The earth is over 4.5 billion years old and full of strange and curious wonders, but what
are some of the oldest man-made and natural things that still exist today?
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Infographics Show- today we're taking a look
at the oldest things in the world.
Recording: Though Thomas Edison is popularly credited with recording sound, French inventor
Edouard-Leon Scott actually made the first recording several years prior to Edison's
Phonograph in 1877.
Patenting his 'phonautograph' in 1857, Scott beat Edison by twenty years with a recording
of himself singing the French folk song “Au Clair de la Lune”, but the recording and
his device wasn't discovered until 2007.
Why did it take so long?
Perhaps Scott was that terrible a singer that his wife buried the device and recording for
150 years...
Photograph: Frustrated by his inability to draft images by hand, Joseph Nicephore Niepce
created the first photograph in 1822 of an engraving of Pope Pius VII, though it would
be destroyed years later during an attempt to copy it.
Trying again, Niepce coated a pewter plate with a bitumen solution and placed it into
a makeshift camera that overlooked his estate from inside an upstairs window.
After exposing the plate for eight hours, the world's first photograph appeared etched
onto the photosensitive plate, and remains on display to this day.
3d Model of the Earth: Nowadays you can find a globe in almost every classroom in the world,
but for centuries maps were limited to flat representations of the world which distorted
the true size of landmasses.
Hitting upon the idea of creating a round globe that could more accurately represent
shapes and sizes, ancient mapmakers began to create 3 dimensional models of the known
world in the 1st century BC.
Yet the oldest surviving globe was made by Martin Behaim in 1491, who then had to immediately
create a new one just a year later after Columbus' famed trip of 1942 redrew the world’s maps.
We're willing to bet Behaim found this development rather annoying.
Restaurant: Still operating after 1,200 years, Stiftskeller in Austria is still serving up
traditional Austrian dishes in St. Peter's Abbey in the middle of Salzburg, the exact
same building it was founded in back in 803 AD.
Surviving untold number of wars and catastrophes, the little restaurant that could is also famous
for being located in the same town that Mozart was born, a fact it celebrates by hosting
Mozart nights where patrons can dine while listening to renditions of the master composer's
greatest works.
Map: Inscribed on a stone tablet, an ancient Babylonian map of the known world dates back
to 700-500 BC.
With Babylon inscribed at the very center of the stone map, experts have also identified
other places from antiquity such as Assyria, and the borders are surrounded by a body of
water called simply the “Salt-Sea”.
Discovered in the late 1800s in Sippar, Iraq, the map now rests in the British Museum.
Coin: The ancient kingdom of Lydia occupied modern day Turkey and is thought to be the
first to use coins as currency well over 2,500 years ago.
Made of a gold and silver alloy mix known as electrum, the coins have stood the test
of time and were minted around 750-560 BC.
The reach of Lydia's traders helped the coins spread across Eurasia, and in 2014 a diver
in Bulgaria happened to find one in the Black Sea.
Written Piece of Music: “Hurrian Hymn No. 6” is the oldest piece of written music
ever discovered, having been created an astonishing four thousand years ago sometime between 2,000
and 1,400 BC.
Discovered in Ugarit, Syria, the song is an ode to the goddess Nikkal inscribed on clay
tablets and includes instructions on how to play it on a lyre.
Shipwreck: Discovered by underwater archaeologists from Ankara University in 2014, the world's
oldest shipwreck was discovered in Turkey's Ural Port and is estimated to be 4,000 years
old.
Unfortunately because recovering ancient shipwrecks from salt water is an extremely sensitive
process that can take up to 8 years, there is still no word on who may have built this
ship or why it sank.
Surviving Ship: Discovered during the construction of a motorway in the Netherlands, the Pesse
canoe is the world's oldest surviving ship, constructed sometime between 8040 and 7510
BCE.
Hewn from a solid tree trunk in the dugout canoe style, the boat has been freeze dried
for preservation and is on display at the Drents Museum.
This 298 centimeter by 44 centimeter canoe predates the Pyramids by a whopping 6,000
years.
Tree: California has some of the oldest trees in the world, and in 2017 it was confirmed
that a Bristlecone Pine located in the White Mountains is the world's oldest living tree,
at a whopping 5,067 years of age.
The current record holder beats Methuselah, another bristlecone pine that is located nearby,
by 200 years, and though its general location is known, its exact location is kept secret
to prevent vandalism.
Food: Shockingly the oldest food in the world is not on a discarded dish hiding under a
lonely bachelor's bed, but was discovered in Oxfordshire, England and is a whopping
5,500 years old.
Originally thought to be charcoal, the piece of burnt bread was found to have crushed grains
of barley, proving that the Neolithic English were farming as early as 3620 BC and were
as absent-minded as the rest of us who leave bread in the toaster too long.
Animal: In 1977 a Koi fish died after living for 226 years, and just this last July Russian
and American scientists working in collaboration who also don't watch enough horror movies
thawed out worms recovered from permafrost above the Arctic Circle and observed as the
32,000 year old creatures came to life and began to eat.
During the 1990s, a microbiologist from California Polytechnic State University revived yeast
trapped in amber for 25 million years, and then went on to found a brewery that crafted
beer from a 45 million year old variant of Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
Yet the oldest living animal may possibly be even older than any of these- Turritopsis
dohrnii, a type of jellyfish, is able to reverse its lifecycle and revert back to an immature
polyp stage and back again, seemingly without limit.
Though estimating the age of a specimen is not possible by any known means, scientists
theorize that there is a very good chance that there are specimens in the wild that
predate even the dinosaurs!
By reversing its life cycle indefinitely, these jellyfish are able to survive climate
change and natural disasters, and may in fact be the only life left on earth when the sun
finally swallows it up.
What's the oldest thing you own?
What's the oldest thing you've ever visited?
How long will The Infographics Show live?!
Let us know in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video Oldest Companies That Still Exist.
Thanks for watching, and as always, please like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.