Famous singer and hat-enthusiast Jamiroquai once sang "I'm going deeper underground, there's
too much panic in this town."
But if he'd known about some of the things waiting for him in the subterranean world
he might not have been so hasty.
For beneath our feet there are the remains of many strange terrors including plague victims,
chemical warfare, and giant kangaroo skeletons, as you'll see for yourself in our list of
the seven scariest archaeological discoveries.
Number 7: Mega-Wombats
This is a reconstructed model of a Diprotodon, which was a Rhino-sized marsupial that roamed
the Earth between two million and fifty thousand years ago.
Weighing in at 2.8 tonnes, these relatives of the modern-day wombat were discovered in
a mass grave in Australia back in 2012.
Over 50 skeletons were found at the site, along with bones from other scary-looking
beasts including the Megalania, which was a six-metre-long venomous lizard, and the
Protemnodon, a two and a half metre tall kangaroo type creature who makes Roger the Buff Kangaroo
look like a weedy little nerd.
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/3033358/thumbs/o-ROGER-KANGABRO-2-570.jpg?7So if you thought Australia was full of creatures
trying to kill you today, imagine what it was like a few hundred thousand years ago.
Neanderthal Steve Irwin would've had his ass kicked.
Number 6: Plague Graves In 2012 the area around London's Liverpool Street Station was in the
process of being excavated as part of the Crossrail project, when the construction team
discovered something that literally stopped them dead in their tracks.
Corpses.
Lots of corpses.
The remains of over 4,000 people were found during the works on the station, which was
itself built on the old site of Bethlehem Hospital.
This hospital had its very own cemetery adjacent to it, and it was here that many victims of
the bubonic plague were buried during the 16th and 17th Centuries.
Every single one of these bodies had to be moved before work could continue on the Crossrail
project, and the Museum of London Archaeology's Alison Telfer made this job sound like a fun
little jigsaw puzzle, when she was quoted as saying;
"Part of the skill of it is actually working out which bones go with which."
London is littered with plague pits and cemeteries like this, and new ones are discovered pretty
much every year.
But the scary thing is that this mass collection of old timey dead folks lay only 8ft below
street level.
I guess that's why they tell you to mind the gap on the tube, it's so you don't fall into
a pit of a thousand corpses.
Number 5: That's Handy At least when they excavated London Liverpool Street they had
a heap of full corpses to work with, but when a 3,600-year-old palace was dug up in the
Egyptian city of Avaris, all the archaeologists found were hands.
Right hands to be exact - and pretty big ones too.
In 2012 a total of sixteen right paws belonging to adult males were discovered in the grounds
of a palace which once belonged to King Khayan of the West Asian Hyksos people.
It is thought that this heap of old-fashioned self-pleasure devices was evidence of the
ancient practice of hand tribute, whereby the vanquished soldiers of an army would have
their right hands chopped off by the victors.
The soldiers would then exchange their enemy's hands for a sum of gold from the King, as
this was seen as a symbolic way of obliterating an enemy army's strength for good.
But I'm not so sure that's the whole story.
I've got a sneaky suspicion that old King Khayan also liked himself a little stranger
danger.
He looks the type.
Number 4: Bathhouse Babies This next entry is gruesome because of what the archaeologists
found, and also what they didn't find.
In 1903 the fantastically named Alfred Heneage Cocks discovered the remains of 103 people
beneath an old Roman villa in Hambleden, England.
Of these 103 people, 97 of them were infants, and most were boys.
In 2014 another Roman baby-burial site was discovered by the equally well-named Ross
Voss in Ashkelon, Israel, where a further hundred infant skeletons werediscovered on
the site of an old bath house.
Once again it seemed most of the victims were young boys, and several more sites like this
have been discovered in other areas of historic Roman influence.
But it's only recently that we've understood why infant boys were buried in these places
and not infant girls.
It's because these establishments were most likely brothels, and since the Romans were
pretty cool with infanticide as a form of super-late birth control, the prostitutes
who gave birth to these poor, unwanted boys simply tossed them in the sewer.
And the girls?
It's likely they were raised in order to continue the family business.
Ain't that sweet.
Number 3: Ancient Chemical Warfare In 1933 French archaeologist Robert du Mesnil du Buisson
was investigating the remains of a Syrian battlefield where the Persian and Roman armies
fought in 256 AD.
While doing so he found a series of siege tunnels built under the city of Dura-Europas,
and inside he unearthed the bodies of nineteen Roman soldiers and one solitary Persian, who
died striking a pretty badass disco pose.
The Persian's position indicates he was clutching his chest when he died, and the way the Romans
were found shows that they were desperately trying to escape from something.
So what happened?
Well, when the Romans heard their enemies digging beneath them they decided to intervene.
However, the Persians were prepared, and when the Romans entered the siege tunnel the Persians
threw bitumen and sulphur onto a readily prepared fire.
This created a sulphurous gas which formed acid in the lungs of whoever breathed it in,
and so now we know why old bonesy was pointing to the sky like a Bee Gee.
He wasn't throwing disco moves after all, he was flipping the bird to the sulphur guy
who threw down on the count of one and not zero like they'd agreed.
Thanks a lot Chadius.
Number 2: The Spooning Skeletons On February 13th 2015, just one day before Valentine's
Day, the Greek Culture Ministry announced this freaky discovery.
What you're looking at are the remains of a 6,000 year old couple who were found clinched
together in the southern Greek cave of Diros.
Nobody knows if they died like this, if they were positioned this way after death, or if
one of them died first and was just super, super clingy.
But we do know they were a pair of young lovers with a family, as the remains of an infant
and a foetus were also found in the same cave.
Now you may not think this entry is particularly scary, but if you're a total commitment-phobe
like me, this eternal embrace is the stuff of nightmares.
Number 1: The Monster of Mount Owen New Zealand, 1986.
A team of archaeologists are making their way through the cave system of Mount Owen,
when they stumble upon the last thing you'd want to find inside a deep and dark mountain
cavern - this thing.
Oh great, there's a monster in the caves.
And if it's lost a hand I doubt it's gonna be friendly.
The claw looked relatively fresh to the explorers, as if it had been severed only recently, and
at this point I imagine the team started mentally calculating who their slowest member was so
they could leave them as a sacrifice.
Hey fat Steve, guess what, it's not you.
You're pretty swift for a big guy.
But thankfully the group had no reason to be scared, because tests later revealed the
owner of this claw had been dead for more than three millennia.
The claw belonged to a prehistoric flightless bird called the Upland Moa, and its fresh
appearance was simply due to the fact it had been extremely well preserved.
Some species of Moa were over three metres tall; however, this fella was a pint-sized
one and a half metres.
And guess what, the Moa might be about to make a comeback.
Japanese scientist Dr Yasuyuki Shirota has taken DNA from the Moa's cave clawand plans
to replicate it in the embryo of a chicken.
So put down those buffalo wings folks, because Big Bird's mean little brother is on his way.
Bonus Entry: Cannibal Cavemen This list was pretty skeleton-heavy but we couldn't leave
you without a quick look at the group of Neanderthal remains which were discovered at a site in
Spain.
Dating back nearly 50,000 years, bones belonging to a Neanderthal family were later found to
have strange markings on them.
Almost as if they'd been chewed.
By humans.
Well that's because they had.
Six adults, three teens, two kids and a baby were seemingly attacked by another group of
Neanderthals who invaded their cave, ate their flesh and broke open their bones to suck out
the marrow.
They even consumed the baby Neanderthal, but since they were Spanish I guess that counts
as Tapas.
I'd be full after like one and a half babies at most.
And that's our list.
Do you enjoy hearing about scary stuff found inside things?
Then great, because while we work on researching the worst things discovered inside Kinder
Eggs and the ten most shocking horses found inside other horses, we've got this video
on five terrifying and creepy things found frozen in ice for you.