false, as many illustrations show that the Sphinx already lacked a nose centuries before Napoleon was born; it is believed that the nose was intentionally removed at some point during the 19th century.

From the 3rd to the 10th century AD. He also once had a beard. They were aliens. This claim refers to the fringe ancient astronaut or alien conspiracy theory popularized by Eric vondenkin. The theory is essentially that ancient civilizations, i.e. non-European ones, could not have built or made. their technological advances without the help of a more advanced extraterrestrial civilization to teach them how to do it. Aliens apparently helped build everything from the pyramids to Stonehenge to the Nazca lines, because we were too stupid to do it ourselves. A five-thousand-year-old murder mystery is a reference. to otzi, the iceman, a naturally mummified human body dating back to 3300 BC.

C., was discovered encased in ice on the border between Austria and Italy with his clothes, skin and organs intact. It is perhaps one of the oldest and best preserved human specimens ever known. date scientists explored his colon and everything seen on live television the examinations of his body seem to show that otzi was murdered by an unknown assailant and abandoned in the snow thousands of years ago for unknown reasons it is a real case without resolve dead sea scrolls these are possibly one of the most important archaeological finds of the last century. They are a collection of Hebrew manuscripts discovered in a desert cave system and in the West Bank.

Originally by a goat herder. This collection of documents consists of some of the oldest surviving copies of the Hebrew Bible. or old testament dating from approximately 408 BC. C. to 318 AD. C. giant skeletons. This is a reference to Nephilim conspiracy theories on the Internet, where dozens of poorly Photoshopped images of giant skeletons are presented as evidence of a building-sized race of humans in our distant past. man, this is the lowenmench, a prehistoric figure of a man with a lion's head carved from mammoth ivory and dating back to between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago. It is one of the oldest examples of figurative art and some say it could be a bear's head. man instead of a lion, but who knows curse of king tut this refers to the superstitious belief that the opening of the tomb belonging to the boy pharaoh tutankhamun in 1923 cast a curse on the excavation team and other visitors, which resulted in many premature deaths actually.

Of the 58 people who were present when the tomb was opened, only eight died prematurely within a dozen years; many of those deaths were the result of external factors such as malaria and fever and were probably not related to the excavation at all. the tomb lived a long and healthy life the shroud of turin the shroud of turin is a controversial linen cloth containing the negative image of a bearded man many have claimed that the cloth was used to wrap jesus christ after his crucifixion, by numerous Scientific tests carried out on the fabric have shown that it is most likely a counterfeit product from the Middle Ages and not an authentic relic.

Seven wonders, according to ancient historians, there were seven legendary monuments built by man in ancient times and which the Greeks and Romans marveled at for their beauty and impressive scale, all but one the great pyramid of giza has been destroyed or lost in time the terracotta army this is an immense collection of terracotta sculptures representing the vast army of qin shi-huan, the first emperor of china, and buried with him for the purpose of protecting him in the afterlife Oak Island Oak Island is an island in Nova Scotia that has been the focus of pseudoarchaeologists for several hundred years, many enthusiasts have become convinced that anything from alien technology to pirate gold to the Ark of the Covenant from Shakespeare's lost plays exists beneath The island in the so-called money well search has been fruitless for many decades as no significant treasure or artifact has been discovered despite the claims of its defenders, there is probably nothing there like the tomb of King Tut It is believed that There is a curse around the site, however this has not been proven, it was not aliens, if there is one thing that archaeologists have discovered it is that humans are cunning and intelligent insects who constantly find unique and ingenious ways to achieve a goal just because era in white does not mean that the walking heads were aliens in 2012, a team of archaeologists successfully transported a replica of a 5-ton moai head using only ropes and manpower as an experiment to replicate the methods they used the inhabitants of Easter Island in the past. they could have transported the heads themselves no extraterrestrials were required internal ramp theory this refers to one of several competing methods by which the great pyramid of giza was built the internal ramp theory postulates that an internal spiral ramp exists within of the pyramid itself and assisted in hauling building materials during construction there is archaeological evidence to support this view, although it has not been completely accepted, there is apparently a universal tendency for humans to draw these small rockets on everything that augustus below From the stairs, this is the Moroi Augustus, an originally decapitated bronze head.

Belonging to a statue of the famous Roman emperor, it was discovered under the stairs of an ancient Cushite temple in what is now Sudan in 24 BC. The head was cut off from its original body in Roman Egypt by invading Kushite soldiers who took it across the border. As a war prize in Kush as a gesture of victory, the head was buried under the temple stairs so that the faithful would symbolically step on the face of the defeated emperor. However, this insult had the unintended consequence of preserving it for thousands of years better than almost any other.

Another Roman bronze, in particular the head retains its decorative inlaid eyes often missing in other specimens. Plus, the eyes look like top quality material. Cave paintings are movies. This is an interesting theory about the extra heads and limbs commonly depicted in prehistoric cave paintings. In the case of animals, the theory speculates that these duplicated body parts were intentionally drawn to create the illusion of movement. The light from the torches would distort the shadows along the cave walls and make the images appear to come to life through a primitive form of early human animation. Here, throughout history, humans have always had a tendency to leave silly, silly inscriptions that simply state that they were here.

There are literally thousands of examples of these works in progress. The best way for archaeologists to learn how people of the past did things is to see what they just did. They were given up and left incomplete or abandoned, for example, there are dozens of unfinished moai or Easter Island heads and Egyptian obelisks chiseled into the rock but never completely finished, often due to accidental damage during construction or a simple lack of enthusiasm to finish them. Some of these things are still waiting to be finished after thousands of years. I thought my procrastination was bad. Europeans ate mummies from the Middle Ages until relatively recently.

Wealthy Europeans consumed the flesh of Egyptian mummies by grinding it into a powder called mamiya. This powder was believed to have great medicinal properties and could treat gout, epilepsy and cataracts. King Richard found him in a parking lot. Remember that an archaeologist once dug straight out of the skeleton of King Richard III, the last king of the Plantagenet dynasty, under the parking lot. In other times, ancient statues and buildings were painted colorfully, although many of the ancient statues and buildings that survive today appear to be of rather drab stone or smooth white marble, in the past they would have looked very different.

Closer analysis of these monuments has shown that many would have been painted colorfully. They were beautifully painted in their heyday with faint traces of their pigments still detectable, the ancient world was indeed very bright and vibrant, from this statue of Augustus to the entire Parthenon, passing through the Aztec temples and the face of the Sphinx, everything would have been full of color, but due to time, many of these pigments have long faded hello puppy kv-55 is akhenaten refers to the interpretation of the mummy and the valley of the king's tomb kv-55 is the infamous pharaoh monotheist Akhenaten DNA evidence appears to support this long-suspected identity As the individual in this tomb was both the son of Amun Hotep III and the father of Tutankhamun, the shadow of the creeping feathered serpent during the spring and autumn equinoxes in the Mayan temple of Kukulcán in Chichén Itzá, the sun hits the pyramid in the right way. which causes a series of triangular shadows to slide down the main staircase, this effect only lasts a few minutes throughout the year, but through this clever architectural arrangement, the dark body of the feathered serpent god appears to slide up to his fearsome carved head.

Jesus with the head of a donkey, this is the graffiti of Alexa Menos, a graffiti in Rome that could be the oldest representation of Jesus, dated around 200 AD. The graffiti shows a young man worshiping a crucified figure with the head of a donkey. An inscription accompanies the image that says in Greek, Alexa Least worships her god. It is believed that the drawing was created to mock an early Christian named Alexa Minos. The figure with the donkey head is an insulting caricature of Jesus of Nazareth. Mesoamerican grills among several Pre-contact cultures in Mesoamerica, the teeth of the elites were drilled and inlaid with precious stones and jewels.

These ancient grills were a type of status symbol as well as an enormous health hazard, so much of what they had been lost has been lost. has survived is only an incredibly small fraction of what actually existed in the past roman bikinis there are several well-preserved roman floor mosaics depicting a group of women wearing bikini-like sports outfits voynich manuscript the voynich manuscript is a rather mysterious document Written in an unknown writing system, it consists of almost 240 pages and is filled with illustrations of fictional plants, creatures and mythical people. It has been carbon dated to the early 15th century, although its exact origin is a bit hazy, unclear. who wrote the manuscript and why it seems likely that it was written in some kind of cipher or code that only the author understood andean brain surgery several civilizations in the andes mountains performed skull and brain surgery and were actually quite good at it , as evidenced by the high survival rate of patients, which is estimated at around 90 percent. gospel of judas this refers to one of the lost gospels I found in the Nag Hamadi library a collection of religious texts belonging to an ancient but now extinct sect of Christianity.

The only fragmentary copy of the Gospel of Judas that survives is one of the most intriguing documents, as it tells an alternative narrative of the life of Jesus. crucifixion and presents Judas not as a traitor but as a loyal servant to the end. Undeciphered languages ​​around the world there are dozens, if not hundreds, of inscriptions on everything from clay tablets to ancient rocks written in systems of glyphs and symbols that are still indecipherable. For modern experts, although we would very much like to, we currently have no way of reading what these inscriptions say because the languages ​​in which they are written have been lost to time, from Rongorongo on Easter Island to Linear A in the minoan crete, scripturesSomalis and Singapore stone to the writing on the back of the hungry statue of Saquara, all of these are completely illegible writings and they still hold their secrets, at least for the moment, that's the main penny.

There is a medieval Norwegian coin that was found in what is now the state. of maine in the united states if this artifact is genuine it would support the idea that the normans of europe had not only crossed the atlantic ocean in their ships but had also had contact and carried out trade with the native americans centuries before rock music of christopher Columbus several fragments of Paleolithic flutes have been discovered in caves dating back tens of thousands of years. These ivory and animal bone flutes were made by some of our earliest ancestors during the Ice Age.

Archaeologists have reconstructed them to determine what Stone Age music would have sounded like. It is eerie to imagine hearing its sad notes echoing throughout the forest in the darkness of winter. I want to hear some melodies. The cat on the roof, as shown in this Roman tile. Even after two thousand years, cats have never changed. Hey, don't touch that mask. to an image of a carved green stone mask discovered beneath the pyramid of the sun in teotihuacan, mexico, back in 2011 due to its resemblance to the stone mask and jojo's bizarre adventure and the mask and the mask, many people in line joked that the archaeologist should leave the mask alone because disturbing it would end the world ah, that might have been right faces of the dead in roman egypt mummies of people belonging to the upper class were usually buried with very detailed portraits of Their faces alive, many of these coffin portraits have survived us over the centuries and are incredibly realistic showing a wide range of facial shapes, hairstyles and personalities.

Ocean man in the summer of 1964 the nets of an Italian fishing boat caught something in the Adriatic coast this is what they found Fishermen had discovered an ancient bronze sculpture encased in centuries of Thorough cleaning of the patina and sea foam revealed that the statue was an agile and beautiful athlete and, consequently, it is now known as the victorious young man. It was sculpted sometime during the Hellenistic period, possibly by the famous Greek artist Lysippus. The sculpture probably ended up off the coast. of Italy on a Roman ship that sank in a storm, although the remains of the ship itself have not been located meteoric iron before the Iron Age it was to be expected that iron would be scarce humans had no means to produce it from raw mineral, however, iron from Meteorites provided people in the past with a very rare opportunity to make metal tools and weapons.

Scientific evidence has shown that artifacts such as King Tut's dagger and the tips of some Inuit spears were in fact made from iron extracted from space rocks fallen from the sky. the nazis took up the spear of longinus during the 1930s several nazi leaders became very interested in the field of archeology heinrich himmler gave the green light to several searches for legendary places and artifacts such as the city of atlantis and the ark of the covenant apparently unsuccessfully one object that was supposedly recovered by the nazis was the spear of longinus or sacred spear the spear supposedly used to pierce the body of jesus on the cross the imperial insignia of the holy roman empire dubiously claimed to have acquired the spear in the middle ages in 1938 after the annexation of austria the relic was taken to adolf hitler and displayed in germany for a short time after the war ended however the sacred spear was returned to vienna crown of nails well maybe not the iron crown of lombardy is a metal crown made during the early Middle Ages for an Italian Christian King, a band on the crown was supposedly made from one of the iron nails used in the crucifixion of Jesus, however, an examination of the hat has revealed that it is 99 silver, not iron, which means the legendary story surrounding it is almost definitely false.

Ramsay's second passport. In 1976, the 3,000-year-old mummy of Pharah Ramses II was flown from Cairo, Egypt, to Paris, France, so that she could receive much-needed restoration. A popular rumor on the internet claims that in order to leave and enter the two countries Ramses needed to be issued a passport, this is only half true as although a lot of paperwork was created for him, an actual physical passport was never produced. This image circulating on the Internet is a clever Photoshop golden eye on char sucde's site, a skeleton belonging to A woman owns the oldest artificial eyeball ever found.

The eyeball was covered in a thin layer of gold and was worn regularly as long as the woman was alive. Old Barbies. Ancient children's dolls have been discovered at various archaeological sites around the world. Some of these dolls are really creepy looking and incredibly similar to modern Barbie dolls, with articulated limbs and decorative clothing that can be changed. Gay caveman. This was an incredibly bad piece of journalism. Well, in 2011, in the Czech Republic, archaeologists discovered a prehistoric skeleton that appears to have been biologically male. but had been buried in a ceremonial manner that was normally reserved for women in this society, leading the archaeologist to speculate that this individual could have represented an example of a third gender or an individual with a gender role that was neither completely masculine nor completely feminine.

Something common in many cultures throughout history, third gender burials like this are actually quite common in

archaeology

, particularly in North America and pagan societies, now the media completely misinterpreted the story, the article news outlet shouted a gay caveman when the original archaeologist said nothing about what it could be. It is more accurate to think of this individual as a transgender caveman or a non-binary caveman. That said, there are some archaeological finds that could depict two individuals in same-sex relationships, but as with many things in

archaeology

, it's difficult to know for sure. This is a stone relief in the Egyptian temple of Hathor that vaguely resembles a modern light bulb.

The relief is actually a depiction of a scene from Egyptian mythology involving a snake emerging from a lotus flower. Nearby hieroglyphics confirmed this interpretation that the Scooby-Doo mug refers to. these really amazing greek terracotta vases made in the shape of realistic dog heads the hobby lobby smuggling scandal oh wow this is pretty cool okay so as of 2009 representatives of the popular arts store chain and crafts hobby lobby you know which store your grandmother buys minion stickers and scented candles from ancient Iraqi artifacts purchased $1.6 million worth from dealers in the United Arab Emirates, literally thousands of Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals.

The green Christian evangelical family. The owners of Hobby lobby want to display many of these artifacts. in its Bible Museum, a museum that has often been criticized for its, shall we say, lenient views toward historical accuracy. Now you might be wondering how these artifacts from Iraq ended up in a completely different country and I'm glad you asked because it's a hobby. lobby supposedly sure didn't, as it happens that most items lacked much or no supporting documentation of their previous ownership, which is crucial to ensuring that an artifact was obtained legitimately and not through, I don't know , looting well, guess what hobby lobby? purchased over 5,000 illegally looted artifacts seen after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the country was left in complete disarray and looters quickly began plundering Iraq's archaeological sites and museums selling the stolen artifacts to black market dealers , these items would then resurface outside.

In the country, its shady origins were not questioned by future buyers. We know that some looters were simply local civilians just trying to make money to feed their families; However, others have been connected to more malicious organizations in 2011. US customs agents seized several shipments of artifacts from the hobby lobby afterwards. Correctly suspecting that they had originally been acquired through illegal means it is now debatable whether the parties involved were aware of the illicit origins of these artifacts, but let's say that they had been accidentally mislabeled in custom statements as samples of pottery and clay tiles. of Türkiye in Israel and not of Iraq or the United Arab Emirates.

Archaeologists have since determined that several of the pieces Hobby Lobby originally purchased came from the National Museum of Iraq, which was rather violently looted less than a decade before the United States government prosecuted Hobby Lobby. due to the scandal and in 2017 the company reached an agreement to return more than 5,500 devices to Iraq and have to pay three million fines. Cats domesticated themselves. This is a popular theory about how wild cats were domesticated into house pets. Human farmers began creating food stores for their surplus crops, attracting mice and other pests. The cats, attracted by the high concentration of easy prey, began to live near human homes until gradually, over time, the cats learned to live with us and we simply let them hang.

Several genetic studies on prehistoric human remains in Europe have revealed that several of the first Europeans looked very different from modern Europeans. Cheddar Man, for example, was a 9,000-year-old man from England who, according to genetics, had dark skin, dark hair, and light-colored eyes. The giant is the name given to the largest moai or Easter Island head ever. built, however, it was never lifted or transported from its original quarry due to the absolute impracticality of its size. Pre-Columbian automobile, the wheel and axle are often considered one of the first and most essential inventions for humanity, as they made transportation much easier, especially over long distances;

However, in some regions, such as Mesoamerica, it appears that wheels and axles never gained such prominence. Oh, the Mesoamericans invented them, but it seems they only used them as children's toys, they never incorporated them into larger cars or wagons. The reasons for this are unclear, but it seems that it might have something to do with the fact that Mesoamerica lacked large domesticated animals to use. as beasts of burden for gathering said inventions, so they had little practical use for them. Green Sahara There was a period in prehistory when much of the Sahara Desert, one of the most inhospitable places on earth, was not a sandy wasteland, but was once a lush place and there is evidence of wet grasslands from this period in prehistoric rock art showing that giraffes, rhinos, elephants and other animals once lived in this region.

People swam in freshwater lakes and had thriving communities here, but they died out or moved elsewhere once the desert sands washed away in ancient trade. Archaeological finds have revealed that the world of the past was surprisingly much more interconnected than previously thought, although it was difficult for a single person to travel far from home, in these times objects could travel great distances through a complex network of trade. . We found a statuette of Buddha. in medieval Scandinavia, ancient Greek tapestries depicting centaurs in China, and carvings of Hindu deities in Roman Pompeii, products could be sourced thousands of miles from their original locations, but let's just say the shipping times were quite a long wait.

Prehistoric shark attack the remains of this three thousand year old Japanese hunter-gatherer show that he had been attacked by a tiger or a great white shark at some point neolithic gummy bear this amber amulet was found in a Polish swamp its provenance It can't really be attested, but it seems that it was dropped by a prehistoric hunter at some point during the Neolithic period. It also looks very tasty. A wooden ship under the World Trade Center. After the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, a massive construction effort was made to rebuild the destroyed area of ​​the city in 2010 an excavation site revealed that 20 feet below street level of the new york city there was the intact hole of a wooden ship dating back to the 18th century pygmy mammoth in egypt there is a mural in an egyptian tomb the tomb of rec murray that appears to depict a small hairy elephant on a leash there is some kind of fringe theory that the animal representedIt is not an elephant but a woolly mammoth, although it is not entirely impossible, this is probably not the case, according to my previous tablet four thousand years ago, a Babylonian administrator wrote a complaint. on a cuneiform tablet that says I can't get water for my sesame field the sesame will die don't tell me later you didn't write to me the sesame is visibly dying ibi Ilabrot saw it that the sesame will die and I have warned you you lift sun refers to the infamous baibon stone, a large block of granite found near olympia, greece, dating to the 6th century bce.

C., the stone has been engraved presumably by a man called bibon with an inscription that reads vibon son of fola has lifted me above his head with one hand, can we take a moment to appreciate how goodbye Bond wrote his inscription in the perspective of first stone viking person was a job description an extensive genetic study of remains from the viking age revealed that quote the vikings were an incredibly genetically diverse group? and not the necessarily homogeneous people often thought to have come from all over Europe and is perhaps best thought of as a job description as a pirate or mercenary rather than an ethnic group that stalks fema in the city of navagarad in russia, they found archaeologists spelling task of a seven-year-old medieval boy called hymn Anfield was obviously not interested in his task as he scribbled all over it.

I went into more depth on this story in a previous video, so you should check it out on Caligula's coffee table in the 1st Century AD. The notorious Roman Emperor Caligula ordered the construction of two of the largest wooden ships ever built in ancient times. These pleasure barges were some of the most expensive and technologically advanced of their time and were said to host the emperor's lavish parties and orgies. The ships eventually sank to the bottom of Lake Nemi, where they remained for almost 2,000 years in the 1920s. However, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini ordered the lake to be drained among the remains of the recovered ships.

The two Nimi ships were successfully rescued and eventually accommodated on their own. museum, but in 1944 an Allied attack resulted in a fire that eventually burned the museum, unfortunately almost completely destroying the remains of the original ships in the process, few managed to survive until 2017, when the New York prosecutor's office confiscated a panel of mosaic from a private collector in New York City the artifact turned out to be a Roman mosaic used to decorate the floor of one of the enemy ships that survived the fire had been sold by an Italian aristocratic family to antique dealers in America the owner of the mosaic apparently there was I have no idea how special it was and I was using it for years as a coffee table knowing what Caligula probably did on that ship.

He just hoped they would clean it up a bit before using it. It's a ritual. It refers to the tendency of archaeologists to explain something like. an artifact or ritual burial custom, which basically means we don't know what the hell this thing is or what it was used for. It's a vague, general term that doesn't really mean that brushing your teeth can't be considered in the end. ritual and a lot of other things mormonism the religion of mormonism has this kind of strange relationship with archeology the founder of mormonism joseph smith was an amateur archaeologist in 1823 smith claimed to have discovered with the help of an angel an ancient book of plates Buried gold on a hill in Manchester, New York, Smith claimed they were the remains of a bygone civilization of Israelites called Nephites who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in ancient times.

Now, in retrospect of modern archeology and genetics, this claim of an ancient transatlantic crossing is simply not true. It is supported by the evidence, but it is possible that Smith discovered the remains of the very real Mississippi Native American culture that existed in the eastern part of North America between 800 and 1600 AD. These Native Americans knew a little about metalworking and decorative crafts. copper plates with glyphs and designs perhaps smith found some of these copper plates and misidentified them as israelite the schliemann level this level is dedicated to the story of one of the founders of modern archeology the man who American archaeologists really they love to hate heinrich schliemann and oh boy was this wild guy heinrich schliemann was a mid to late 19th century german businessman who had a passion for the works of the ancient greek poet homer and used his great wealth to finance his hobby of digging up ancient sites throughout the Aegean Sea, Schliemann's lifelong dream. was to hunt the legendary city of trojan mentioned in homer's iliad in the odyssey at the time this was considered nonsense until the late 19th century troy and the trojan war was largely considered a fantasy or myth without any historical basis, Schliemann disagreed and believed that the war was a real historical event and that the city was at one time a real place.

After some research, he identified the site of Hyserlick in what is now Turkey as historic Troy and began excavating it in the 1870s with the most delicate of dynamite archaeological methods, the crazy thing is, he was right. Hisserlik is seen by modern archaeologists as historical Troy, unfortunately for us, however Schliemann was the one who found it first and his explosive methods were devastating destroying much of Hyserlick's important historical context forever, for example we now know that The ground level that Schliemann identified as the Trojan War was too old to be Homer's Troy, and in order to access this older level, Schliemann had to recklessly remove the younger lairs above it effectively. .

Erasing all traces of the real Trojan War in the process, Schliemann also kept few records or maps of his excavations, so he took little care in documenting the location of any objects or finds. He also had this tendency to claim that any artifact he found must have belonged to him. to someone historically significant calling things like King Priam's treasures or the mask of Egaminon based on absolutely nothing, he literally just said: Yeah, that sure sounds good, source, I made it all up, but wait, it gets worse. Schliemann smuggled several of the most valuable into Troy. treasures of Anatolia and the Ottoman Empire only knew about this because Schliemann let his wife Sofia wear the priceless 4,000-year-old jewels in public at similar parties and such.

Upon learning of this, the Ottoman government understandably forbade him. Schliemann dug into his country and tried to sue him for the gold, but he simply fled to another country and unearthed the ancient city of Maisine in Greece. Everyone agrees that Schliemann was pretty bad, pretty bad, even for the time when the field of archeology was still in its heyday. childhood, the amount of damage Schliemann caused to science through his needlessly careless methods is immeasurable, to say the least, we will never be able to obtain the knowledge he destroyed when Schliemann's story basically serves as a textbook example of how not to do archeology oh Schliemann, you rap chives, kings. of earth refers to a rather obscure fresco at the Umayyad caliphate site of Kuzra Amra.

It is said to represent the six kings of the known world at the time the fresco was badly damaged, so it is difficult to say who all of them would have been, but of the ones we know it was the Visigoth king of Hispania roderick los anigas del kingdom of aksum najashi an anonymous byzantine emperor and an anonymous sassanian emperor the identity of the last two kings is a topic of much debate but it is speculated that they are chinese emperor and king of india but this remains a conjecture. bronze age crop top. This is a reference to the ectvent girl's well-preserved clothes.

This Bronze Age girl was buried in a wooden coffin in what is now Denmark. she survived 3,400 years ago. The clothing consists of a loose bodice that she left to bear with a short linen skirt with a large decorative disc. A kind of bronze age waifu. The Arabic coin for the Pope refers to a rather unique gold coin minted by the English King Apha of Mercia in 774. ad the coin appears to have been a blatant copy of a coin minted by an Islamic caliph with the words offa rex clumsily added The engraver who produced it did his best to copy the original Arabic inscription but obviously did not understand the language, so the text contains many grammatical and typographical errors.

It's unclear why this strange coin was made in the first place, but one theory posits that it was a gift to the Pope from the Vatican, which is a little funny when you realize that the Arabic letters are read there. There is no god but Allah, I guess that probably wouldn't have gone down well with the Christian Pope. Medieval Panties In 2008, archaeologists discovered a secret chamber in Langberg Castle, Austria, inside was a hidden cache of clothing dating back to around the 15th century, among these. The garments were some of the best preserved medieval underwear, including four linen bras.

This was a bit surprising, as it was previously thought that women's bras like these with two separate support cups wouldn't be invented until much later in the Victorian era. I cite a missing link in the history of women's underwear. It's also pretty funny that the linen panties found in the chamber probably didn't belong to a woman but to a guy, hey, I get it, I'm more of a brief sky, hair gel, the clone. The Caveman is a well-preserved Iron Age bog body found in Ireland. Analysis of his body showed that the man liked to comb his hair using tree resin as a primitive type of hair gel.

Coffin juice when the so-called black sarcophagus was opened in Alexandria, Egypt. In 2018, media reported that it was full of bones floating in a soup of dark red mud. The story and the accompanying photographs quickly captured the public's attention, perhaps not in the best way. Many online petitions circulated demanding that archaeologists allow people to drink the juice from the coffin, the juice in the coffin was actually sewage from the underground drains of Alexandria, so IMHO you probably shouldn't drink it before contact. Dogs before European contact. The indigenous people of North and South America had their own unique breeds of dogs not found anywhere else in the world;

However, aside from Chihuahuas and a handful of other breeds, all of these dogs became extinct after European contact, likely due to disease and competition with European dogs. I also made a whole video on these guys so check it out. Voskop Man Fossil remains of a prehistoric human being were discovered in South Africa in 1913 and, according to anthropologists of the time, he apparently had a huge brain. The police chief, as he was later known, had a cranial capacity estimated between 1700 and 2000 cc by comparison. The average human being today has a cranial capacity of around 1400 to 1500 cc. Now, re-examining history, it is difficult to determine the truth of this statement.

The fossil was very fragmentary, so I would attribute this unusual cranial capacity to researcher error. The Olmec heads were actually thrones. It appears that at least some of the famous Olmec heads of Central America were not originally intended to be heads. At least two of the colossal skulls show unmistakable signs of having been recarved; They originally appeared to have been stone chairs or thrones before being Resculpted Star Wars Archeology For decades, people have been searching in some of the most remote parts of the world not for remains of lost civilizations, but for artifacts from a galaxy far, far away that seen after filming the iconic Star Wars film franchise.

The set crew for several of the films apparently simply left many of the original props at their filming locations, where they remained abandoned for years. Avid film fans have tracked down several of these artifacts, from the charred ruins of Uncle Owen's Ontario house to the fiberglass skeleton. From the Krait Dragon in the deserts of Tunisia to the fragmentary remains of the Jabba Barge in Buttercup Valley, Arizona, sadly many of these unique pieces of film history have been destroyed by the elements or looted by locals and resold. to private collectors the stain that there once was there an ancient Greek statue called Aphrodite of Kindos was supposedly so attractive and realistic that at night young people would sneak into the temple that housed it and let's say that they used it inappropriately according to legend this It happened so often that over time it became a dark spot visible on the statue.

Now we cannot verify the veracity of this statement because,Although we have numerous Roman copies, the original statue has not been found and most likely never will, but who knows, the statue in its possibly legendary taint could still be out there. boba fett mayans the helmets of the mayan ritual boxers look a lot like the mandalorian helmets from star wars these boxers use giant, pointy cotch cells as boxing gloves in their very bloody sport the cauldron boys there is an ancient, dark tomb in what is now germany commemorating two brothers named saluta and mcgrethro were persian cataphracts or heavily armed knight soldiers like these were often degradingly called boiler boys because they tended to boil in the sun under all that metal plate these particular boiler boys apparently They fought on the Roman side against the barbarians in Germany Around 235 AD, the two brothers seemed to have originally come from all over Mesopotamia and served under the Sassanian king Adeshir.

They were probably mercenaries who sold their services to anyone who needed strong fighters under Ardeshir. They could have traveled as far as the Indus before serving. Under Rome defending its borders on the Rhine, this simple tomb and truth tells the story of two brothers who traveled together across the width of the known world and fought dozens of brutal and bloody battles only to die in a swamp so far away. at home and fighting for an empire, they probably weren't particularly interested in fun times in Pompeii. This refers to an image of a cast belonging to a man killed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

Originally uploaded to Pompeii's Instagram which sounds super weird when I say it, this image started circulating online with people claiming that the man was having fun at the time he died, as it turns out no, he's not giving it one last blow before the man probably simply ended up in this position because his arms and legs flexed after death due to the intense heat of the volcano's pyroclastic flow. sweet potatoes the common narrative we are taught in school is that north and south america and their native inhabitants were isolated from the rest of the world for tens of thousands of years and it was not until Christopher Columbus crossed the atlantic ocean in 1492 that this isolation was broken, However, something is changing this view, something that would not be expected from sweet potatoes, sweet potatoes, sweet potatoes are a crop native to America and were cultivated by Native Americans.

Interestingly, for thousands of years, archaeological evidence has shown that sweet potatoes were grown on some of the most distant Pacific islands as early as 1000 AD. The Polynesians of the Cook Islands, Easter Island, Hawaii and even New Zealand were growing sweet potatoes centuries before Christopher Columbus or any other European knew about the Americas, how these sweet potatoes came from Central or South America to these islands in the ocean peaceful, it's a mystery, these potatoes are some of the strongest evidence that something real could have existed. interactions and trade between Polynesians and South Americans long before European contact, in addition to this, the word for sweet potato in Polynesian languages ​​in South American languages ​​is suspiciously similar, suggesting a shared origin, perhaps some canoes from the Polynesian islands, such as the island Easter, they traveled to South America or maybe the dispersal of this crop occurred naturally and the language issue is a strange coincidence, the point is that we don't know exactly and the entire transpacific debate on sweet potatoes remains as this type of unsolved mystery: the return of hammurabi's shoe this refers to one of mari's letters a series of clay tablets in syria documenting written conversations sent and received by king zimri lim a rather curious letter records an interaction between king zimri lim and king of babylon hammurabi yes, hammarami in the letter says that hammurabi received a pair of cretan leather boots or sandals as a gift from zimri lim, but Hammurabi returned them.

These boots would have been quite a stylish and expensive gift, especially to carry around until now, so the question arises as to why Hammurabi returned them if they were too small or too big for his feet, as historian air klein points out, he could at least having given them away again, he had to do it to him refers to the Guinol lioness, a supposedly 5,000-year-old Mesopotamian statue supposedly found near Baghdad, Iraq, is best known as the most expensive antiquity sold at auction in 2007. sold for $57.2 million why I have no idea don't ask me someone must really like their 5,000 year old furries throwing a king's arm in the trash possibly the oldest royal remains ever found was a skeletal arm found in the sworn king's tomb by Egyptologist flinders petri petre gave the arm to fellow egyptologist emil brooch who supposedly quickly threw it away thinking it was too much of a crab for the museum to display sabertooth lips, well this is refers to a Paleolithic figurine.

From the French prehistoric site of Izuwitz, the figurine has been lost since at least the early 20th century, so all we have of it are drawings based on the original. It represents a species of big cat, but what type of big cat is a point of controversy. Most think it is a representation of a cave lion, but a small minority have postulated that it could represent a saber-toothed cat, specifically a homotherium, which is definitely the most intriguing possibility, as it would be the only representation of a eyewitness of such a creature while it was still alive, if this is indeed the In case another question arises, why are there no saber teeth?

This oddity has spawned a theory that, contrary to most pop culture depictions, saber-toothed cats had full lips that actually hid their long fangs in life, but this is something of an evidence-based extrapolation. quite faint. cursed grilled cheese this refers to a pretty funny glass thread where users wanted to use the combined ingredients of the world's oldest cheese, a 2000-year-old piece of butter, and 500-year-old chunks of Jordanian bread in an ancient uncovered non-stick frying pan in italy to make the oldest grilled cheese in the world the lost statue of the giant aztec serpent this refers to a very enigmatic and little understood artifact in 1824 the english naturalist william bullock held an exhibition at the egyptian hall museum in london, england, Titled Ancient Mexico this exhibition consisted mainly of Aztec artifacts acquired by oxen, such as authentic pottery and codices, however, the main features of ancient Mexico were several large-scale plaster casts of Aztec statues, these molds were based on stone originals that They date back to Mexico, there are two contemporary sketches from this exhibition and we can see that almost all the statues are known to everyone except one that is the most striking of the plaster statues is this incredibly large and fearsome snake with the head of a man in its mouth There are suspiciously no references to this giant Aztec snake.

The statue outside Bullock's exhibit and the original on which it was based have not been found. Some have said that it could have been manufactured or invented by Bullock, but this seems unlikely to me. We know that almost everything else in the exhibition was based on authentic Aztec specimens, many of which we still have - except this one - even the plaster cast appears to have disappeared, as contemporary sources report that it was sold to a private collector after that ended the exhibition and was never seen again, but how does anything work? this great loss or misplacement it is very strange and crazy that this huge snake statue has disappeared from history and no one knows any details about it or where it went hoping that it is still collecting dust in the basement of some old English mansion.

At this moment, waiting to be discovered, huge cookie jars, this refers to the plane of jars and laos, scattered in the valleys and foothills of the Shanquan Plateau, there are thousands of stone jars, some small and others truly giants, were built by an unknown prehistoric culture between 1240 and 660 BC. C., for an even more mysterious purpose, some human skeletons were buried around the jars, while others were found inside them. Some show signs of cremation, so perhaps the jars were prehistoric crematoria, most jars are unadorned and lack inscriptions or images. Except for one that has a pictogram of a frog-like humanoid, the plan of the vessels is truly an archaeological mystery, they obviously served a religious or spiritual function for people of the past, but we can't really say much beyond that the idol of Indiana Jones' gold is fake In the first Indiana Jones movie, the fictional archaeologist takes a golden idol from an abandoned temple somewhere in South America.

This accessory is actually based on the actual Dumarton Oaks birthing figure. This figure is said to be a pre-contact work of art depicting an Aztec. goddess giving birth now the Dumarton Oaks figure has come under scrutiny and could very well be a clever forgery. The provenance or origins of the artifact cannot be confirmed because it first appears on the shelves of an antique store in Paris, France. Furthermore, recent microscopic analysis of the artifact has shown that the incisions and holes were probably made with modern tools, not ancient ones. This is an incredibly similar situation to the infamous crystal skulls supposedly discovered in Mesoamerica.

Stone age. Personal massagers. Several stone artifacts with interesting shapes have been found. At prehistoric sites around the world, some were probably simply ceremonial or artistic in their purposes, while others appear to have been used for something else by our early ancestors. Yes, I'm glad he's wearing gloves. The Venus figures are prehistoric selfies. This refers to a theory. Introduced by anthropologists McCoyd and McDermott to explain the puzzling Venus figures, a collection of Stone Age figurines with large breasts and hips and often lacking a head or face, scientists suggest that Venuses look that way because they were made by prehistoric women who looked at themselves. bodies according to them without mirrors the first humans had to rely on their first person perspective to describe themselves and the reason why many of the figures lack heads or faces is because the artist did not have mirrors to see their own faces to last straw mcdermott paper If these fantastic visual experiments had been carried out which essentially consisted of photographs taken from the first-person perspective of a woman looking at her own naked body, other anthropologists have criticized this interpretation because prehistoric humans would obviously have had access to streams and puddles that could have been used as mirrors.

The last maki wattle The maki wattle of Mesoamerica was one of the most powerful weapons in history. It basically consisted of a wooden club held in one hand with several obsidian blades as sharp as steel razors embedded in its sides. Said to be so sharp that some Spanish conquistadors reported it could sever a horse's head with a single blow, although this might be a bit of an exaggeration, the makiwato was the weapon of choice for countless elite Aztec, Mayan and Toltec warriors for centuries. , so it might be a bit shocking to learn that Until recently there was not a single surviving makiwattle dating back to the pre-Columbian era.

Oh, there were replicas made centuries after European contact, but there are no authentic specimens before the last pre-Columbian makiwattle was apparently housed in the royal armory of Madrid after Hernán Cortés. He sent it back to Spain as a war prize after his conquest of the Aztec empire. This is where things get a little confusing and confusing. The makiwato in question appears in an armory catalog in 1837 and in a photograph taken at the end of the 19th century. along with Japanese samurai armor and a Persian shield and, according to this image, the Madrid makiwatal appears much longer than any previously known, almost resembling the bow sword of Guts's golden age, some experts have suggested that This specimen is found in the Royal Armory of Madrid.

It represented a rare two-handed version of the weapon, almost like a European long sword. The armory, along with the last unusual maki, burned down in 1884, meaning this elusive two-handed variant has been lost to time; Some have suggested that it could have served a purely ceremonial use, but with no artifacts to examine, it is difficult to say thankfully, however, a second and perhaps even a third authentic pre-Columbian macchiato was recently unveiled within the museum of the largest temple in Mexico, which again increases the number of known surviving maki. one and sucheven twice since 1884 and there you have it, the archeology iceberg.

I hope you enjoyed and learned something new. Tell me what you thought of some of these dark and strange trivia. I simply have love and passion for this unique subject. and diverse field of science, it is surprising how much hard work archaeologists around the world have done to advance our understanding of the past. Definitely feel free to share your weird specialized archaeological tidbits because I obviously couldn't talk about all of them on this list and I had to. leaves a lot of things out, okay, thank you very much for watching this installment of the path explanation.

I hope to see you next time. If there's a prize for bad judgment, I guess I already won. No man deserves the aggravation that has been ancient history. there done that