From horses preserved in lava to the first real evidence of the multiverse, plus the
most shocking discovery made on Google Maps!
Here are ten seriously surprising discoveries!
10: A Looted Statue Italian police made a rather surprising discovery
when two off-duty officers with the Italian art squad stumbled upon a Roman statue from
the 1st century that had been stolen from an archaeological site back in 2011.
That’s right, someone thought it would be a good idea to steal ancient art and smuggle
it out of the country!
Where did they find this mysterious statue?
It was in an antique shop in Belgium.
Apparently, an Italian businessman had received the statue and then exported it to Belgium
for some strange reason.
The statue itself is of a headless Roman wearing a toga, with a monetary worth of over $100,000.
It was initially stolen from the Villa Marini Dettina archaeological site near Rome.
Why did he do it?
It’s not 100% clear right now.
Why do you think he did it?
But what’s truly surprising is that the only reason the statue was discovered at all
is because the two off-duty officers simply went for a walk in a local neighborhood and
saw the marble statue inside an antique shop.
They hadn't even been looking for it.
The authorities aren’t yet sure what will happen to the person who stole it and sold
it to the antique shop, but hopefully the impressive piece of history will be going
back where it belongs soon.
9: Lava Horses One of the most surprising archaeological
discoveries having to do with a horse was just made in Pompeii, the Italian city forever
trapped in time because of the disastrous eruption of Mount Vesuvius back in 79 AD.
Like everyone else in Pompeii, this horse was covered in ash and petrified.
That was the worst day imaginable if you were a resident of Pompeii, but at least it makes
for a fascinating historical site today!
The horse was discovered wearing a military saddle with bronze plating.
The horse was also found alongside the remains of two other, less impressive stallions, inside
a stable attached to a suburban villa, kind of like how your garage is attached to your
house.
Imagine your prized car being buried under layers of ash.
That’s basically what happened to this family and their beautiful horses!
Unfortunately for the animals, they probably perished immediately after the volcanic explosion.
Judging by their rigid postures, they had been unable to break through the stables and
probably died where they stood.
What's really cool about the horse is just how wonderfully preserved it has remained
for the past 2000 years.
You can still see its face, its hooves, and its round horse belly.
Researchers have suggested that the horse was probably a valuable breed and may have
been used to display social status.
8: A Billion Rubles Not long ago, Russian explorers discovered
roughly a billion Rubles, an old Soviet currency, abandoned in an old, closed-down mine.
And while you may be thinking a billion Rubles is a lot of money, it's actually completely
worthless.
That’s right, no one will take it.
You can show up to th ebank and try to cash it in, but they’ll look at you funny, and
probably call the police while they’re at it!
A group of explorers were checking out a rumor they had heard that after the Soviet Union
collapsed, huge quantities of cash had been dumped into old missile silos not far from
Moscow.
According to the BBC, these explorers chased the rumors to the Vladimir region of Russia,
where they found the mine just like promised, and all the cash.
At current exchange rates, the billion Rubles would be worth about $18 million USD right
now.
But of course, they are no longer legal tender.
The cash was used between 1961 and 1991 before being discontinued.
Now it’s pretty much only useful as a collectible curiosity.
The Russian Federation still uses the Russian Ruble, but it's not the same as the money
used during the Soviet Union throughout the different states.
Because the mine where the money was found had flooded in the past couple of years, the
explorers found what they described as a swamp of banknotes, all of them bearing the face
of Mr. Vladimir Lenin.
Kind of creepy, don’t you think?
7: Neanderthal Glue A new discovery has surprised the world by
providing evidence that Neanderthals may have been a bit smarter than we thought.
Traces of an ancient glue-like compound have been found on a stone tool that dates back
50,000 years.
The glue was crafted from birch tar through a process that would have required significant
pre-planning – something experts weren't sure Neanderthals were capable of.
What was the adhesive used for?
It was used to build more reliable tools.
Think about joining the rock head of an axe to the wooden shaft.
This could be done with enough brute force, sure.
But 50,000 years ago, a very smart caveperson figured out how to make it a bit easier by
creating the world's first adhesive.
Hey, it was a long way from there to glue, but it was a start, and a pretty impressive
one, considering what the cavemen had to work with!
The tool was discovered on Zandmotor Beach, on the coast of the Netherlands.
It was discovered near another recent discovery: a Neanderthal skull fragment pulled out of
the sand.
The Neanderthals are an extinct cousin of early Homo Sapiens, our ancestors, and they
populated this area for tens of thousands of years, since our ancestors began moving
out of Africa.
Unfortunately for them, they went extinct about 40,000 years ago.
6: Escape from Mars Our next surprising discovery comes from Mars,
which is a place full of strange, wonderful things that give our scientists clues about
the rest of the Solar System and the Universe.
New research done by scientists at the University of Arizona has given some insight as to what
happened to the water that once covered the Martian surface.
As you may already know, billions of years ago, there was water on Mars very similar
to how there is water on Earth today.
But something happened that made it vanish.
For a long time, scientists have purported that the water is trapped inside of the planet,
locked inside of rocks.
The new evidence suggests that water has actually been escaping through the Martian atmosphere
for billions of years.
This evidence comes from a surprisingly large amount of water being discovered in Mars’s
upper atmosphere.
It seems that water is evaporated from the surface, stuck in the upper atmosphere of
Mars, then rapidly destroyed.
Scientists have no idea exactly what's going on here, but it looks like some kind of volatile
event destroyed much of the atmosphere around Mars, which at one point had been as strong
as Earth’s – and the result may have been that the water literally escaped Mars by evaporating
out into space.
Would you ever go on a spaceship to Mars to colonize the red planet?
Why or why not?
Tell me your thoughts in the comments below.
Then remember to subscribe to Talltanic for more awesome videos just like this one!
5: Hippo Axe Back on Earth, an axe made from the bone of
a hippo has been found in Ethiopia.
Even more surprising is that the axe has been dated at 1.4 million years old.
Scientists believe the hippo axe was crafted by our ancient ancestors Homo erectus.
The tool was found at the Konso archaeological site in the south of Ethiopia and is one of
only two bone axes known to scientists that were crafted beyond 1 million years ago.
The axe had a honed edge that had been made by carefully sharpening the chunk of bone
to make it more deadly.
According to paleoanthropologist Gen Suwa, the tool was fashioned from the thighbone
of a hippopotamus.
This is the newest evidence that ancient hominins were actually pretty skilled at crafting things
out of rock and bone.
Of course, hominins 1 million years ago weren't that far from glorified monkeys.
These were our first ancestors and the first animals to appear with human-like proportions,
arising in the country of Georgia 1.85 million years before today and living as far as Indonesia
until 117,000 years ago.
4: Plane in the Jungle The Swamp Ghost is one of the coolest and
most surprising artifacts ever rediscovered after World War II.
The Swamp Ghost is the nickname for a Boeing B-17E bomber that was discovered crashed in
Papua New Guinea back in 1972.
So far as the official history reports go, the plane was damaged by enemy fire, it lost
fuel, and it went down on February 23, 1942.
It was brutally attacked while trying to complete a raid on Japanese forces.
The pilot and the crew of nine did survive the crash, though they suffered an ordeal
that went on for six weeks trying to escape the wild swamps of Papua New Guinea where
they had crashed.
They did eventually make it to safety, but the destroyed plane was forgotten.
When the plane was found 30 years later by an Australian Air Force crew, they were surprised
to discover coffee still inside the thermoses in the cockpit!
These poor soldiers had brewed themselves up a drink and were ready to relax… when
they got shot down.
3: The Multiverse In the most surprising and shocking discovery
of the century, scientists may have discovered real, tangible evidence of the multiverse.
If what the reports say are to be believed, scientists have discovered something known
as the ‘cold spot’ and it could prove definitively that the universe we live in
right now is simply one of countless other universes clustered together like soap bubbles
foaming out of a bathtub.
Put on your lab coats, because it's about to get scientific.
The cold spot can be seen from the Southern Hemisphere in the constellation Eridanus.
It's a chunk of space 0.00015 degrees colder than everything around it.
That’s right.
It’s a tiny bit colder than the surrounding space, which is colder than anything we could
ever witness here on Earth.
Deep space is incredibly cold, almost at absolute zero itself!
Scientists first thought the cold spot was simply a supervoid, an area in space that
has a lot fewer galaxies than usual.
But in 2017, researchers at the United Kingdom’s Durham University Center for Extragalactic
Astronomy claimed that the cold spot is not a supervoid, but evidence of multiple alien
universes.
How does that make sense?
According to Professor Tom Shanks, the cold spot may have actually been created because
of a collision that happened between our physical universe and the bubble of another, unseen
alien universe.
In other words, our universe may have somehow crashed against a different universe very
similar to our own sometime in the last few billion years.
The theory is that such a collision would have produced an imprint in the form of radiation
– and this imprint may just be the cold spot.
It just makes you feel small and insignificant to think about wild scientific theories like
that, don’t you agree!?
2: Google Maps Kidnapping One of the most surprising things ever discovered
using Google Maps was an actual kidnapping.
That's right, a kidnapping went down in broad daylight and was discovered by Internet sleuths
perusing through Google Maps Street View.
The incident in question happened in Sweden, on a perfectly ordinary residential street
while the sun shined down from the sky.
The Street View showed two men dressed in black with black masks, much like burglars.
They were caught in the frame sneaking out of a building and holding between them a rolled-up
carpet that very well could have contained a human body, either dead or alive.
The big kicker came from a viewer who noticed human feet poking out through the bottom of
the carpet.
At this point, there was really no doubt that they were carrying somebody inside that rug.
But unfortunately, it came out later that what Google actually captured with their cameras
was a film being made!
Zooming out from the supposed bandits, you can clearly see professional film equipment.
Across the street, people were filming the scene for a movie.
That is, unless it was all just a cover for a real murder!
1: The Largest Cement Ship The largest concrete ship in the world was
dismantled after spending 40 years sitting on the riverbank.
After the ship's maiden voyage in 1974, it was almost immediately abandoned.
Sounds like a ridiculous story, right?
It’s true!
This ship is called the Gu Tian and for the past 40 years, it has been a tourist attraction
in China’s Fujian Province – and also home to some unsanitary squatters.
But what you might be wondering is why a ship was built entirely out of concrete.
It doesn't really make much sense.
How could you realistically make a ship out of something like concrete!?
You might as well use wood.
But back in 1970, there was a lack of steel in China and a cheap solution was to make
a boat out of concrete.
Of course, it ended up being way too costly to power a ship made of concrete; it was too
heavy.
So, the men in charge of the government back then ran the ship aground and left it there
until the late 2010s when they finally decided to demolish it.
How do you feel about these insane and bizarre discoveries?
Let me know in the comments and thanks for watching.
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