12 Most Mysterious Recent Archaeological Finds Scientists Still Can't Explain

while it's always exciting to find out what experts know about ancient civilizations and artifacts it's also just as exciting to find out what they don't know we're talking about mysteries they haven't solved and creations they can only guess at they sometimes don't like to talk about it but experts are often baffled by the discoveries they make [Music] in 1845 the british royal navy vessel hms erebus disappeared in the middle of an exploration mission in the arctic that was the last anybody saw of it until 2014 when the wreck of the sunken vessel was found but rather than being the end of the story that was the beginning of a new mystery the vessel vanished with the hms terror as both ships attempted to navigate the northwest passage in the arctic but the subsequent failure to find any trace of either vessel during rescue missions prompted wild speculation about piracy mutiny and even cannibalism in truth we still don't know what happened the wreck is mostly intact with no obvious sign of what caused it to sink personal effects including kitchenware bottles of wine and even clothing and hair brushes have since been brought back to the surface but the strangest discovery of all was a note found at another on land location close to the wreck that contains a note written by a survivor in 1848 according to the note the ship's captain sir john franklin and 23 others had perished but other survivors abandoned the ship and headed out across the land they were never heard of again and the question of what happened in the three years between the ship disappearing and the note being written is unresolved what is the true purpose of the so-called fan pyramid of tenerife might it be as some have suggested a solstice market made by the native guanche people more than 2 000 years ago the existence of the step pyramid and the other pyramid-like structures around it has been known for some time and it's been studied extensively during the past century but the first suggestion that it might have had an astronomical purpose comes from a study carried out in 1991 three astrophysicists from the canarian astrophysics institute determined that the pyramids can be used to mark the progress of the sun through the sky and thereby determine the date of both the summer and winter solstice with a high degree of accuracy those who disagree with the theory say that there would have been much simpler ways of identifying solstice states without going through the trouble of building pyramids so there must have been a more elaborate and specific purpose that we are not yet able to identify even the age of the structures is mysterious while it's strongly possible that they were built 2 000 years ago it's also possible that they're as comparatively young as 500. as identified by the archaeologist j.a clayson the records of the ancient vikings make numerous references to objects known as sunstones which helped seafaring viking navigators identify the location of the sun even on the cloudiest days and use that information to help them plan journeys and stay on course the question of what exactly these sunstones were has always been a difficult one for archaeologists to answer but a new study conducted in 2020 might have found the answer sun stones might actually have been chunks of iceland spar a calcium carbonate crystal it's a unique form of calcium that doesn't contain impurities which means it remains colorless and is transparent to both ultraviolet and visible light one of the very few sources of iceland spa in the world is radar fiorder in the east of iceland from which the substance takes its name any light that hits iceland's spar splits resulting in a double image of anything seen through the crystal when held up to the horizon that creates a double dot image in the vicinity of the sun even when the sun isn't visible to the naked eye that isn't definitive proof that iceland spar is sunstone but it might be as definitive as we can ever get it's a commonly held theory that there was once a fourth pyramid in the giza plateau no archaeological evidence of this supposed fourth pyramid could be found for a very long time but perhaps this mysterious staircase is the first sign of it the staircase plunges down into the floor of the desert and might once have been in the missing pyramid's basement in an impressive feat of engineering the staircase leads straight down through several feet of limestone and leading to a hidden underworld below the plateau that was unknown until 2018 access to the plateau is strictly limited because the staircase is on land owned by the military but a few lucky archaeologists have managed to gain supervised entry amazingly the lowest point is a full 125 feet beneath the ground and is full of water the underground area is full of carefully carved niches in which black basalt and granite sarcophagi are installed the sarcophagi are open and so someone has obviously raided these tombs in the distant past the ancient writer herodotus once spoke of egyptian priests creating underground chambers during the building of memphis and it appears that the practice occurred in giza too in one of the flooded rooms there's a lone sarcophagus covered in deeply engraved symbols and markings that some claim to be the tomb of the god osiris it surely can't be but why is this place kept almost totally top secret while we're in egypt we should talk about the fact that there's a hatch or a hole on the top of the head of the sphinx and nobody wants to tell the world where it leads to in fact very few archaeologists want to talk about the idea that there are rooms inside the sphinx at all the whole can clearly be seen in old pictures of the sculpture but appears to have been filled in more recently it's likely that very few people knew it was there at all until aerial photography became possible even now it's illegal to photograph the giza plateau from above which is a sure sign that there's something there that the authorities don't want people to see researcher robert scotch claims to have seismic data that clearly indicates the existence of hollow chambers inside the sphinx and an underground tunnel that leads from the sphinx to the great pyramid zakihawas has even produced a video that appears to show him accessing the chambers through a hatch and discovering a sarcophagus although his testimony is disputed and he now refuses to discuss his video what's really inside the sphinx and why aren't we allowed to know the folklore of every country says that there were once giants living side by side with humans on earth but modern-day people don't like to entertain that idea many scientists will try to tell you that there's no evidence to support the idea but there is we find new evidence of it all the time as we did in china in 2017 when a whole graveyard of five thousand-year-old giant skeletons was discovered in jiaojia village close to jinan city the skeletons all belong to people who would have ranged in size between 5 feet and 11 inches and 6 feet and 4 inches this wouldn't be considered exceptionally tall now but 5 000 years ago it was a full foot above the average and so they would have appeared to be giants never forget that giant is a relative term used by people of average height archaeologists and historians aren't sure why the people of this ancient village were so much taller than all of their peers they might have been wealthy powerful folk who had access to much better food than those living around them but if that were true we'd expect to see larger than average skeletons in other wealthy areas of china and we don't [Music] it's quite common for a new business to bring up in the same place as a closed one and begin offering the same service but this might be the longest gap between closing and reopening in human history later in 2021 a food stall in pompeii that shut down after the eruption of mount vesuvius 2 000 years ago will reopen to the public the stall is a fine example of a thermopylae the ancient equivalent of a fast food outlet food sold at such a stall would be cooked at home kept warm by equipment at the stall and sold to the public over 80 such food stalls have been identified in the ruins of pompeii but this recently discovered one is the only one to be fully restored and reopened for business the thermopylaeum complete with its well-preserved colorful frescoes was discovered in march 2019 and selected because of its excellent condition underneath the ash and detritus it's essentially undamaged and so requires only minimal restoration work food on offer at the stall before the volcano included paella fish snails and birds it will be interesting to see whether present-day tourists are receptive to such a menu when it reopens from all the media attention that stonehenge gets in england you'd assume that it's the most impressive and significant ancient stone circle in the world that isn't true it's far smaller than the salvik kurgan in the republic of calcasia in russia we imagine more people might know that if cacaja was more popular with tourists the stone circle perhaps more accurately described as a stone square marks the presence of a burial mound which is thought to be the final resting place of the tagar king buried two thousand seven hundred years ago oddly black and white photos from around a century ago show that there was once a large earthen embankment between the stones but the stones are all that remain today nobody knows who moved all the earth what was inside it or why it was moved that's hard to explain but so is the fact that the largest slabs of stone are 25 feet tall weigh 60 tons and were moved around 40 miles from where they were quarried that ought to have been impossible for people living so long ago so this is a place where we can find mysteries both ancient and modern we'd know more about our ancient ancestors if more of their civilizations had left behind written records but many of them didn't and we sometimes struggle even with those who did take the oracle bone script for example someone went to a lot of trouble to leave these written records behind but we're totally unable to translate them the national museum of chinese writing has been soliciting public assistance with the translation of the scripts since 2017 but so far they've had little success despite offering a cash reward equivalent to fifteen thousand dollars the bones are believed to have been carved and inscribed during the shang dynasty some 3500 years ago 5 000 unique symbols have been marked on the oxbones which may have been used by soothsayers to predict the future but experts have thus far decoded just under 2 000 of them that makes it impossible to translate complete sentences and without that ability the meaning cannot be discerned it doesn't help that the messages are encoded historians think that the soothsayers heated the oxbones until they cracked interpreted the cracks and the bones as messages and then painted over them to make the records permanent feel free to contact the museum if you want to help archaeologists made the find of a lifetime when they located a burial mound amid the remote mountains of kazakhstan in 2018 there they found more than 3 000 items of gold jewelry and precious stones that are believed to belong to the monarchs and royal family of the saka people who once lived in the region the collection has been described as priceless beyond measure and is approximately 2 800 years old the tarbagatai mountains are difficult to get to and covered in harsh terrain which probably made them an excellent place to bury people of high standing safe in the knowledge that their tombs would never be broken into or robbed or at least not until archaeologists turned up almost three millennia later items recovered so far include plaques chains gold necklaces gold plates and decorative gold bells arguably more impressive than all of those finds are the tiny gold beads that were once affixed to items of clothing which display a level of micro soldering that we'd struggle to replicate today with all our modern technology this alone suggests that the saka were far more than a nomadic branch of scythians which is all some historians give them credit for while most people believe that the hand grenade is a relatively modern creation it's anything but a kind of hand grenade was used during the years of the crusades in the territory that's now israel and an almost totally undamaged example of one was discovered there in 2016. you might not recognize it as a grenade by the modern definition though this weapon was made of clay elaborately decorated for reasons best known to its creator and then filled with naptha a highly flammable and sticky liquid that many experts believe to be the secret of greek fire once the fuse at the top of the grenade was lit it would be thrown at enemies and soak them in burning liquid in both style and execution it can be compared to a molotov cocktail grenades like this were invented during the byzantine era and remained in use until the byzantine empire gave way to the ottoman empire rather than being thrown at enemies on land they were likely tossed from ship to ship in the hope of lighting a whole vessel on fire the mystery here isn't so much why they were invented but why they suddenly stopped being used after the 16th century and the idea wasn't revisited until the invention of the modern hand grenade in the early 20th century 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 Recent Archaeological Finds Scientists Still Can't Explain, mysterious finds, archaeological mystery, mystery, ancient mystery, ancient finds, scientists still cant explain, recent finds, recent archaeological, 12 most, top 12, most amazing

Id: l4dcpZcu2vE

Length: 15min 27sec (927 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2021