12 Mysterious Ancient Technologies Scientists Still Can't Explain

we know that our ancient ancestors were skilled builders and exceptionally gifted craftspeople the evidence of that is everywhere from the tiniest pieces of jewelry they made to the enormous cities they created what we're less sure of is how they went about some of these construction tasks some of the things made by people living thousands of years ago ought not to have been possible with the technology of the time and yet they were made nonetheless scientists struggle to explain some of the mysteries you're about to see so see if you can come up with explanations of your own we tend to think of nanoscience as a recent field of study but there's some evidence that our ancient ancestors had at least a passing understanding of it thousands of years ago we can say that with confidence because of a 2006 study into an ancient hair dye that was used to darken hair in egypt more than 4 000 years ago the research was carried out by french scientist dr philippe walter of the national center for scientific research in paris in conjunction with l'oreal they proved that the ancient egyptians used a form of wet chemistry to synthesize lead chloride compounds and then added them to lead sulfide to create a black pigment creating nano crystals of galena the substance was mixed with water to create a paste and then applied to the hair where it reacted with naturally occurring keratins in the hair to produce the dark shade it's highly unlikely that these egyptian chemists fully understood the reasons why the process worked but they can't have arrived at the method by accident and so they must have been skilled researchers speaking of ancient nanotechnology we can also see evidence of it in the creation of first century ceramics from corsica this practice appears to have developed on the island during the iron age using asbestos fibers taken from the island's northeast to reinforce traditional ceramics with a crude form of nano fiber coating asbestos would be split by smashing it with pebbles and then mixing with raw clay paste to create ceramic objects before firing them in a sort of rustic oven the ceramics in question have only ever been discovered in the same part of the island suggesting that knowledge of the method was limited only to a very small number of people and was forgotten about when those people either died out or moved on formal scientific research regarding the potential of nanofibers for reinforcing ceramics wasn't carried out until 1838 when french ceramist a bronard wrote a paper on the subject before going on to found the french national museum of ceramics the idea that people living 1800 years earlier could have had an understanding as good as if not better than his is truly mind-blowing [Music] the magnetic compass is also an invention that's far more ancient than most people assume it to be it was created in china and probably came around by accident ancient chinese soothsayers used lodestones to create fortune-telling boards and quickly came to realize that their lodestones always pointed north thus enabling the invention of the navigational compass the first record of such a device appears in the manuscript wu ching seong yao which was written in the year 1040 and included references to a device known as the iron fish which would point to the north when suspended in water a song dynasty era book from the same year also refers to magnetic devices used in land navigation it wasn't until the 14th century that the idea reached europe where it was first recorded in amalfi italy probably by someone who'd either acquired one or seen one in action while traveling through the far east based on this the chinese must have had a big advantage over other civilizations when it came to navigation for more than 300 years no wonder they were so successful but how did they come up with the idea so much earlier than anyone else did [Music] while the examples of amazing ancient technology we've looked at so far operate on the small scale our next example is enormous to find it we have to look at the yangshan quarry in china which is where much of the stone used in nanjing's great monuments was quarried not all of the stone that was quarried cut and shaped here was moved elsewhere though some of it like this colossal unfinished stele is still here history tells us that the creation of the steel was ordered by the yongla emperor during the 15th century who wanted to use it in a monument to honor his father at the ming xiaoling mausoleum workers got around to carving out the head base and body of the steel before appearing to give up no doubt somewhat over awed by the size of their creation the body is 30 feet wide 15 feet thick and 150 feet tall we have almost no idea how they could possibly have carved something so enormous and there's zero chance they'd ever have been able to transport it we can't help but wonder what convinced them that such a thing might have been possible in the first place [Music] our next surprising piece of ancient technology is also chinese it's a form of refrigerator and it's over 2 500 years old the ancient chinese text known as xi jing also sometimes called the book of poems tells us that refrigerator technology existed during the time of the warring states in the 5th century bce modern refrigerators rely on having access to electricity but this clever device was little more than a box made of bronze and copper separated into an inner container and an outer container anything you want to keep cool for preservation meat for example was placed in the inner container the gap between the inner and outer containers was then filled with ice and the whole box was covered with a lid to help retain the temperature inside the versatile device could also be used for the opposite reason you could add hot water instead of ice to keep the contents of the inner container warm whenever examples of the devices have been found they've always been noted to be covered with ornate carvings and inscriptions suggesting that this technology was off limits to all but china's wealthiest residents while the ancient romans tend to be thought of as the pioneers of advanced irrigation thanks to their attractive aqueducts many of which are still standing today that honor should by rights go to the ancient residents of algeria that's because the irrigation system in the algerian region of adrar known as quanat or folgara is one of the oldest examples of sophisticated hydraulic engineering in the world fagaras were created by digging out tunnels beneath slopes usually hillsides or mountainsides that allow fresh water to run in a controlled path down the side of the slope and form a pool wherever the creators of the fogara wanted it to be it's like an aqueduct but it's below the ground rather than above it the first of them is thought to have been created in persia around 2100 years ago but the one in adraar is by far the most impressive in terms of scale sadly it's every bit as endangered as it is impressive modern-day schools and hospitals have been built on top of the path of the fogara but the creation of the fogara weakened the ground and so the buildings are slowly sinking a race against time has now begun to find a way to preserve the buildings and the ancient irrigation system without damaging either of them [Music] binary code is the base language of computers and yet it predates them by centuries german mathematician gottfried leibniz is generally credited with inventing binary code in 1703 but in reality the concept of binary is even older than that in recent years we've seen compelling evidence that binary code was used and understood in both ancient india and ancient polynesia thousands of years ago on the polynesian island of mangariva a binary system combining base 2 and base 10 was in use by the year 1450 with a binary system used for every number higher than 10 save for 20 40 and 80 which are referred to by one word terms in the manga-revan language even older than that is the ancient text chahanda sastra written by the indian scholar pingala almost 2000 years ago the name of the text translates into english as science of stanzas and within it pingala uses light and heavy to describe musical syllables in exactly the same way 0 and 1 are used in binary some people even credit pingala with the invention of the mathematical concept of zero [Music] building anything in a part of the world that's prone to earthquakes is a risky endeavor unless you put something into the structure to protect it from earthquakes you might have to rebuild the whole thing from scratch in the aftermath of such an event while that's been a problem for structural engineers all over the world for centuries it was never an issue in ancient china thanks to the invention of brackets called dugongs these wooden brackets have been keeping old timber chinese buildings standing for more than two and a half thousand years as we've seen with many other ancient chinese inventions it took the rest of the world hundreds of years to catch up with the concept a dugong is made from a complicated set of interlocking beams each of which is cut to a precise measurement to serve its purpose the more beams are used in the design the better the weight of the building is distributed that reduces the risk of any individual element cracking or splitting and so dampens the impact of an earthquake dugongs aren't sunken into the earth or otherwise supported they stand freely on the ground with no other fortifications necessary they're not even held together with glue or any other bonding agent they're a miracle of ancient ingenuity and they're too advanced for many modern minds to comprehend properly [Music] every time you clean your teeth remember to thank the ancient egyptians they came up with the idea and they also invented toothpaste many dentists study an ancient egyptian recipe for toothpaste while they're training and they're often surprised by its complexity and efficiency that particular formula comes from the 4th century but egyptians were brushing their teeth long before that in fact we believe they used a paste formula to brush their teeth with their fingers 5 000 years ago before toothbrushes were invented the toothpaste recipe that dentists will be more familiar with is etched onto a papyrus document at the national library in vienna austria it describes a paste made of rock salt mint pepper and irish flour crushed together in mixed with water the resultant product smells pungent and isn't particularly appetizing but the parchment promises readers that it's perfect for maintaining white teeth it's not as effective as the leading brands you'll find on the market today but it's a lot more efficient than some of the soap-based kinds of toothpaste that were still in use as recently as 100 years ago music has been around for as long as there have been people but it would be natural for you to assume that electronically generated music is a far more recent invention possibly starting with the electric guitars of the 1930s in truth the first electric device capable of making music was the tel harmonium also known as the dynamophone as created by thaddeus cahill in 1896 cahill's groundbreaking device was capable of generating electric sounds and transmitting them through wires to horns which acted as speakers as kahil excitedly pointed out when he unveiled his creation to the world it would even be possible to broadcast the sounds directly down telephone wires the telharmonium used tone wheels to create sounds which makes it a forerunner to the hammond organ sadly for cahill his idea didn't capture the hearts of the public that had a lot to do with the size of the devices each one would easily fill a room and weighed more than 200 tons nobody was willing to pick up the bill for mass production and so he was forced to stop making them after completing three prototypes the last of them was destroyed in 1962 [Music] the invention of the steam train changed the face of travel and made it possible for human beings to get from one side of a country to another faster than ever before that invention would never have been possible had hero of alexandria not come up with the aelepile also known as heron's engine two thousand years ago this engine design should look familiar to anyone who's ever studied a steam engine it's a sphere that's kept in perpetual motion by boiling water which in turn emits steam from nozzles on its surface and generates pressure that can be turned into energy in his early designs for the ayla pile the boiling water was positioned below the steel sphere but hiro later found a way to move it inside and make the design more efficient what he couldn't do however is come up with a practical use for his creation and so he stopped developing it any further it wouldn't be until taku-al-din studied hiro's work and began to refine it during the 17th century that its potential became clear and not until 100 years after that in the united kingdom that the steam train was finally born hiro's idea was a good one but it was eighteen hundred years before its time tattoos are more fashionable in most parts of the world now than they have been in decades but we're not sure that would be the case if people still had to get their tattoos via the method that was used in north america 2 000 years ago this spiky device which is in storage at washington state university was probably a painful thing to have applied to your skin it's made of pear cactus spines tied to a wooden handle and wrapped in yucca leaf and it was used to tattoo the pueblo people who once lived in what's now the southeast of utah what's curious is that no evidence of tattooing has been found on the skin or bones of any ancient pueblo bodies located so far and nor is there any mention of tattooing in the few written or drawn records we have of their culture we do know the ancient people of north america had tattoos though because of other cactus-based tools found in places like new mexico and arizona in those cases though the tools were made over 1 000 years after this one we wonder if people were getting tattoos of stars roses skulls and chinese symbols even back then 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

Views: 218,236

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Keywords: 12 Mysterious Ancient Technologies Scientists Still Can't Explain, mysterious, mysterious technology, ancient mystery, mysterious ancient, scientists still cant explain, ancient, ancient technology, future technology, unexplained, 12 most, top 12, most amazing

Id: ZG0srwSBhfk

Length: 16min 21sec (981 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 22 2021