10: The Undersea Monolith In 2015, archeologists found something they
couldn't believe.
A monolith over 30 feet (9.1 m) tall was discovered looming above the sea floor off the coast
of Sicily.
It was discovered at a depth of 120 feet (36.5 m), looking so much like Stonehenge that it
could rewrite everything we know about ancient history.
Researchers still don't know exactly what they're dealing with.
It's been estimated the monolith is somewhere around 9300 years old.
It also looks to have been made in several parts, then put together.
To make sure this really was a man-made monolith and not just a big rock on the bottom of the
sea, researchers confirmed holes drilled by hand into the stone.
These holes were probably used for wooden posts to keep the monument upright.
A few things about the history of the area.
9000 years ago, this part of the Mediterranean was above water.
But a flood changed that forever, washing away any settlements on the coast.
It's very likely that this monolith was part of an early civilization in the Mediterranean
basin, knowledgeable in architecture and construction.
The thing is, researchers don't know which civilization built the monolith.
And because only one was found, it likely was not part of an actual settlement.
No foundations or buildings were discovered near the object.
It may have been a remote place of worship, just like Stonehenge in England.
The suggestion here is that even before Stonehenge was built, people in Europe were practicing
building megaliths.
It could even be the descendants of whoever built this giant stone tower eventually made
it to England, where they continued fashioning stone circles for ritual purposes.
9: The Tamil Nadu Civilization On the banks of the Thamirabarani River in
India, a pot of rice was discovered from 3200 years ago.
Experts say this simple discovery could change everything we know about Indian history, pushing
two ancient civilizations together.
To understand this a bit better, it's generally agreed right now that the Indus Valley Civilization
was the very beginning of India as we know it today as a country and as a culture.
But this pot of rice has shown that the Tamil Nadu civilization likely existed in tandem
with the other.
The rice was found during excavations in the village of Keezhadi.
This is in the south of India, where the Tamil Nadu civilization originated from.
It's in the north of India where the Indus Valley is located.
The significance of this comes down to learned history.
Most people in India believe everything Indian came from the Indus Valley, while the Tamil
Nadu civilization of the south was merely a continuation of that several centuries later.
What this discovery tells us is that there were two separate civilizations on the Indian
subcontinent at the same time.
It’s impossible to say where each came from, but it's unlikely they both originated in
the same location.
This means the Indian people may have come from two very distinct cultures that spread
from the top and from the bottom.
If true, it could challenge many nationalistic views that people have on the subcontinent
in regard to where their ancestors came from.
8: Ancient Baby Vertebra In Israel, researchers have discovered a vertebra
that's 1.5 million years old.
They believe this piece of skeleton belonged to one of the ancient hominids of the people
who migrated from Africa into Eurasia.
The vertebra belonged to a young boy between the ages of 6 and 12 when he died.
He was pretty tall for his age and may have reached an astonishing 6.5 feet (198 cm) in
height if he had lived into adulthood.
It's not clear how he died, but his single remaining bone represents the earliest piece
of physical evidence of an ancient human in Israel.
Here's where things start to change history.
The size difference between this fossil and other similar bones found at an excavation
site in Georgia (the country) is immense.
The difference suggests at least two different populations of ancient hominins arrived in
Europe from Africa.
This was not something previously known to researchers.
What we can guess now is that migration to Georgia began 1.8 million years ago, and another
wave began moving to Israel 1.5 million years ago.
Before, researchers simply thought there was one big wave of migrants entering the area.
Now it seems ancient migration from Africa was not a single event, but occurred in many
waves throughout a period of up to 300,000 years.
The big mystery scientists can't figure out is why one of these groups was so enormous,
practically giants reaching nearly seven feet tall (2.13 m).
They don't know where these giant people went or how long they survived in Israel before
going extinct. 7: The Clovis in Michigan
13,000 years before today, the state of Michigan was covered in a block of ice about a mile
high.
Suffice to say, this was not a habitable place.
Archaeologists believe it was this thick wall of ice that kept some of the earliest North
Americans out of the region.
These were the Clovis people, the first organized society to live in what is today the United
States of America.
But something interesting just happened.
An independent researcher with help from the University of Michigan identified a Clovis
campsite in Michigan, 13,000 years old.
It's now believed to be the earliest archaeological evidence in the state, predating every other
human settlement in Michigan by centuries.
It could rewrite the history of the native people here, and even the settling of the
Great Lakes.
What's really incredible is that it shows people were here even though it was largely
inhospitable.
Mind you, the small pieces of evidence from the campsite only show a small group of people,
maybe six in total living on the edge of a river.
It may have been a kind of scouting party, a group of Clovis trying to see how far they
could stray.
It's likely all the ice prevented them from going any farther.
It could explain why the culture centered themselves around the Great Lakes region,
since the glaciers didn’t allow them to continue spreading.
6: Ancient female ruler A shocking discovery in Spain from 3700 years
ago has shed some light on ancient royalty.
Spanish archaeologists have determined the body of an ancient woman from the Bronze Age
may have been the first case of a female ruler in Western Europe.
Her bones were discovered at the La Almoloya site in Murcia, dated back to 1700 BC.
The ruin in which her body was found may very well have been the first palace built in Western
Europe, in the cradle of the El Argar society.
These people flourished from between 2200 and 1550 BC as the original European society
to use bronze, to build monuments, and to erect entire cities.
They are the earliest example of a society that created a class-based state in the region.
They divided people into categories of wealth and labor.
This woman, name unknown, was found buried in a jar beneath the floor of a large room.
She was somewhere around the age of 30 when she died, and had a daughter buried elsewhere
at the site.
She was found with a diadem and other valuable grave objects connected to politics.
This has led the researchers to believe she was the ruler of the entire palace, and maybe
even the whole El Argar society.
5: Rewriting Chinese History The ancient city of Sanxingdui was discovered
by a man and his son in a small village in China’s Sichuan Province.
They found some sacrificial pits containing treasures of bronze and gold, as well as plenty
of pieces of pottery and fragments of old buildings.
Throughout the last century, archaeologists have come and gone from this city, always
uncovering more and more historical knowledge.
We now know that Sanxingdui was arguably the greatest civilization in China about 5000
years ago.
But what's really changing the history books is the fact that the city has given up proof
of a civilization that had its own customs and rituals separate from any other in Chinese
history.
In other words, Sanxingdui is a complete anomaly.
Here's how mysterious the city is.
The artifacts discovered here are so unlike any other relics found in ancient China, or
indeed any other ancient place in the world, some think they depict extraterrestrials.
Archaeologists have uncovered bronze statues with bulging eyes and weirdly shaped bodies
that look as though they were made to depict alien visitors.
Plus, the techniques they used to build their highly advanced city weren't seen in any other
part of China for another 1000 years or more.
It's even more mysterious because no mention of them can be found in any historical record.
We don't know what language they spoke, we don't know why they abandoned their city and
vanished, and we don't know where they went.
4: Humans in the Americas Archaeologists investigating the Coxcatlan
Cave in Mexico have made a discovery that will probably force every textbook to be rewritten.
They found animal bones and rock shelters suggestive of a human presence in the area
33,000 years ago.
This is shocking for one reason.
It would mean human beings were in North America 20,000 years earlier than mainstream scientists
say.
That's 20,000 years earlier than any other piece of evidence.
It was a time when the ice sheets across North America were still thick and impassible, leading
many to wonder how they arrived in North America at all.
According to Andrew Somerville from Iowa State University, the discovery is changing the
timeline of human migration into the Americas.
While it hasn't been 100% confirmed yet, this cave does seem to contain evidence of human
habitation.
If it turns out to be true and verified, it will mean people were in the Americas earlier
during the Ice Age.
And if they were here 33,000 years ago, who's to say they weren’t here even further back
– maybe even 100,000 years ago?
3: Seafaring Australians Surprising new archaeological research in
Australia is changing what we know about the indigenous population of the continent.
It turns out ancient Australians were captains of industry, masters of the seafaring trade
with vast, international networks.
These networks go back 3000 years before previously thought.
This is especially shocking because until recently, researchers believed the culture
of Australia evolved in complete isolation.
Nothing changed until Europeans arrived.
But by looking at the archaeological record 3000 years ago, researchers have found that
Australians were building huge canoes that could go across the ocean, some of them up
to 60 feet (18.2 m) long.
They then loaded each canoe with a crew of experienced sailors, a bunch of goods, and
sailed thousands of miles to distant lands.
This makes a lot of sense if you actually look at where Australians came from.
Here's a quick lesson in the origins of human migration.
Somewhere around 3500 years ago, people moved out of Vietnam and southern China into Taiwan.
They then started island hopping across the Western Pacific.
They dropped some people off in New Guinea, they continued on to the Solomon Islands,
Fiji, Vanuatu, and eventually Australia.
A single group spent about 500 years sailing through the Pacific, colonizing every uninhabited
island.
It makes complete sense that moving forward, these people continued their seafaring ways.
The indigenous Australians continued to trade with other settlements in the Pacific, all
the way to China.
2: The Drought that Toppled Empires Archaeologist Harvey Weiss was excavating
a site in Syria when he found a layer of silt so dry and barren it didn't have a single
earthworm in it.
This may not sound that interesting, but it turned out to be huge.
You see, every layer of silt corresponds to a period in time.
This particular layer, absent any worms, proved that something drastic had taken place to
scorch the soil thousands of years ago.
And whatever it was, it must have been huge to leave a blanket of earth too rancid even
for earthworms.
Dating has helped us figure out it was all because of a drought in the year 2200 BC.
This was a time when the Akkadian Empire was dominating the regions of Syria and Iraq.
But in the year 2150, the empire had vanished.
The central authority was gone, people had walked out of the region, and the Akkadians
were no more.
The discovery of an intense drought happening at the same time as the civilization collapsed
is no coincidence.
It now looks as if this ancient society crumbled almost overnight because of a sudden lack
of rainwater.
But guess what, the Akkadians were not the only ones.
4200 years ago, there was a disaster in Mesopotamia, there was chaos all along the Nile, and the
Aegean and Mediterranean regions were in turmoil.
It's now looking like some kind of mass drought tore the world apart for a short time, toppling
empires everywhere it went.
While the fall of these empires was previously attributed to things like social anarchy and
war, it looks like it may have just been something as simple as a pause in rainfall.
1: Early Scavengers In 1929, an amateur archaeologist made an
interesting discovery in New Mexico.
He found stone points scattered around mammoth fossils.
The stone points were believed to be the ends of spears once used by ancient North American
hunters to take down the biggest game of all: the mammoth.
This was seen as clear evidence that human hunters were expert mammoth killers.
And since then, similar artifacts have been found near mammoth bones at 11 sites throughout
North America.
These places are referred to by archaeologists as kill sites, places where ancient hunters
descended on mammoths, giant camels, and even mastodons.
Well, all of this might be wrong.
Archaeologist Metin Eren from Kent State University says the tools found at these supposed kill
sites weren't from spears at all.
Instead, they were just knives that hunters used to carve meat off carcasses of animals
that were already dead.
Other sharp objects found may have been used to throw at other scavenger animals trying
to get to the mammoth remains.
What all this means is that we may not have been as formidable as we like to think.
It could be that instead of hunting mammoths, we just followed them around and scavenged
the dead.
This even makes sense based on some experimental data.
Simulations have been done showing the force of an average human throwing a primitive spear
at a mammoth.
Researchers now don't even think these rock spears could have penetrated the hide of a
mammoth.
And even if they had magically penetrated the thick skin of one of these monsters, there's
no way they could have gone through bone or the thick meat beneath.
How do you feel knowing the ancient people of North America were probably just a bunch
of scavengers instead of brave mammoth hunters?
Let me know in the comments and thanks for watching!
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