10: Village in a Lake In a shocking archaeological discovery out
of Switzerland, a bronze age village was found hiding underneath the surface of Lake Lucerne.
Imagine living on top of a literal ancient town, preserved under your feet.
Would you feel weird about that, knowing people lived and died for thousands of years right
where you live?
I would, but these people only found out about this recently.
Traces of homes were found while workers were laying a pipeline in the natural harbor.
The homes would have been on stilts, built on the actual lakebed at least 3000 years
ago when the lake was just a shallow crater without water.
What’s interesting is that archaeologists have had a hunch there could be a village
under the lake for some time, and this was the proof they finally needed.
30 wooden piles and 5 chunks of pottery have all now been dated back to the Bronze Age,
around 1000 BC, to be exact.
Of course, it’s hard to determine exactly what this ancient civilization had looked
like.
They were likely some of the first farmers in the region of Central Europe, and maybe
even the ancestors of those living in the nearby town of Lucerne today.
The water levels would have risen slowly starting in the 15th century, giving the people ample
time to escape and reestablish before flooding.
9: Swampy Discoveries The Great Dismal Swamp is just as miserable
of a place as it sounds like.
It’s a swamp, it’s dismal, and it’s great, at least in terms of size.
It doesn’t sound like a great place to live, though, but it’s home to some pretty incredible
archaeological secrets.
Most of these secrets are stuck under the swamp water and buried under heaps of muck,
but they’re still there.
You see, the Great Dismal Swamp once covered a huge portion of Virginia and North Carolina,
with vegetation so thick and treacherous that no horse or canoe could penetrate it.
So, the swamp made a perfect place for fugitive slaves to hide, as well as Native Americans
fleeing colonial invaders.
This was back in the 1600s, when a community of Native Americans and African Americans
had established itself in the swamps.
Throughout a decade of excavations in the Great Dismal Swamp, archaeologist Dan Sayers
has uncovered about 3600 artifacts from the area's history.
These artifacts include clay tobacco pipes, the nails used in the construction of cabins,
gun flint, and lead shot.
But of course, finding tangible evidence of the people who lived here is very difficult
because it's all under the swamp water.
We know they lived in a communal society on the fringe of civilization, and we know that
almost all traces of the settlements they built have already been reclaimed by the swamp.
But without written records, and with only a handful of recovered artifacts, it's hard
to say what exactly daily life was like for the hundreds of years the swamp was occupied.
8: 18th Century Shipwreck Shipwrecks happen all the time, but nowadays
we generally know about them when they happen.
That wasn’t the case hundreds of years ago, so sometimes archaeologists today find surprising
discoveries from ships that went down in the distant past.
In Egypt, that means a shipwreck from the 18th century that was recently discovered
in the Red Sea.
An archaeological mission working with Alexandria University’s Faculty of Arts found the front
part of the merchant ship sunk near Saadana Island.
They also discovered artifacts that were part of the ship when it sank.
These artifacts include pottery vessels that once held grain, as well as pieces of the
broken off ship.
However, it’s difficult to tell just what exactly the merchant ship was selling because
it has already been so terribly destroyed by sitting at the bottom of the Red Sea.
It's hardly even a ship anymore, with only fragments of its hull being visible through
the sand.
The ship originally sank when it crashed into the steep coral reefs of the Red Sea while
on its way back to Egypt.
This was a pretty common problem back in those days.
Nobody has any idea who the ship belonged to or even what its name was.
The crew probably died without a trace!
Imagine waiting on a family member to return from a long voyage, but every day that passes
makes you think that they were lost at sea.
It’s a terrifying thought, right?
It happened countless times in this part of the world, because we know that right now,
this is just one of hundreds of anonymous shipwrecks that litter the area.
7: Ancient Turtle In Courtenay, British Columbia, a fossil hunter
came upon something amazing in a local river just last month.
About 80 million years ago, a sea turtle passed away on the banks of what is now a lonely
river in the Comox Valley.
The fossil of this ancient animal was just found by a man named Russ Ball, someone with
years of experience in fossil hunting.
He began his hobby for collecting fossils when living in Alberta, one of the richest
locations for fossils anywhere in North America.
But when Russ moved to Vancouver Island, the climate was different and so were the fossils.
The turtle fossil was only exposed for a brief time when water levels dropped.
Ross had to act quickly to properly preserve the fossil of the ancient turtle and get it
out of the river, which he did with some help from the local hydroelectric power company!
Next, Russ gave the fascinating fossil to the Royal BC Museum for further analysis.
Nobody is really sure what kind of turtle this is because they are very rare to find
in British Columbia.
Turtle fossils just aren’t that common, leading some to speculate that this could
be a brand-new species of turtle never before seen.
But we won't know for sure until more investigation is completed by the museum.
6: World War 1 Machine Gun A man in England was dangling a magnet into
a river near his home in Yorkshire when he found something he had never expected.
He pulled an ancient Vickers machine gun out of the river, still in relatively good condition
considering it was probably down there since World War One.
The magnet fisherman described it as a once in a lifetime find and is now hoping to locate
a museum where he can put the brutal weapon of war on display.
The gun dates from 1915 and had probably been used by British soldiers battling on the Western
Front.
The Vickers machine gun was known for its reliability and deadliness, used by the Brits
for over 50 years.
If you're wondering what a machine gun from the war was doing in a river, it's actually
not the only one.
Many deactivated weapons were dumped into rivers throughout England after World War
One, with many of them still being slowly eroded today.
5: Lemur Graveyard Researchers have discovered one of the strangest
graveyards ever in an underwater cave located on the island of Madagascar.
Inside this cave, researchers discovered hundreds of creepy skulls and skeletons, many of which
belong to a group of extinct lemurs.
As weird as this sounds, it's 100% true.
The extinct lemurs had probably been washed into the underground cave by a storm that
happened thousands of years ago.
But wait, the graveyard contains even more creepy fossils than just those of extinct
lemurs.
Researchers also found the skeletons of primates, hippos, crocodiles, and a huge predatory cat
native to Madagascar, an extinct type of giant fossa.
The oldest animals found in the cave went extinct a couple thousand years ago, whereas
the most recent skeletons belong to animals still living on the island, such as rodents
introduced by humans.
Perhaps the most bizarre part of the discovery is the rate at which these animals went extinct
on the island.
Humans only colonized Madagascar 3000 years ago, and that timeline overlaps with some
of the fossils, suggesting humans lived alongside giant lemurs and ferocious cats, until they
hunted them all to death.
Have you ever found an animal skeleton you didn’t recognize?
What did you do with it?
Did you eventually figure out what it was?
Tell me your story in the comments section below.
Then remember to subscribe to Talltanic if you haven’t already.
More exciting videos are coming out very, very soon!
4: Underwater Alien Base Stranger than anything else any archaeologist
has recently uncovered is the underwater alien base allegedly discovered 6 miles (10km) off
the coast of California.
It looks awfully suspicious, but what’s the truth behind it?
The strange structure was found resting on the floor of the ocean like some kind of spaceship
covered over with dirt.
It looks like what you might imagine an underwater city to look like if it had been abandoned
and covered in shifting ocean sediments.
There are even columns that appear to lead into the structure.
However, scientists have been skeptical about whether this thing is truly an alien base.
After all, the images were obtained via Google Earth, making many question their validity.
The anomaly is 2000 feet (600m) below the surface, it measures at least three miles
wide, and it's shaped like a perfect oval.
David Schwartz from the U.S. Geological Survey says that it's simply a geological formation
and has nothing to do with aliens, but he hasn’t been down there to look.
How could he know for sure!?
I think it merits more investigation, don’t you?
Unfortunately, nobody actually knows what the anomaly is.
It looks like an artificial structure built on the floor of the ocean.
But according to the experts, it's nothing to be worried about.
We’d probably all like to get some better imaging before deciding one way or the other!
3: Top Predator As if the ocean weren’t scary enough, scientists
have discovered a new top predator of the ocean and it's nothing short of terrifying.
Marine biologist Yoshihiro Fujiwara caught the fish while doing research off the coast
of Central Japan, in Suruga Bay.
At first, he and his crew thought they had reeled in a coelacanth, one of the most legendary
fish of all time.
But the fish they caught was a bit different.
In fact, something about it didn’t seem right.
But there was no way they could have found a new species.
Suruga Bay is the deepest bay in all of Japan and has been studied extensively since the
19th century.
There's no way anyone missed a fish as shocking as this one.
Or did they?
As it turned out, everyone had missed this fish.
It was brand new.
Never assume you know what’s going on under the sea!
Fujiwara checked all the books he could, he consulted with his colleagues, and in the
end, he concluded that he had a new fish on his hands.
It was a monster creature over 55 pounds (25kg) in weight.
Fujiwara named it yokozuna slickhead, which is a homage to the top rank in sumo wrestling
in Japan.
I wouldn’t want to wrestle with this evil looking fish, would you?
2: World War 2 Bombers Three aircrafts from World War Two have been
discovered in a lagoon in Micronesia 76 years after they vanished off the face of the earth.
The airplanes had been part of Operation Hailstone, back in 1944.
The three aircrafts had been manned by 7 servicemen from the United States, all of whom were listed
as missing in action, or MIA.
The discovery was made by Project Recover, which specializes in finding out what happened
to American soldiers declared missing in action during the Second World War.
They found the aircrafts in Chuuk Lagoon.
There were two SBD-5 Dauntless dive bombers and a single TBM/F-1 Avenger torpedo bomber
that had been fighting Japanese forces when they probably took damage and fell into the
water.
The remains of the soldiers might still be down there, and the planes are of incredible
historical importance.
Perhaps someday they’ll end up in a museum!
1: Sunken Moai If you thought that the giant heads of Easter
Island, known as moai, were just heads, think again!
Scientists have uncovered something incredible recently that shocked the world.
In fact, it turned out that the moai were full statues with most of their bulk hidden
underground like icebergs.
But how did the rest of them get underground?
It’s totally bizarre.
After digging some of these statues up, scientists saw that they had bodies that had been sitting
in the dirt for centuries.
They were enormous and far from just being heads.
That's what makes the picture that’s been going around the internet lately of the submerged
moai so interesting.
The photograph shows three divers swimming around a huge moai statue nestled against
some coral.
It makes you wonder just how exactly the statue got underwater and what else we might not
know about Easter Island.
Unfortunately, the image is not historically accurate.
It’s actually not a genuine Easter Island head.
According to National Geographic, the moai is fake.
It was a prop for a movie done in 1994.
Now it’s part of the reef and more of a tourist attraction than a history lesson,
but the real moai are still embedded in the ground, and their mysteries still lie beyond
our scientists’ knowledge!
What’s the most mysterious thing you’ve ever found underwater?
Let me know in the comments and thanks for watching.
If you haven’t already, be sure to hit subscribe for more awesome videos!