10 MAD THINGS from PREHISTORY you probably didn't know about.

over the past couple of years we've covered more than a few astonishing discoveries in prehistoric archeology whether we've made a short Standalone program as in the prehistory flash strand or as part of the pre-history show for example but now we've trolled the archive and come up with some standout discoveries and news items that we've covered in the past some are just amazing some are just weird some entertaining and summer all three so settle in for 10 mad things from pre-history you probably didn't know and stick around to the end for a non prehistoric bonus first up a crystal dagger and a mass suicide [Music] had a stunning set of artifacts found during excavations at the montelerio tullos passage grave in Valencia de la Concepcion in Southwest Spain excavations were completed back in 2010 but reports were only published in 2015 and 2019. the site has been dated to around 4 800 years old and stands within a necropolis incorporating a number of other burials archaeologists Unearthed an extraordinary collection of arrowheads and a beautifully preserved dagger all of which are made from rock crystal now it's worth noting that rock crystal and quartz items have appeared in a number of other burials in the regions of Western and Lucia and extreme Madura but the vast majority of sites have contained just one or two items a couple of sites did contain a dozen or so arrowheads and microblades but none of these other burials have given up anything as spectacular as here at the thalos of montaliria and spectacular is the operative world isn't it it's also worth noting that the excavations revealed a really unusual set of remains the tallest itself is an enormous megalithic structure made mainly from huge slabs of slate the 39 meter Corridor extends into a corbled roofed construction containing a main burial chamber another short passage leads from the main chamber into a second smaller burial chamber the remains of at least 25 individuals have been excavated 20 were found in the larger main chamber two in the smaller chamber and a further three in the corridor analysis has revealed that at least 15 of the individuals were women although from the arrangement and positioning of the bodies it seems likely that they may all have been females this is probably a good time to point out that all the media coverage of this site in the excavations have descended into total fabrication and in some cases utter nonsense ah yes from Tales of goddess Cults to mass suicide many of the media articles have reported that the women probably all drank a poisonous liquid in some Grand ritual to accompany their Chieftain into the Afterlife they pretty much all report that everyone died from mercury poisoning with speculation that perhaps these were priestesses of some kind or some sort who painted their skin with the toxic substance yes the somewhat less dramatic truth is that just seven of the 25 individuals showed traces of mercury poisoning which almost certainly came from the Cinnabar that has been more widely associated with similar sites now Cinnabar produces a red pigment which could easily have been used for skin coloring and adornment and these people just wouldn't have known that they were slowly poisoning themselves oh and that Chieftain it was supposedly accompanying into the Afterlife well that Chieftain was in a completely separate burial about 200 meters away in the necropolis yeah well sorry to be such downers on the party but here the walls of the site were also coated with Cinnabar but there is not one scrap of evidence to support any of these outlandish claims there are also depictions from otherwise reputable sources of a massive chamber filled with the corpses of people who've been involved in their lavish ritual the simple fact is that even the larger the two changed it is far too small for any kind of dancing around these people were simply laid to rest yeah however all that said back to the facts the archaeologists also found a large amount of what are thought to be either shrouds or items of clothing with the bodies now obviously any of the binding fibers and textiles have long since disintegrated but whatever these garments were they were made with tens of thousands of perforated and amber beads tens of thousands of perforated amber beads let's just meditate on that but not not all Amber bees there were tens of thousands of perforated beads but some of them are Amber and oh it's just extraordinary isn't it tens of thousands good grief the burial also contained the broken remains of what was a ceramic figurine of some sort a number of small pieces of gold blades in Ivory and unusually for a barrier like this they found a crystal core which possibly is the very same tool used to make all the weapons it is truly a fabulous discovery which requires none of the media's fairy tales however that said I can't wait for the the novel to come out you know which will hang all these wonderful details together somehow anyway but that's obviously a few of these claims are possible but it's far from certain that all these individuals even died at the same time and it's particularly fanciful to suggest that they all died at the same time as the chief in the Tomb 200 meters away all we can say for certain is that 25 people were buried in two Chambers and that they were buried with arguably the most beautiful set of Crystal weapons anyone could possibly need in the afterlife what more could you want and on that you know how people sometimes hang on to the belongings of their deceased loved ones I don't know what Grandpa's pipe Grandma's knitting needles whatever well it seems that in Bronze Age Britain they were taking that idea to the next level and this is Professor Joanna Brooke and Dr Tom Booth have been refining dates on human bones collected from 60 Bronze Age sites around Britain all of which were known to be carefully placed burials right now the surprise outcome was that at 26 out of the 60 sites they found that some of the bones were significantly older than the primary burial but the older bones were always within a time frame where the remains could have been or probably were within living memory of the main burial meaning that at least some of the time our ancestors were keeping hold of pieces of the dead now obviously it's impossible to say for certain but the implication is that people were treasuring pieces of their departed loved ones whether it was grandparents or great-grandparents the two most notable finds were one human femur as a leg bone which had been carved into a flute and there was a grave in Yorkshire where a woman was found buried with two other significantly older skulls so we've we've kind of got to imagine keeping our great grandparents skulls on the shelf by the door something like that yes or every Solstice is saying oh he passed me granddad's legs so I can whistle and jolly tune you know I said how some of these things were just plain weird well this is one of them I don't know how to say much more about this one without being a bit of a plot spoiler actually carry on well I've got a a bit of an odd one here um I don't know if you've ever heard of Lord tagar culture from Siberia I have now the take our culture well do you know it's another one of those discrepancies between you know what is Iron Age and what is Bronze Age and it depends on the country that you're in um this is kind of more or less the same period as you were just talking about with the princess the tagar culture go from uh 800 BC to 100 BC roughly and it's still Bronze Age for for them um but the takeout culture now they uh they mostly come from South Western Siberia but this discovery is from right up in the uh in the Northeast in the balayagora I think it is yes the balayagora district and there are burial mounds there that have been they've been known about and excavated for decades so that the culture is well known right and the thing is that these people the tagar people had some pretty wacky funery practices well what they did was they would they would take the deceased and put them in a stone coffin fair enough and then they would cover the stone coffin just Loosely with uh with stones and just leave them for a few years and then after a few years hmm after a few years they would take them out the semi-mummified remains and yeah and they would bind them up with grass and leather making some I mean it sounds so grotesque but some kind of Macabre effigy but as if that's not bad enough the thing that we're looking at here is the heads right well I'm no I don't know if you're gonna have a surprise me or not well it's um yeah it is odd so what they did was they would take a skull and they would pack the cavities with Clay so into the eye sockets into the mouth into the uh the nose hole they would just pack it with Clay not something you'd see on blue people and then once they'd pack that with Clay they would then cover the whole skull with clay and form yeah and form a kind of well they would reform a face that didn't necessarily have to look like the deceased person it just had to be a face so they were um you know giving life back to this thing um um and and so here's the thing that uh that this was known about for a long time and the discovery that is in the news now is actually new news on old news and it comes from 1968 that they found for once because they they're usually these things are always broken and they found a complete unbroken clay head so enjoy a Rapture yes so back in 1968 they x-rayed it but the technology at the time just wasn't really up to penetrating uh playing giving any kind of clarity they couldn't see clearly what it was all they could see was that it was a bit weird and they didn't know what it was but they didn't want to damage the clay head so they just put it away to one side fast forward to 2020 and and two uh an archaeologists from Uh Russian archaeologist there's a professor Natalia uh blosmack from The Institute of archeology and ethnography and Dr Constance and Cooper of The Institute of nuclear physics and they decided that they would check it out with modern technology and guess what was inside it's a sheep's skull inside this human head is a sheep's skull now it's it's so weird because it's the only one that they have found loads of these clay heads which have always been broken and you know but this is the first time they've found one that well it didn't have a human head in it so um the thing is though weird as this is there's an interesting correlation because there are cultures and I think the main one that I'm that I'm half remembering because I can't remember exactly but there's a tribe I think in Africa where um their practice was that a body had to be complete so if um if if it was Battle or anything like that that when people were actually brought back for burial that if any body parts were missing limbs or what have you then they could be made up from anything that was found um you know on the way home if you like so if they found like there was a skeleton of a cow then a cow's leg would do in place of the human leg just so that the body had all its necessary Parts the body in the actual burial or what it was yes so internment so the implication you know I mean if if this person um if his head was missing you know maybe they just replaced the head just so that the body was complete I mean it makes sense isn't it folks if you thought things were weird in 2020. yeah it's console yourself with the fact so in essence you're saying so if if a bear had come along rip this chat uh head off um they just used a sheep skull too you know maybe in a nutshell that's my take on it that's my take on it that there have been a couple of other suggestions that uh the academics are making like uh you know maybe the idea was to give them a fresh start in life I uh in in the afterlife and I'm not really sure what the implication of that is you know are they are they saying that what this person was such a bastard but uh am I allowed to say that um he was such a bad person that uh they decided he'd be better off starting again as a sheep in the afterlife seems a little bit stretched to me um I think it's more likely to be that they were just so the question for me is is was this a one-off that happens to have been happened upon by archaeologists as general practice this is what we don't know that's what we need to know really yeah otherwise we're going to go off in all sorts of directions and trying to uh we work out what that was about we are it's a standard practice or or a one-off watch this space moving on if any of you out there still had any remaining ideas of Neanderthals as knuckle dragging dullards prepare for a bit of a surprise to think of it you'll probably be surprised anyway this piece and this time it's about strength yay string we love string yeah string some of you may have seen in the news last year actually that evidence had been found for 13 800 year old rope in France well we did a piece about it didn't we indeed we did do a few spouse yeah yeah um and this discovery from the French national Center for scientific research is more rope um and the thing is well it's string really string or thread and this time it's the work of Neanderthals found in a cave in the ardesh region of Southern France and really this is a testament to the skills of the researchers because every artifact the team find they examine under the microscope I'll say that again every single thing that they find they examine under the mic so if it's a relevant piece they can see that a tiny piece of flint has been worked they look at it under the microscope and on one small piece of flint they found a tiny beautifully preserved piece of cordage it's six millimeters long and half a millimeter wide so you know hats off to them for signing that but it's dated to a staggering 40 000 years old and now it's important to remember here this is the work of Neanderthals who always consider to be considerably less sophisticated than Homo sapiens but this is a finely braided piece of thread made from tree fibers yeah I mean it's a one it's a wonder why we do that I mean it's another conversation entirely why we tend to uh or historically we've denigrated neanderthals but uh this is extraordinary fantastic find and using the word find is interesting so often used and just I mean reiterate what you know you've just said as as well that using that word find um is doesn't do service to the actual finding work the actual digging the actual Excavating that goes on because it has to be go on at such a granual painstaking level to enable people back you know who are looking at stuff under microscopes and analyzing stuff to be able to extricate this kind of detail um it just speaks to you know the work that field archaeologists uh do just thought I'd mention that anyway okay on to weird thing number five do we have here a Swiss Bronze Age Darth Vader well probably not but if you keep watching you might see where I'm coming from with this one today we're looking at a discovery that was originally made near Lake BL Northwest of Bern in Switzerland um right back in 2017. yeah and we have to say thank goodness for responsible detectorists because the discovery was made by a couple of guys out treasure hunting so it could so easily have gone unrecorded but they reported to find straight away because they knew it had to be something important sadly despite their responsible attitude other people did have a ferret around which Disturbed some of the archeology but nevertheless we still have a unique Discovery here yeah don't we just we're looking at a complex burial here which we'll get into in more deeply in a in a moment but the unique aspect here if not these slightly weird aspects is that the excavated artifacts handed into the authorities included a bronze hand slightly smaller than adult life size made from about a pound or about half a kilo of bronze decorated with a gold cuff would you believe so I mean it's an extraordinary thing the gold foil has been applied to the wrist using a vegetable based glue and inside the hand itself is a kind of socket which looks like it could be mounted on a pole or of some sort yeah it's intriguing that it's only slightly smaller than life size I mean why you know they clearly could have made it bigger or smaller it just seems old depends how precious bronzes I suppose maybe yeah but one of the most seductive possibilities being discussed is that it could have been a prosthetic hand you know perhaps for a warrior who had lost his own in battle who knows anyway other artifacts handed in excuse the pun included a bronze dagger and a rib bone now obviously archaeologists got the treasure hunting Duo to show them exactly where the location was so they could evaluate the situation and they then returned the following spring to excavate Andrea share head of the ancient history and Roman archeology department at the Bern archaeological service and her team spent seven weeks Excavating the site which it has to be said really yokos what we keep seeing in burial locations these people really did like to give their departed loved ones a good view the site's on a plateau above Lake Biel near the Tiny Village of prel was a fantastic view over the plateau to the Alps the excavations revealed that the site was a burial in pretty poor condition the team uncovered the bones of a middle-aged man along with a long bronze pin a bronze spiral probably they were they think that it was probably worn as a hair tie along with fragments of gold foil which do match those decorating the cuff of the bronze hand and one piece of Good Fortune was that they found one of the hands broken fingers in the grave which pretty much confirmed that the hand was originally buried with the man cool yeah carbon dating of the glue holding the gold to the wrist return dates of between 1400 and 1500 BC so middle Bronze Age appropriately making it though the earliest known representation of a human body part in Europe how about that how about that yeah it's also significant here is that hardly any gold has ever been found in burials in Switzerland uh so you know that that's a a turn up as well but regardless of the gold this find is just completely unique in Europe yeah of course one of the unfortunate results of anything discovered in this way is that having been pulled out of the ground by amateurs with no details of the context having been recorded the archaeologists have absolutely no way of determining exactly how a hand has been positioned in relationship to the body which might have given us a clue as to its actual purpose so whether it was worn as a prosthetic wielded as a staff like a scepter or helderloft on a long pole we will never know and on to the next and not much to say about this one except that if you thought there wasn't much going on in southeast Spain in the Bronze Age this is pretty much off the scale may we introduce to you the Silver Queen of the El agar culture today we're going to the Bronze Age ruins of La Alma lawyer in Southeastern Spain in what is now modern-day Murcia Malaya is an important Hilltop complex one of many sites built by the El agar culture and occupied between approximately 2200 and 1500 Years BC the site was discovered back in the 1880s and excavations has been going on for many years the particular Discovery we're talking about today dates to around 3 700 years ago it was actually Unearthed in 2014 but the excavation reports have only just been published and we are really looking at something quite extraordinary here yes a number of burials have been found beneath the floor of a large Hall which appears to be the most important structure in the whole complex but it's the most recently discovered grave burial number 38 which has caused such excitement archaeologists from the autonomous University of Barcelona have discovered the high status grave of a man and a woman buried together in a large ceramic jar now analysis has revealed that the man died some years before the woman the tomb being reopened for her to be placed alongside him and what makes this discovery so important is that the vast majority of all the lavish grave goods were buried with the woman not the man with the clear implication that it was the woman who was the most important individual in this Society the man died at around 35 years of age and was buried with his own fineries including beer Jewelery fled golden plug type ear adornments a silver ring and a copper dagger decorated with silver rivets by contrast the woman who was in her twenties when she died was laid to rest with the wealth of silver grave Goods intriguingly her earplugs were different sizes both with silver spirals looped through them more silver spirals had fastened her hair she wore a silver bracelet and a silver ring amongst other items placed alongside her were silver plates and also a wooden all interpreted to be a symbol of Womanhood also decorated with silver however the most impressive item was a silver diadem still in place around her head it is one of only six ever found in our dark Graves but another intriguing aspect of these diadems is that they have been found with the disc pointing upwards and downwards in this burial it was downwards to lie over or Beyond The Bridge of a nose although it's impossible to say with absolute certainty it does seem clear from the burial that the young woman was Superior in status to the man possibly even a queen and this has raised many questions around the standard view of patriarchal Societies in pre-history now hundreds of el agar sites and burials have been excavated and in high status burials they are known to have included important grave Goods with girls from as young as six years old and that something was never granted to boys under the age of around 12. this woman had a number of health and congenital conditions she was missing a neck vertebra and a rib she had a shortened left thumb and scarring on her rib cage suggests she may have had a heart infection of course it's quite possible these characteristics may have added to her individuality in society back then who knows adding to the overall complexity here the pair were buried beneath the floor of what appears to be a grand hall of some sort now the walls aligned with benches and at one end there is a hearth and a Podium so there is no question that this was an important place within the society and it doesn't end there found beneath the floor of another room nearby was the grave of a baby girl who was between 12 and 18 months old when she had died the DNA analysis revealed that she was the daughter of this young couple and further investigation is going to be carried out to see if anything could be learned about why she wasn't buried with her parents the infant burial has another significance though in that she proves that the man and the woman lived at the same time this is usually not the case in other El agar double burials where the individuals have lived and died at different times yeah it really is an extraordinary story waiting to be unraveled whichever way you look at it it seems desperately sad for this family all to have died so prematurely well yes as I've said before somebody out there needs to write the novel they do they do you know what though in researching for this news flash we've learned so many new and exciting things the Revelation for us in this story is not so much the burial we've just talked about but it's a whole subject of the El agar culture itself a whole Bronze Age State the size of Belgium on the Western Mediterranean Coast who knew if you go down to the woods today you probably won't get much of a surprise but if you went down to the woods in the Ural Mountains ten thousand years ago it might have been a different matter today we're looking at new news about old news and revisiting a significant discovery made well over a century ago in a peat bog near yucatarinburg over in the Ural Mountains the shigir idol is the oldest known wooden sculpture ever found it was discovered in 1894 when gold prospectors were digging up the peat bog hoping to make their fortunes now when in use the statue stood in imposing 17 feet tall and was carved from a single large tree its head is carved with the mouth forming an O shape and intriguingly there are a number of other faces carved down the length of the wood along with overall zigzagging geometric designs the statue was put on display in this third lost Regional Museum of local law in yucatrinberg and was always presumed to be a few thousand years old until the 1990s when it was carbon dated for the first time dates came back at a staggering nine thousand eight hundred years old so old in fact that many archaeologists and Scholars rejected the findings as impossible the things didn't stop there in 2014 with advances in dating techniques new samples were taken and much to everyone's astonishment the newly calculated age came back as eleven thousand six hundred years old but it still didn't end there because researchers realized that over the decades for the purposes of preservation the wood had been treated with waxes and the carbon content Within These waxes was skewing the results so they bored into the Heartwood and extracted samples that couldn't possibly be contaminated and the dates came back the wood is an incredible twelve thousand two hundred and fifty years old researchers estimate that the tree was around 150 years old when it was felt and carved so the statue itself was created about twelve thousand one hundred years ago and carved antler also found in the 19th century close to where the idol was discovered has undergone tests which have given similar dates and recently a team led by archaeologist Mikhail zillion of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow has begun excavations at another peat bog some 30 miles away from where the sugar Idol was originally found now they have already uncovered hundreds of artifacts including bone points and daggers and elk antlers carved with animal faces I've also found evidence for the surprising sophistication of these Mesolithic people's carpentry skills Stone adses and other woodworking tools as well as examples of skillfully worked and smoothed Pine logs all of which points to people being far more socially and culturally advanced than we tend to imagine you have to wonder what sort of environment was home to this towering Effigy you know was it deep in a forest or standing proud in a clearing maybe the ongoing excavator stations will reveal more clues to the lives of these people who knows okay time to break out the tissues I'm afraid a sad story from the banks of the Danube 30 000 years ago who knew such a story could reach out and grab us by the throat from such a long time ago don't worry the items after this will cheer me up a bit kicking straight off we're going to be taking you to the banks of the Danube about 30 miles west of Vienna but 30 000 years ago do you know this this is a it's a painful Discovery um whilst being quite lovely in its way it's the earliest ever known burial of identical twins yeah and uh basically the burial itself is quite lavish but we'll come to that in a minute this is as Michael said it's in it's in the town of krems right in the middle of the Town actually and this burial it's two babies obviously identical twins uh one of them died just after childbirth and they've they've been able to see this from uh from bones and teeth really but uh uh but one died just after uh birth the other died weeks to short months afterwards and their the burial is they were buried under Mammoth under a mammoth shoulder blade which has been shaped to form a cover for the grave and the whole thing is coated in Red ocher so it's you know it's just um it's painful really when you sing the one child died at childbirth and another one died short weeks and months uh afterwards and then only a few feet away there is a third child that they've been able to ascertain is very closely related probably a cousin and that was uh some months older so you've got two twins dying shortly after birth and another related one in the same family dying some months later it's just you know what a poignant thing to discover it's highly evocative isn't it yeah we should point out that this is coming up in news um the discovery was actually made in 2005. that's that actually that's very good point yeah and it's once again it's another case of modern tech you know being able to go back and look at older discoveries and learning that this is the oldest known set of identical twins it's a fantastic thing to be able to tell well yeah that's absolutely it the application of a DNA techniques and Isotopes to be able to evaluate what the actual feel your relationship was between these two infants um I've got some great detail here from the original uh from from the paper from the uh study of the DNA but first there was a description of what's actually in the graves really helpful to get a conjure this pictures I'll just read from the paper it says the oval-shaped grave pit of the double burial measuring uh 0.36 by 0.28 by 0.2 meters contained the scalp remains of two infants um where they'll be referred to as individual one and individual two um I think individual one was the earlier of the burial each of the bodies was embedded in Red Oak and they were placed next to each other in flexed positions Facing East over their skulls pointing North the bodies however did not occupy the same amount of space in the grave pit while individual 2 was placed more centrally individual one was deposited against the grave Pit's Southwest Edge a total of 43 beads made of mammoth ivory were set on individual ones pelvis and their Arrangement clearly indicate that they've been threaded on a string all 53 beads are remarkably similar in size and shape and the perforation show no sign of wear indicating the production for the sole purposes for the sole purpose of serving as a grave good personalized attribution is emphasized by the position of the individual's right hand which was placed Atop The String in contrast individual 1 was equipped with three perforated mollusks and a perforated Fox incisor that were recovered from beneath individual twos mandible suggesting that they were pendants on a string necklace after deposition of the corpses the pit was not backfilled but instead sealed with a mammoth's shoulder blade of which to make it fit the scapulae had been flaked off with a series of blows yeah so paint a picture doesn't it it really does it really does it's um yes it's the it's a wonderful aspect of adna telling us you know giving us such Rich information uh but at the same time actually giving you a closer Glimpse at prehistoric trauma really I mean we've also Dreadful time for that family and you mentioned there is a third infant involved in this study which was uh buried uh some distance away but again very uh young infant and there's a familial relationship that the third one being a cousin yeah yeah now the whole thing about this for me the absolutely well now before I go into that 2005 it was discovered um but um they uh there was quite a fuss about it in Austria at the time I do believe and uh they made a reconstruction of the Grave for the Natural History Museum in Vienna um so that's there and I think some of the photographs that I may be showing are of that uh but as I'm saying this recent study is to do with the DNA and the what comes out of it for me is I just gasp when I think about that we're looking back 30 000 Years to you know virtually from our point of view an alien existence and yet oh the bizarre thing is I find myself getting very emotional about it yeah yeah absolutely yeah I agree it's it's absolutely bizarre um that these two little tiny tots have been buried with such tenderness and respect that you get such this sense of tragedy just boof for thirty thousand years ago it's there yeah right right in in your face you know the love and care um that has been put into um laying these little ones to rest again the astonishing amount of information that comes out of the modern tech uh I find consistently enthralling I mean in fact they've been able to tell from this that uh they they did isotope analysis as well so they can tell how they do this I have no idea but they can tell from the carbon nitrogen and barium in uh in the tooth enamel that the twins were breastfed yes and and the uh the the cousin this the one the the older burial um well the younger burial the older child uh they could see from stress lines in the teeth that he it it implied that he had feeding difficulties and from that they it makes them wonder if the mother had a painful breast infection mastitis or something like that um and and it's those sorts of things that come from our ability now to do this extreme depth of chemical analysis it's as you say I mean the the just the the dreadfully painful time for that family yeah uh is suddenly made real all by chemical analysis it's extraordinary yeah oh yes the Birdman of Siberia and his bespectical friend I would imagine his cloak of many beaks wouldn't be seen as exactly politically correct today you'll see what I mean but what was its impact all those years ago in Siberia today we're looking at a fascinating Discovery from The novosibirsk Institute of archeology in Siberia where they found two remarkable Bronze Age burials at the UST Tartus archaeological site thought to belong to the odd enough culture the team have been Excavating it us tatas for quite a while and have already found over 30 other burials but Lilia koboleva from The Institute said that nothing found so far is as impressive as these two particular individuals the burials date back to around 5 000 years ago where two men have been laid to rest with some extraordinary grave Goods they appear to have been Shaman of some description one was wearing a costume which Incorporated a collar made of around 50 bird beaks and they're not small either the actual species haven't yet been identified but we're talking about herons or cranes so they must have looked quite impressive the second male was buried with what appeared to be a pair of bronze spectacles although it might be more accurate to call them eyewear for the moment and judging for the position of them in relation to the skeleton it's pretty conclusive that they fell off his face as the body decomposed the eyepieces themselves look more like hemispherical cups with holes in the center and must have looked quite daunting when there were bright shiny metal and obviously it's quite unlikely that we'll ever know how they were used or perceived it is possible that they formed part of a funery mask but they really do look like Bronze Age specks but this being up in Siberia it may also be possible that the small Central holes acted as some kind of protection from bright sunlight reflecting off snow who knows another interesting feature of the spectacle man's burial is that the grave had two levels separated by a wooden divider and this man was buried beneath two children one aged about five the other about ten at this stage it's impossible to say how much time may have separated the burials maybe they were his children maybe not oldest Boomerang there there oh wait what the oldest Boomerang is from where this is the discovery of the world's earliest known Boomerang of foundation wait what sorry run that by me again yes the world's oldest known Boomerang found in the OB West over cave in southern Poland what wait sorry learn that by me again the oldest Boomerang oldest Boomerang found in southern Poland it's from Southern Poland it's from Southern Poland uh and this find its own Spanish tuned in folks it's an astonishing 23 000 years old yeah archaeologists from the Polish Academy of Sciences found in their words an abundance of lithic and organic artifacts including a wedge made from deer antler a snail shell which had been either a pendant or a bull Aura an upper canine from an arctic fox which seems to have been part of a necklace numerous Stone blades and tools and a human thumb bone which at the time was the oldest known example of human remains found in Poland you know that particular record has long since been superseded by various human bones found in Poland most notably by the 115 000 year old finger bones of a neanderthal child which had been at least partially digested by a bird we actually did a piece on them but even 30 plus years since the uh of was over excavation the boomerang which they have attributed to the Pavlov culture Remains the oldest known example found anywhere in the world it's about 70 centimeters long six centimeters wide and about 1.5 centimeters in thickness made from mammoth ivory the upper curved side is the natural exterior of the Tusk the other face has been polished flat and shows several scratch lines which don't appear to be in any way decorative so the team suspect they relate to the manufacture of the item it's probably worth mentioning that contrary to popular belief boomerangs were used on almost every continent in prehistory and are not a uniquely Australian invention examples have been found in Africa India there is even a 9 000 year old specimen from Florida uh the earliest boomerangs ever found in Australia are around 10 000 years old although they are clearly depicted in rock art dating back 20 000 years but that is still a full 3 000 years later than this two foot long mammoth tusk piece from the Pavlov culture in southern Poland so uh you are folks prehistoric archeology from a parallel universe uh just one of those discoveries that so often slip can slip by unnoticed but um yeah we we thought this one did really deserve to be more widely known we certainly did yeah yeah thanks for watching folks hope that hasn't done your brain in too much bye thank you folks for watching to the end if you've enjoyed the show please do hit the like And subscribe buttons and of course the very best way to keep up to date with what we've been doing is in our patreon community link to that and buy me a coffee campaign in the description so your bonus item for staying with us thus far is actually not from prehistory which is a bit obvious once you get the context but nevertheless it is so entertaining we couldn't really leave it out please enjoy the world's oldest customer complaint I I am going to finish this off with a little bit of Whimsy that I have to say I really love this um it's not new uh it's not new it's I stumbled across it quite by chance when I was researching various things and actually this is from the British Museum and it's probably the oldest known customer complaint right it's 4 000 years old from Babylon and it's one of the cuneiform tablets and I'm I'm gonna read the translation to you and I'll probably praise it a bit because it does go on a bit but um basically um this customer has written tell air Nazir that's this bloke's name tell air Nazir Nanny sends the following message when you came you said to me as follows I will give gimul sin when he comes find quality copper ingots you left then but you did not do what you promised me you put ingots which were not good before my messenger sits in and said if you want to take them take them if you don't want to take them go away do you take me for that you treat somebody like me with such contempt I've sent as Messengers gentlemen like ourselves to collect the bag with my money deposited with you but you've treated me with contempt by sending them back to me empty-handed several times and that through enemy territory whoa is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Tillman who has treated me in this way you alone treat my messenger with contempt he goes on he goes on about how disgusted he is with the quality of the copper and and now the the funny thing is that after having banged on about uh get this chap getting his comeuppance if you look into this chap ER Nasir it turns out that he was a bit of a rogue and this uh message from Nanny is it's not the only person who complained about n this is dodgy dealings and they go it's just this wonderful thing he he goes on on account of one trifling Miner of silver which I owe you feel free to speak in such a way oh it's Priceless there's 4 000 year old rent it's wonderful there you go 4 000 year old wearer of The Grouchy hat it's you no wonder it resonates with you [Laughter]

Channel: The Prehistory Guys

Views: 229,899

Keywords: standing with stones, michael bott, rupert soskin, podcast, ancient history, standing stones, stone circles, burial sites, long barrows, ancient history podcast, ancient history discoveries, neolithic era, neolithic europe, neolithic art, neolithic man, megalithic builders, megalithic archaeology, megalithic culture, megalithic europe, megalithic monuments, stonehenge, avebury, prehistoric archaeology, bronze age europe, bronze age man

Id: kMYILApsQHc

Length: 49min 53sec (2993 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 11 2022