- I'm archeologist Andrew Kinkella,
and I'm here to answer some of your questions on Twitter.
This is Archeology Support.
[gentle upbeat music]
@landyhoz, "What is the difference between archeology
and paleontology?"
Paleontology is about very old things, like dinosaurs,
and on the order of millions of years old.
Archeology is about much more recent human past,
largely the last 10,000 years.
There is a wing of archeology that deals
with ancient human ancestors
where we're studying on the order of early human evolution
from several million years ago.
@Anyextee asks, "What do you think is the most
significant archeological discovery
in recent years and why?"
The find of Richard II, which was amazing, in a parking lot.
That just shows you that things change.
People move around.
People forget things that were one really, really important.
Another one on my top 10,
the find of the shipwreck, the Endurance,
off the coast of Antarctica.
The Endurance got lodged in the ice.
Ultimately, it sank because the ice would melt
and the ship would sink.
They had to use ROVs, remote operated vehicles,
in order to find this thing, because of its depth.
@athienofanacco1 asks, "Do y'all only use
those little brushes at dig sites?
Like, that would drive me mad using that all day."
We use all different kinds of tools in archeology
depending on the situation at hand.
The trowel is the tool of the archeologist.
You can dig fast with the long edge of it
or you can be really precise with the pointy tip.
[trowel clinking]
Archeology is much more about touch sometimes
than you would think and sound.
You could hear a little clink, time to slow down.
So I take the trowel, put it down, bust out the brush.
As I brush, we can see the artifact.
At that point, we can switch to the popsicle stick.
I can push and you don't have that metallic clink.
What we would do at this point, pedestal the artifact.
We would dig around it.
We can say the artifact is 10 centimeters deep,
20 centimeters from the west wall,
17 centimeters from the north wall,
and then we have the artifact's exact location.
This artifact is called a Clovis point,
a very specific tool to some of the first people
to ever enter the New World.
@CheungMattias asks, "Honestly, I still don't know
how the Rosetta Stone works."
The Rosetta Stone is one of the most important
archeological discoveries,
because it led to the cracking of Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Rosetta Stone was found in 1799
by Napoleon's science team
that he brought with him in the town of Rosetta in Egypt.
What makes it so important is because it says
the same thing three times.
At the top, it's in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics,
in the middle, it's in demotic,
and at the bottom, it's in Greek.
So you have this one piece that you can read,
and then you sort of have a key
where you can start to build off of and figure out
what the different symbols mean.
@iamnjogu asks, "Curious about these stone tools
discovered from ancient man?
How do the archeologists know
it's not just a chipped rock?"
If this just rolled down a hill, it would look different.
If I'm an ancient toolmaker
and I'm using a hammer stone on this,
I'm gonna hit it really hard to get a flake to pop off.
It's gonna create what's called a bulb of percussion.
It's gonna create this divot.
Also, in terms of ancient stone tools,
they're gonna use things like obsidian, it's volcanic glass.
Those types of stones can make a really, really sharp edge.
On the flip side, this is a hammer stone.
It was very specifically sought after by ancient people
for its qualities of not being too soft or too hard,
and you can use it to make good stone tools.
@Zefwagner asks, "I don't know what the hell
a Dial of Destiny is,
but I sure as hell know that a dial is inherently
less exciting than an ark, a temple, or a grail."
The Dial of Destiny is the new artifact
that they're gonna use in the new "Indiana Jones" movie.
What they're relating this to is something
called the Antikythera mechanism
and its ability to track the rotation of planets over time.
I think what it really shows is an excellent use of math
to make the gears so precise
that it could at least work for a while.
@_AtangBiyela asks, "Why do archeologists
excavate graves again?"
Sometimes we come across them and we don't expect it.
I will say that is the most common way
that we find human remains.
It's a little bit of a deep moment.
You do start to think about your own mortality.
Human remains that you find in a grave
tell you so much about the past.
The human skeleton itself can tell you how that person died.
Did they have any diseases?
What was their social status?
It can tell you about the religion of the culture.
When we excavate something like a human burial,
we go very slow.
We work with local communities.
Where are you gonna store these human remains?
Are you going to rebury these human remains?
@goff_logan asks, "How does this carbon dating thing work?"
Carbon-14 is an isotope.
It breaks down over time.
And what we can do is measure the rate
at which it breaks down.
Let's say after I'm filming this,
I walk off and I die in the parking lot.
My carbon-14 starts to go down.
5,730 years from today,
I will have half as much carbon-14
as I did in the beginning.
Now if you add another 5,730 years,
I have a quarter of what I had.
Now you gotta watch it,
because it only works on things that were once alive.
You cannot carbon-14 date a rock.
But for living things, burials, remains,
we can get a date for it.
@rstephens asks, "LIDAR is being advanced
partly by its use in self-driving car research.
How long has it been used for archeology?"
It's been used in archeology
in the last 10 years or maybe more.
But LIDAR is a bunch of lasers shot down from a plane
or a helicopter that flies over a site.
What it gets is really, really specific
geographic and mapping data.
So as the plane flies over and shoots a bunch of lasers,
the trees actually blow a little,
so a couple of the laser beams will get down
to the ground surface.
It used to be just prohibitively expensive.
These days, the more and more we get of that,
the more projects actually have it
due to the decreasing cost.
@brycepwrites asks, "How often do archeologists
have to think,
'Are these bones a crime scene or a discovery?'"
I did once work on a salvage archeology project
where a construction crew had accidentally hit a family plot
that was about 80 years old.
The skeletal material was still kind of supple.
You can really tell the difference
if you're working with something
that's thousands of years old,
because it's totally dry
and it started to kind of wither away.
So they're not bleach white like you would think.
They're sort of a dull brown.
I still will call the coroner just to make double sure.
@katyazeisig asks, "Anyone else wonder how accurate
a forensic facial reconstruction artist
would be if they just had your skull to work off of?"
We have to realize that it's not perfect.
In terms of facial reconstruction from a skull,
some things you can get are stuff like the cheeks.
Are the cheeks higher or lower?
The eye sockets, the brow ridge, the chin, the teeth.
Sometimes the chin will be more of a jutting chin.
But stuff like what was the overall shape of the nose?
You know the ears.
You're gonna go with the trends of the time.
So if you're working on a skull that's 4,000 years old
and it's a male skull,
you're gonna put some sort of beard on it,
because they didn't have BIC razors 4,000 years ago.
Archeology is literally three pieces
of the thousand-piece puzzle.
@MalakaiWaters asks, "Do archeologists
just go to random places and be like,
'I feel like there's something important here,'
and then just start digging?"
We only excavate after we've surveyed
and mapped the location.
We are looking for the best possible places
that archeological sites might exist.
The ancient Maya would build on good soil.
If there's a forestry company or something
who has made a map of the soil quality
throughout the region,
I love getting that map,
because that makes my work that much easier.
I was working on a project in downtown LA
where they were replacing the sidewalk.
And they took up some of the concrete
and there was a human skeleton right there.
This was a human skeleton
that had been there for hundreds of years.
In the modern world, we wanna have archeologists
along with construction projects and building projects,
because they do find things like this from time to time.
@John_engineer asks, "What's the most valuable artifact
you have ever found?"
I'm gonna go with an entire Mayan pyramid.
I found the pyramid through Google Earth at home.
I rolled the cursor over this area of the jungle
and the altimeter would go
bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop.
And I thought, "You know, next time I'm in that area
of the jungle, I gotta go back there
and check out that area."
And yes, it actually was an ancient Maya pyramid.
@jo6totorobear asks, "What archeological find
do you wish you had made and why?"
The tomb of Tutankhamun.
Howard Carter, in the early 1920s,
it took him several field seasons,
and he had to look for months through the entire
Valley of the Kings.
At his last little survey square, that's where it was.
Those artifacts are amazing.
Stuff like wood that's 3,000 years old,
it looks like it was made last week.
They tell you so much about this little moment in time
when this young king died unexpectedly.
@Janelovesbees asks, "Do archeologists
even do sex estimations of skeletons?"
Yes, and it's usually fairly easy.
The two best places to look are the skull and the pelvis.
For a male skull, it tends to be more robust.
It'll just sort of be bigger overall, a bit more angular,
although there's a lot of overlap on this.
So you have to look at different,
very specific parts of the skull in order to be sure.
I got this wrong once.
Now, it was a skeleton that had no head.
The pelvis looked very, very narrow,
and I was like, "It's a guy."
Once they got it to the lab
and they could look more closely,
it was a female who had a very narrow pelvis.
In the field, there's still parts of it covered with mud,
it's in a bad position.
But once it's in the lab, it's under controlled conditions,
you can get really exact measurements,
you can just get a much better idea of what's going on.
@reactive_yuri asks,
"I finished watching 'Ancient Apocalypse' last night.
Why do the experts
dismiss Hancock's hypothesis as baseless?"
"Ancient Apocalypse" is a Netflix series
whose central premise is there was a cataclysm
about 10,000 years ago
that destroyed a super-advanced, super civilization
and we only have bits and pieces of that left.
It didn't happen, there is no evidence.
One of the best examples of this is the Piri Reis map.
It was done in the early 1500s,
made by this guy named Piri Reis.
Pseudo-archeologists, like Graham Hancock, say,
"This is evidence that ancient people explored Antarctica."
It's just not.
It's proof that ancient mapmakers ran out of paper,
curved it around.
This is just a part of South America.
We can't use this today
as serious scientific evidence, it's not.
@Motmotorg asks, "Did you know that the Maya believed
that natural sinkholes, called cenotes,
were sacred portals to the underworld?"
I am a Mayanist and I did my dissertation
on the cenotes of Belize.
Sometimes they were just used for water,
but other times they did sacrifice people
into the cenotes from time to time.
I don't want you guys to think that human sacrifice
happened like every weekend or something, it didn't.
If the crops were going poorly and if there was no rain,
you may sacrifice somebody
who was usually a captured warrior
from one of the other cities.
Take this person to the edge of the cenote,
you would slash them through their chest.
We have found human remains in some of the cenotes.
We have accounts from the Spanish
of seeing this kind of thing happen.
In terms of my research,
we did find a little building
right on the edge of the cenote,
and we would call that a water shrine,
and that would be the place
where these kind of rituals would take place.
@ethvnsroom asks, "Why do archeologists dress like that?"
It depends on the environment you're working in.
For me in the jungle, I'm gonna wear a light shirt,
I'm gonna have boots on,
I'm gonna bring a machete with me
in order to cut through the jungle.
I'm gonna wear a hat, protects you from the sun.
You will also bring with you a bunch of different tools
in a backpack or a satchel, a GPS unit.
If I had to bring one thing with me, it would be a compass.
The compass will get you home.
GPS units are great, they work on batteries.
And once you're outta batteries, you're dead.
Always trust your compass.
@Rocketeer46 asks, "Why are there so many
archeological discoveries of late?
Are there more archeologists,
or is it technology, or what's the reason?"
It is true that we tend to be finding more and more stuff.
We do have more modern technology, like LIDAR.
There's also satellite technology
that help us find new sites
and we can see things like ancient trade routes.
But a major part of this is world overpopulation.
There is more and more excavation,
so we find new archeological sites
in every country of the world.
@Oikade20 asks, "What do archeologists not know or debate
that you would most like an answer to?"
When did human beings first enter North and South America?
The overwhelming evidence points to Asia,
across to Alaska, and then down.
We have very good evidence
up to about 16 or 17,000 years ago.
It's really hard to say after that.
You have sites way down in South America
that can be quite old too,
21,000 years or 40,000 years,
but the evidence isn't quite good enough.
A decade from now, maybe we know more than we do now.
Those are all the questions for today.
Thanks for watching Archeology Support.
[gentle upbeat music]