12 Most Mysterious Archaeological Artifacts Scientists Still Can't Explain

when you go to look at a historical artifact in a museum it will be accompanied by a plaque that tells you what it is and where it came from in some museums you might even get an audio recording or a guided tour to provide you with more detail not every discovery comes with an explanation though even with all the information at our disposal in the modern age there are some things that our best scientists and experts find hard to explain see if you can come up with explanations for the things you're about to see in this video [Music] there are many good guesses about the site of tam talk in mexico's huastec jungle but very few proven facts two central mysteries drive curiosity about the place the first is that the enormous carved stone monolith shows a woman with two decapitated women either side of her which has prompted some experts to believe that the site was used by a previously unknown group of high priestesses the second mystery is the repeated use of the number 13 on the monument that strongly suggests that it's a lunar calendar but there's a problem with that idea the monument is around 2600 years old and so it would predate the oldest known calendar in the americas by approximately 2 000 years was it made by a group of proto-hwasteks might the olmecs have spread further than we thought or is this the last record of a long gone female-dominated culture that we know absolutely nothing about the latter possibility is intriguing but without further discoveries to support the idea it's unlikely we'll ever be able to provide an answer [Music] during the 1760s a christian missionary named padre joseph maxiano rothou found himself inside the caves of baja in california gazing up in wonder at a series of cave paintings on the ceiling he liked them but he couldn't explain them the fact that so many of them were half black and half red confused him and so did the fact that many of them were on sections of the cave walls that were 30 feet clear from the floor the primitive tribes people who lived in the area at that time didn't have ladders and even if they had they denied all knowledge of the paintings they said the pictures had been there longer than their people had and that they were created by a race of giants over 200 years later we are still not sure what the truth of their creation is but we do know the tribe's people weren't lying they didn't create these paintings carbon dating carried out during the 20th century has proven that they're around seven and a half thousand years old making them the earliest cave paintings on the american continent we have no idea who made them or why the half red half black design of the humanoid figures was significant [Music] in 1985 over 600 pieces of ancient pottery were unearthed at a site in shuangdun village in china the majority of them are now at the anhui bengalu museum where they attract lots of attention from visitors but there's one piece that captures the eye more than any other it's this depiction of a human face believed to be female and it might be the oldest attempt by an artist to capture the human smile in recorded history carbon 14 technology has been used to date the artifact and it's been found to be around 7 300 years old nothing even vaguely similar to it was found among the other 600 pieces and the fact that it's the only piece devoid of early chinese inscriptions makes it even stranger to some academics the object is an indication that the shuangdun civilization may have been organized as a matriarchy with a high priestess or sorceress in charge of the people the face might even be a representation of her all of this is conjecture though the presence of markings on her forehead might give her an alternate identity as a dedication to a sun god statues that are difficult to interpret can be puzzles but check out this collection of seemingly organic artifacts unearthed in and around the famous archaeological site of nazca in peru they look like depictions of alien life but is that just a result of us looking at them with our modern eyes one of them appears to be an elongated head with slits for eyes it might even be a mummified skull if you turn the object over you'll find material similar to bone and marrow there's even a hint of vertebrae a radiologist based in cusco has subjected the object to an x-ray and he's convinced that it isn't a fake it has eye sockets and even sinuses someone creating a hoax probably wouldn't think of including sinuses there's also this three-fingered hand to think about which appears to have been skin and bone before it was coated in clay and buried in the desert again the hand has been x-rayed and shown to have six bones in each finger humans have only three it's easy to write these items off as fakes but the x-ray evidence makes us wonder [Music] we're going to stick with the theme of baffling discoveries in peru for a moment because we want to introduce you to the moke icon of the iguana if ancient legends are to be believed this strange entity was the companion of a sky god known in mythology as wrinkle face the customs and beliefs of the moke people can be challenging to interpret but historians believe it's notable that wrinkle face almost never appears in their sculptures or drawings without this cute iguana-like figure alongside it the moke were a significant culture in peru approximately 2000 years ago and were skilled aqueduct builders the remains of some of their aqueducts and mud brick pyramids still stand on peruvian land today the figure is always shown staring directly at wrinkle face rather than any other direction and in some cases examples of it have been found with a vulture worn as a headdress as the mokay didn't have a written language it's unlikely we'll ever be able to find an explanation of what it was supposed to represent we've stayed exclusively in the americas or the far east so far on this journey but now we're headed to europe to look at a very strange nail that was found in sweden's borgholm castle it's only a small piece measuring barely two inches in height but the design of its head is baffling it contains six faces and six eyes why do the faces mesh together in this nightmarish way why are there only six eyes as opposed to the twelve you'd expect to find divided between six human faces one theory is that this is an ancient roman artifact and the faces might be a representation of the roman god janus traditionally though even janus only had two faces there is no known six-faced deity in roman religion or culture the once glorious castle it was found within is now a ruin after suffering an enormous fire in 1806 but for more than 800 years prior to that it served a range of purposes from being a palatial home to being a prison the nail was found early in 2020 and further study of it will be required before any more information is known [Music] there's something fairy tale like about discovering the site of selva di milano in the soriano nel kimino region of italy the stone altars are overgrown by weeds and trees almost as if the location is a secret that the woodland itself is trying to hide from human eyes the staircases and altars are carved out of volcanic rock and it's thought that the ancient etruscans are the most likely candidates for their creation the preacher's stone is the most famous monument at the site but the almost perfectly square stone altar next to it is the hardest to describe there's a staircase leading up to the cube and on its face is the shape of a cross rather than being christian it's thought that the cross might have been used to assist with astronomical observations the rocks and altars are surrounded by roman tombs but these were added sometime after the platforms themselves were carved that implies that the romans knew why this site was special but they didn't pass the secret on to their descendants [Music] we all know what a chessboard looks like when we see one so here's a question is this a chessboard if you answer yes to that question then we have to accept that the ancient tibetans created this chessboard on solid rock 1200 years ago the stone and its engraving are in the sichuan province in china but date back to the time of the tibetan tubo era there's little doubt that it was used as a game board of some kind not only is it neatly arranged into a grid of 100 squares but there are also grooves on either side of the board into which the game pieces would presumably have been placed modern chess uses 64 pieces rather than 100 so it might be that chess as we understand it today is derived from whatever this game might be this region of ancient tibet was known for being multi-ethnic in its makeup so that makes it difficult to determine from which particular culture the idea of chess might have originated it was clearly popular though a similar board was found in maizo kungar in tibet a few years ago think of israel and the first religion that probably comes to mind is judaism there are christian sites to be found in the country though and they don't come much more puzzling than this pool and fountain they've been hiding in plain sight for around 1500 years close to an old church near jerusalem but their historical significance wasn't noticed until 2016. the water facilities were built during the byzantine era in israel probably between the 4th and 6th centuries most byzantine era pools though are not this large based on its size alone it's thought that it may once have been the centerpiece of a larger complex that once existed at the site with some indication that there were roofed colonnades around the pool for people to live in far from being a place of leisure though it's more likely that the water here was used for baptisms the fountain that the pool water drains to is adorned with a series of nymph sculptures believed to be the earliest of their kind in the country it might even be that the water at the site predates the construction of the pool some scholars believe that the baptisms described in acts 8 26-40 in the new testament happened at this location how much can you discover from an ancient handprint that's a question that scientists in scotland are trying to answer after finding a fifteen hundred-year-old handprint left behind on a stone anvil by a pictish metalsmith the discovery was made on rousseau a particularly remote scottish island that has become a hot spot for discoveries related to the picks it's surprising that we know so little about a civilization that was once so dominant in europe they ruled the north of the united kingdom for more than 1 000 years before suddenly vanishing somewhere around the year 900 leaving behind no explanation of their disappearance and no written records just a few scattered out-of-place objects the handprint isn't the only trace left behind by this ancient metal worker after the stone was cleaned imprints of his knees and hands were also found on the anvil he'd have worked in almost total darkness and cramped conditions probably judging his anvil's temperature by the color of the glow that it gave off we know so little about the picks that we don't even know what they called themselves the word picks means painted and comes from roman records of their encounters with the civilization we're returning to mexico for more impossible to decipher carvings because the country is full of them this is boca de potra rios in the mena region of mexico and it's made up of a massive collection of petroglyphs in the desert they date back to pre-hispanic times in the area but the question of who made them and why is unresolved what's especially impressive about them is their sheer volume there are thousands of them to be found here in a location that's otherwise remote and featureless spanish records of mexico at the time of their arrival contained no mention of a civilization living in the northeast of the country so there's no way of knowing who might be responsible for these monuments the aztecs get the credit from some historians but the chichemek and the comanche have also been posited as possibilities they might even be older than those civilizations though there are adobe ovens at the site and carbon dating of them has suggested that they were created around 11 000 years ago if that's true perhaps the artists were the quack wheel deco we mentioned spain and there are ancient wonders to be found there too as an example here's montejo de tiermes this is all that's left of what was once a glorious celtabarian town complete with a roman style aqueduct and buildings carved directly out of single pieces of rock back in the iron age this hill fort was a critical line of defense against invading roman forces it took the romans until the second century bce to seize it but they eventually did kicking out the pneumontia tribe and imposing their own architectural style on the place by 70 bce it featured not only an aqueduct but a pair of forums and large public buildings the romans made use of the rock caves but decorated them with roman style entrances to make them feel more like home they eventually built a defensive wall around the city which helped it to remain populated and in use for a further 400 years until the roman empire's influence declined in the west of europe the presence of a few visigoth and muslim artifacts at the site suggests that other civilizations briefly moved in after that but it's been abandoned for centuries now [Music] subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications and you will be the first to know when a new video comes out thank you for watching and see you soon

Channel: Amazing Stock

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Keywords: 12 Most Mysterious Archaeological Artifacts Scientists Still Cant Explain, archaeological artifacts, ancient artifacts, mysterious artifacts, still cant explain, most mysterious, ancient mystery, mystery, 12 most, top 12, most amazing

Id: gr948lkqvdk

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 31 2020