Archaeologists can spend months sifting through ridiculously small patches of dirt, meticulously
recording everything they find.
Months of back-breaking work might turn up some rare finds — or end in disaster.
"But then, DRAMA."
"What is it, are you mad, guy?"
"We just found this here."
"How could you break it?"
So just imagine how annoyed archaeologists probably get when they leave a promising dig
site empty-handed and then some kid in France falls into a hole only to find prehistoric
cave paintings.
A hard fact of the archaeologist life is that great finds are sometimes accidentally discovered
by common folk.
Let's dust off our Indiana Jones costumes and take a gander at some of the strangest
archaeological finds unearthed by chance.
An army for the afterlife
In 1974, while digging a well, a group of Chinese farmers discovered the first three
of more than 7,000 life-sized terracotta warriors guarding the tomb of China's first emperor,
Qin Shi Huangdi.
The terracotta army buried with the emperor is thought to be one of the greatest archaeological
finds of all time.
It's not only massive, it's full of individuals — each of the 7,000 warriors has a unique
face, beard, tunic, and armor.
This curious fact has led some experts to speculate that craftsmen based each warrior
on a living person, possibly a soldier in the emperor's real army.
The soldiers were likely meant to protect him in the afterlife.
Non-military personnel like servants, scribes, and acrobats were represented as well, suggesting
that the emperor hoped the afterlife would be more or less the same as his actual life.
Sadly, the terracotta army probably wasn't equipped to help protect the emperor from
the crowds of tourists and roadside souvenir stands...
But happy afterlife anyway.
Renovation excavation
When Lucas Asicona Ramirez began scraping away plaster during a home renovation, he
discovered an 18th-century Mayan mural depicting people walking around with what appear to
be human hearts in their hands.
In October 2012, Reuters reported that the Ramirez home is one of four in Ramirez's Guatemalan
village where residents have uncovered ancient Mayan murals beneath the plaster, and experts
think there could be murals in other homes, too.
Sadly, now that the murals have been exposed to light and humidity, the colors are starting
to fade — that's one of the hazards of non-archaeologist archaeological discoveries.
Unless someone with an interest in Mayan art shows up with a bag of mural-preserving supplies,
the ancient murals will probably succumb to the elements in a relatively short period
of time.
A stone's throw
Throwing rocks is almost never a productive activity.
In fact, most people who chuck rocks are bored kids who end up breaking someone's window
— or their head.
But in 1947 the world's most fruitful stone toss ended up breaking a piece of ancient
pottery hidden in a Bedouin cave and exposing the Dead Sea Scrolls to the world.
The scrolls were recovered by a shepherd who'd thrown a rock while chasing a stray sheep.
He and his pals then took their discovery to an antiques dealer in Bethlehem, who, in
keeping with the sacred tradition of antiques dealers being cheap schmucks, gave them the
equivalent of about 29 bucks.
Fifty-six years later, they were sold for $250,000, and those shepherds are probably
still out there, hurling rocks around in hopes of finding the next big ancient artifact — and
hoping they don't make the same mistake twice.
Gene pool deep dive
In 2007, divers exploring an underwater cave in Mexico's Eastern Yucatan Peninsula found
a human skeleton.
Now, finding skeletons underwater isn't the most unusual thing ever.
But this find was unusual because it came at the bottom of a cave that was literally
called The Black Hole, about 170 feet underwater.
Seeker reports that, once the skeleton was in the hands of researchers, they discovered
that it was the oldest known Native American ancestor, dated between 12,000 and 13,000
years ago.
The girl, who was 15 or 16 years old at the time of her passing, probably walked into
the cave and then fell into the deeper pit, which would have contained only a shallow
pool of water.
A few thousand years later, glacial melt filled the pit, submerging her bones and keeping
them remarkably well-preserved until someone was finally able to solve the mystery of her
tragic demise.
Keeping up with the cave paintings
In what is one of the most famous accidental discoveries of all time, four boys and a dog
named Robot were out for a walk one day when they happened upon a fallen tree.
Robot, being a dog, was all "Hot damn, a hole," and started digging in a crevasse the tree
had punched in the ground.
The four boys joined him, imagining they might have found the entrance to a tunnel that would
take them to a lost treasure.
What they found was indeed a lost treasure — just not the kind you can stuff in your
pockets and sell to an antiques dealer for $29.
Instead, they discovered Lascaux, a Paleolithic cave filled with 20,000-year-old paintings
made by early modern humans.
The paintings are exquisitely detailed and some of them are huge — more than 10 or
15 feet in length.
In 1948, a year after their discovery, Lascaux was opened to the public — but 15 years
later someone finally realized that tourism was bad for the paintings.
All the carbon dioxide exhaled by thousands of visitors along with contaminants they brought
in on their shoes was actually damaging the paintings, so the tours had to end.
Fortunately, a full-scale replica of the cave — dubbed Lascaux 4 — was completed in
2016, allowing eager art-lovers to get their prehistoric fix without doing irreparable
damage to the ancient artwork.
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