From the search for a missing tomb to the evolution of the plague that may just come
back to bite us, here are 10 wild discoveries that reveal secrets of the ancient past!
10: Mysterious Egyptian Chest A team of archaeologists recently discovered
a mysterious stone chest from the ruins of an old funerary complex in Egypt.
The discovery was made near the extremely famous Hatshepsut Temple, indicating there
might be a previously undiscovered tomb hiding somewhere in the area.
Queen Hatshepsut was her father’s true heir but as is custom in ancient Egypt, she was
wed to her brother Thutmose II.
He was actually overshadowed by his wife/sister in 1479 BC.
She was more powerful, more popular, and he appears to have suffered from some type of
disease making him weak.
She declared herself Pharaoh and often wore the characteristic male pharaonic robes and
jewelry.
Very few monuments and historical records exist of her husband, instead most reliefs
and hieroglyphics show her in charge of ruling the country and managing trade along with
her son, Thutmose III.
The mummy of Thutmose II was discovered in 1881 although his tomb has never been found.
The chest just may hold some clues.
When archaeologists opened it they found several packages wrapped in a thick canvas, one of
them containing the skeletal remains of a sacrificed goose, another containing an egg
from a goose, and the third containing the egg of an ibis.
These were obviously used for some kind of funerary ritual, though historians can't quite
say how.
The name Pharaoh Thutmose II was also found engraved within the box, suggesting the lost
artifact had been part of his burial chamber.
The temple complex of Hatshepsut is one of the most-visited sites in Egypt while archaeologists
are still searching for the tomb of Thutmose II.
9: The Dragon Man In a shocking new discovery, archaeologists
have uncovered an ancient human fossil that could be revealing some serious secrets of
our ancient past.
The discovery comes in the form of an ancient cranium, currently housed in the Hebei GEO
University Geoscience Museum in China.
The skull is the largest type of Homo skull ever found, and scientists now believe it
represents a new species of human named Homo longi, or “Dragon Man.”
The findings suggest that the dragon man could be our closest hominid relative, not Neanderthals.
It has the potential to dramatically change our understanding of human evolution.
The fossil of the dragon man is the most complete human cranial fossil ever found on Earth,
according to Qiang Ji, professor of paleontology.
Here's how the cranium is different from ours.
It was so large that it could hold a very similar brain to what we have.
However, it had some pretty strange characteristics.
Its eye sockets were square instead of circular, it had a very wide mouth, and its teeth were
way bigger than ours.
It had great big hippopotamus chompers towards the back!
The dragon man did indeed share some human features, but it was more of a beast than
a man.
In fact, the dragon man could be the missing piece of the puzzle in human evolution we’ve
been looking for, or what you may know as the missing link.
The dragon man may have been the bridge between ape and man, or at least one evolutionary
step along the way.
This hominid creature lived about 146,000 years ago in a small community of other dragon
people, just like early Homo sapiens.
They hunted, gathered fruits and vegetables, and probably even caught fish.
There are multiple evolutionary lineages of Homo species and populations that coexisted
in Asia, Africa, and Europe 200,000 to 140,000 years ago.
Homo sapiens may have interacted with H. Longi.
Using Geochemical analysis, researchers have found that H. Longi is one of our closest
hominin relatives, even more closely related to us than Neanderthals!
This discovery is completely redrawing our human tree of life, indicating that we separated
from Neanderthals 400,000 years earlier than previously thought!
8: Ancient Israeli Textiles Archaeologists have made a very rare and valuable
find in Israel.
While it may not be gold or silver, it was something even much more precious!!
They discovered scraps of textile dating back over 3000 years, to the year 1000 BC that
contained ancient purple dye.
Finding textile this old is extremely difficult since most of the time it just disintegrates,
and purple dye back in the day would have been much more valuable than gold or silver.
The rich purple dye was so rare that it was described in the Bible, called argaman.
It was a unique color usually reserved for the most prestigious members of society, like
royalty or priests.
This is because the dye was pretty hard to come by and the color was a bit too vibrant
for everyday living.
So where did these ancient people collect the purple dye?
They got it from the glands of the living murex sea snail.
These little snails are found all along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, making the
villages and towns where they were found extremely wealthy!
Another reason the newly discovered textiles are so fascinating is that they were collected
near the Red Sea, meaning they traveled quite a bit of distance from where they were made.
In fact, the presence of purple dye from the Mediterranean deep in the Israeli desert is
proof of a more complicated social and trading system here than historians had previously
accepted.
It’s hard to imagine these places being so well connected 3000 years ago, but the
people who lived here were obviously important and wealthy enough to get their hands on this
precious purple.
7: Rare Shackled Skeletons A skeleton found wearing shackles has shed
some light on ancient British history.
Specifically, the discovery has given historians an interesting glimpse into the unspoken history
of slavery in Roman Britain.
The skeleton was discovered secured with heavy iron chains around his ankles.
He was also found thrown haphazardly into a ditch, probably as a last act of indignity
after the man was already dead.
He was found in Rutland, and archaeologists have dated him to being around 20 or 30 years
old when he died probably between 226 and 427 AD.
Historians have known for a long time that when the Romans occupied Britain, they practiced
slavery.
This find is unique because it's one of the only pieces of physical evidence of the practice.
But unfortunately, we will probably never know who this man was in life, as his skeleton
holds no clues.
He could have been an ordinary slave worker, a native Briton forced to work for the ruling
Romans.
Archaeologists know this guy was a slave and not simply a prisoner because they found evidence
of a physically demanding life in his bones, as well as proof of injuries he had probably
sustained during all his years of hard labor.
6: Dinosaur Footprints Another amazing discovery was made in the
United Kingdom showing more interesting evidence of the ancient past.
The footprints from 6 different species of dinosaur were discovered in Kent, dating back
110 million years.
The discovery was made by one of the curators at the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, as
well as scientists working with the University of Portsmouth.
They were found near some sea cliffs, which thanks to the stormy coastal weather are constantly
being eroded and revealing new and impressive fossils.
The area is part of the Folkestone Formation, and according to professor of paleobiology
David Martill, this was the first time such footprints were found.
But what kind of dinosaurs are we talking about?
The footprints belong to ankylosaurs, which were devastating armored dinosaurs like living
tanks; theropods, which were flesh-eating dinosaurs and vicious killers; and ornithopods,
which were kind of like birds.
The vast diversity of the dinosaurs shows a time when the British Isle was a paradise
for dinos, specifically during the Cretaceous period.
Way before people ever showed up, England was a dinosaur paradise.
5: Rare Pre-Pharaonic Tombs Archaeologists working in the Nile Delta of
Egypt have uncovered 110 mysterious tombs that could be revealing some ancient secrets
of two very important periods in Egypt’s ancient history.
Amazingly, some of these tombs date back before the kingdoms of the pharaohs, over 5000 years
ago.
This was a time before pyramids, before pharaonic rule, and before Egypt was the great empire
we know it as today.
But here's the thing.
Archaeologists also found tombs dating significantly later, to what is known as the Hyksos period
between 1650 and 1500 BC.
This was a time when Asian migrants flooded Egypt and took over the Middle Kingdom.
About 37 tombs were found from this time.
These are two of the most misunderstood transitional periods in Egyptian history.
The first was obviously an important time because the ancient people of Egypt were rising
out of the Stone Age and embarking on a journey that would make them the great builders of
the world.
The second period thousands of years later is important because it shows a time when
Egypt was usurped by migrants.
It also shows how Asian migrants adjusted to the cultures of ancient Egyptian society.
But what archaeologists don't know is why all these people are buried in the same place.
It seems crazy to think a single cemetery would have been used for two distinct eras
so far apart.
This is a mystery that scientists still haven't been able to solve but are looking into right
now.
4: A Lost Civilization Flooding in Iran recently exposed the ruins
of an ancient burial ground that may have been part of a culture from the Bronze Age
which flourished alongside Mesopotamia but was ultimately lost to history.
Archaeologists were first alerted to the ruins after antiques began flooding the local market
out of nowhere.
Pieces of jewelry, ceramics, and ancient board games featuring unknown artwork caught historians
and archaeologists by surprise.
Many of the objects depicted complex symbols that didn't seem to be from any known civilization.
By 2002, archaeologists were panicked.
They realized the local Iranians must have discovered a new prehistoric site and were
pillaging it to sell the antiques.
It would be the local police who finally solved the mystery.
According to National Geographic, a coordinated investigation led to an immense conspiracy
of artifact traffickers.
It was from the traffickers that archaeologists were able to trace the origin of the artifacts,
to the Halil River Valley.
Here they found the necropolis, previously buried but revealed thanks to unexpected flooding.
They believe it belonged to the ancient Jiroft Culture and that it may have been the real
cradle of civilization, even before the appearance of Sumer or Mesopotamia.
Nobody knows exactly what happened to these ancient people, if they had large and impressive
cities, or even when exactly they existed.
But it looks as though they may be the oldest civilization anywhere in the Middle East – and
unfortunately, almost nothing about them is known.
3: The Anglo-Saxons A new study of skeletal remains has revealed
some pretty shocking information about the Anglo-Saxons.
This study was done by Professor Keith Dobney at the University of Sydney, and he says the
kingdoms of early medieval Britain were very similar to modern Britain today.
By this, he means Britain was full of people from all kinds of different ancestries all
sharing a common culture and language.
To give you a better idea of the dates, the period of the Anglo-Saxons in England was
from between the 5th and 11th centuries AD.
To complete this study, researchers looked at ancient bones dating back to medieval England.
They found that roughly 50% of people came from England and the other 50% were from continental
Europe.
It's also quite interesting that the Anglo-Saxons were by definition migrants who spoke German
and came from Germany in the 5th century.
The people already living in England at the time were actually descendants of Romano-Celts.
In short, the new study has proved that nobody in England was ever really a native of the
land.
Between the occupation of the Romans, the mass migration of the Germanic-speaking people,
and a huge influx of European settlers, Anglo-Saxons were nothing but a group of many different
peoples all speaking old English and living on the same island.
2: The Oldest Plague A new discovery has revealed the very first
person known to science to ever die from the black plague.
The jawbone of a man was recently found in Latvia.
This bone dates back 5000 years, and scientists found the oldest strain of the bacteria which
causes the Black Death inside of it.
Who was this plague victim?
He was a hunter-gatherer who had been in his 20s at the time of death.
Until now, scientists had been struggling to figure out when exactly the virus responsible
for the Black Plague, also known as the Great Death, also known as the bubonic plague, originated.
It now appears that this particular strain of bacteria, which eventually caused the almost
total destruction of Europe, came about 7000 years before today, 2000 years beyond what
was previously estimated.
What’s truly fascinating is the strain of bacteria which caused the victim to die.
It is a little different from the strain that appeared thousands of years later and decimated
Europe.
Scientists aren't exactly sure how the victim was affected, but they do know he died from
the infection.
They also know that the ancient strain of plague was not as contagious or as deadly
as that which came later.
The scary thing is that scientists now have physical proof that the plague bacteria evolved
over millennia until it became so horrible that it almost wiped-out humanity.
1: Mysterious Shaman’s Staff In Finland, a mysterious magical staff has
been discovered, dated back 4400 years.
The staff is incredible, carved in the likeness of a life-sized snake.
It was discovered perfectly preserved under a layer of soil about 75 miles from the capital
of Helsinki.
Archaeologists believe the area was inhabited by Neolithic Stone Age barbarians beginning
roughly 6000 years ago.
Researchers from the University of Turku believe it was probably used in magical rituals by
a designated shaman.
This shaman likely communicated with spirits, or at least, he said he communicated with
spirits.
This is so far one of the only pieces of physical evidence ever found of a magically inspired
culture from Scandinavia way before the Vikings ever appeared.
As for why the staff was made to look like a giant snake, nobody's really sure.
Based on ancient rock carvings found in Finland and parts of northern Russia, the practice
was fairly common.
They have found plenty of depictions of shamans wielding snakes.
Serpents must have been regarded as especially sacred in whatever religion these people practiced,
but historians can't say why.
Thanks for watching!!
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