5 Incredible Discoveries that Changed the World of Archaeology

from the 1900 year old remains a woman with teeth growing out of her pelvis to a 200 year old solid gold bong yes really which still contain marijuana residue archaeology has provided us with both a wealth of fascinating facts and insights into our far history some people like the thousands who signed up to drink the 2 000 year old red mummy juice from a sarcophagus even believe archaeology holds the key to discovering long-lost medicinal and supernatural artifacts they're wrong of course it hasn't always been the meticulous and methodical science we know today as demonstrated by heinrich schleiman when he destroyed the main layers of the lost city of troy by choosing to excavate with dynamite and when early archaeologists were destroying ancient relics they were reaching conclusions that were just plain wrong the icelandic archaeologist finner magnuson made headlines when he claimed to have deciphered the renarmo runes claiming they were a poem celebrating king harold wartooth unfortunately for magnuson and his reputation swedish chemist john's jacob bazilius took an interest a few years later and proved that the runes were actually just natural cracks and fishes in the rock awkward fortunately thanks to the following incredible discoveries the archaeological world has been shaken up and is all the better for it [Music] picture a neanderthal club-wielding fat eyebrow caveman right well for decades they've been considered the slow-witted hominids who won't extinct 28 000 years ago when our vastly more intelligent ancestors showed up and outsmart them evolutionary failures too stupid to survive their reputation was born when geologist william king presented the bones found in the neander valley in germany to the european scientific community in 1864. he declared i feel myself constrained to believe that the thoughts and desires which one dwelt within it never soared beyond those of a brute and well that was the description that sort of stuck it was also a narrative that seemed to make sense neanderthals were stronger and more robust bodies than modern humans so how did we survive and they didn't if not for our giant brains and considering the neanderthal survivor for 250 000 years before going extinct when we'd only been around for a hundred thousand it's nice to have something to help convince ourselves that well we won't share the same fate unfortunately for our fragile egos recent discoveries are shedding some light on the way the neanderthals lived and it's not looking as primitive as we once thought a 2020 study of the abri damaris in neanderthal campsite in france revealed a 46 000 year old three-ply cord fragment stray pieces of string and threads have been found before in the sites but they were all discounted as having fallen from archaeologists clothes this one was different as the strands were wrapped around a core of conifer tree bark and as the paper's lead author bruce hardy pointed out no one was wearing their conifer pants at the time to make the string the neanderthals would have had to have great dexterity some understanding of numbers and operational memory capable of keeping track of all of the steps in the manufacturing process it's even more significant as it opens the possibility that they may have been able to make nets baskets ropes and even fabric on its own the single discovery of a piece of cord might not have been enough to prompt a reimagining of our ancient relatives however other findings have come to light including ornaments made from eagle talons feather accessories and the use of mineral pigments crafting a pretty feather necklace is hardly something you'd expect from our thuggish relatives so they were dexterous creative and valued aesthetics a massive departure from the brute hypothesis so what does this mean for the world of archaeology well we can no longer work off the assumption that if a prehistoric artifact that required anything more than hitting something with a rock is uncovered but it was our ancestors doing some sites may even need to be revisited but discovered on the walls of caves in spain originally credited to early modern humans has now been dated to 65 000 years ago a time when only neanderthals lived in europe previously this would have caused great confusion now we know the neanderthals were perfectly capable of creating the cave paintings and probably much more did you know that under the right conditions your poo can be fossilized and preserve a record of everything you've eaten and also what you were infested with for tens of thousands of years one fine example of this is the lloyd's bank coprolite which holds the impressive title of largest recorded human poo in history it lays at an impressive eight inches long and an eye watering two inches wide or at least it did until its display case collapsed while being held by an unfortunate teacher the enormous dirt plummeted to the ground and broke into three pieces don't worry they just glued them back together nice and yes it really is named after the well-known high street bank but only because it was discovered under the site of the building in york england not because it was deposited by a customer in fact it's 1 200 years old and was left by a viking with a taste for meat and bread and a gut full of worms the vikings don't meet and practice poor food hygiene doesn't immediately seem like groundbreaking archaeology shaking stuff this isn't all the ancient pooh can show us paleoscatologists yep a thing more archaeologists specializing in the study of fossilized feces again this is a thing can now use dna sequencing to shed light on archaeological sites previously thought to have given up all of their secrets the pooh deposited in the right conditions like in a cool dry cave can undergo a process called the mayad reaction this is where sugars in the feces react with amino acids forming larger sugar compounds these can build a shell around the dna encasing it like an m m and preserving it for millennia to reverse the process you simply need to freeze the poo grind it up apply a diabetes drug to break down the sugars and voila dna of course no great work is without sacrifice the fossilized food doesn't smell but the organic compounds responsible for its odor will have also been trapped inside the sugar shell when you break it the smell is released too so if you've ever wondered what a caveman's poo smells like become a paleontologist and you'll possibly get a chance to smell it dna sequencing of vcs began with poo pioneers hendrick poinar and svante pabo of the max planck institute for evolutionary anthropology in 1998 they successfully sequenced the dna trapped in 20 thousand-year-old ground sloth feces which was exciting but perhaps not as full of groundbreaking discoveries as human poop would be unfortunately human poo has proved hard to find as it's disturbingly similar to that of dogs samples can't even be distinguished by their dna due to ancient human diets including dog meat and dog's diets including human poo this has posed a massive issue in the field of paleo feces as archaeologists have never been able to fully be sure of the source of their sample educated guesses can be made based on where the sample was found and what it contains from an ancient latrine probably human excrement full of dog hair probably canine but mistakes have been made of recent re-examination of paleo-feces from a neolithic site in turkey has revealed that what was thought to be dog excrement from the presence of digestive bones was actually human mapping the evolution of our gut biomes is impossible if data sets are full of canine anomalies and vice versa fortunately that's all about to change advances in open source software have allowed scientists to combine dna analysis with the identification of microbe colonies and they've created copro ied a new method that allows reliable identification of the origin of poo archaeologists will now be able to determine exactly what prehistoric humans ate how it was prepared and where they got their food from discoveries are also rolling in one example is an iron age poo preserved in the salt mines of austria which has shown the miners consumed beer and blue cheese delicious this is the first molecular evidence of intentional fermentation with microorganisms being used to produce food and drink maybe it's not so shocking that workers were drinking beer 2 700 years ago but the presence of penicillium rock 40 in their poo means they were pairing their booze with a nice rock four stilton danish blue or gorgonzola far more sophisticated than we would have given them credit for further surprises have turned up in samples from hind cave in texas species dating from 400 to 100 bce showed a dye consisting of pack rats mice fish sheep and pronghorn antelope tasty these findings have shat at the long-held belief that the area's ancient humans had a poor diet consisting mostly of foraged berries in fact with five different types of meat eaten in two days the darts had a wider diversity than most modern humans and more similar to that of henry viii so what does that mean for the world of archaeology perhaps now archaeologists will be just as excited about uncovering an ancient human latrine as they would be a gold-filled two more you know maybe not up until 2020 if you asked an archaeologist 9 000 years ago who were the hunters and who were the gatherers the majority would tell you that the men went out to hunt the big game while the women stayed home searched for berries and raised the children if you asked them today you'd get a very different answer this was thanks to the 2018 discovery of the 9 000 year old remains of a teenage girl in peru buried alongside there were 24 artifacts that made up what's clearly a hunter's toolkit it included pointed projectiles like the used tips beers chopping tools and a knife not used to rabbits and squirrels but on big game of course one anomalous grey isn't enough to turn our understanding of ancient gender roles on its head after all if you look at the majority of hunter-gatherers in modern times the duties are clear men hunt women gather however the find prompted the team to go back and check other 10 000 year old burial sites in the americas of the graves that contained big game hunting tools 16 were male and 11 were female modeling suggests that between 30 and 50 of hunters at the time were women the girl hunter wasn't an anomaly she was the norm so how did this slip through the net the evidence was right there and had already been dug up archaeologists had simply explained hunting equipment away as food preparation gear or mistakes in some cases bodies were wrongly assumed to be men based simply on the fact that the grave contained weapons they did this because of the 1960s man the hunter model which was convincing and pervasive it's not just archaeologists who've been led astray either psychologists anthropologists and sociologists have all published actual scientific studies citing it as an explanation for their findings men assume more risk better more competitive men are better navigators men have better spatial awareness and even men are better at the nintendo wii are all conclusions based on this now disproven understanding of our ancestors so i guess back to the drawing board everybody [Music] who built the pyramids the long and widely held belief would tell you that it was a slaves slaves it's a story that dates back to the 5th century bce the book of exodus mentions the israelites being used as slaves in egypt and the ancient greek historian herodotus wrote that a hundred thousand slaves of unmentioned origin were used to construct the pyramids put two and two together and you get the classic picture of an egyptian overseer whipping enslaved workers as they struggled to pull enormous stones across the stand to some extent it was plausible the skeletons of workers show they worked very hard moving stone blocks as heavy as nine tons with nothing more than wood and rope many show signs of arthritis dismemberment and damaged vertebrae the conditions wouldn't have been great and it was dangerous thousands of them died young even if officials had wanted to hire laborers would it have been possible to find enough willing ones well yeah it turns out they totally could and now we can prove it thanks to an excavation site near the pyramids of giza a digger hit a stone block which turned out to be part of the wall of a 2000 year old workers village houses dormitories and bakeries stretched over half a square mile all built specifically to house and feed those who were constructing the massive monuments the conditions were good they were given excellent food and prime cuts of meat as evidenced by the thousands of bread jars and animal bones 21 buffalo and 23 sheep were delivered daily to feed the 10 000 workers in 2010 a woman horse riding in the area uncovered more evidence that added weight to the worker theory the horse's leg fell into a crack and uncovered a small mud wall this turned out to belong to a worker's tomb the site contained skeletons resting in the fetal position alongside beer and bread for their journey into the afterlife slaves would never have been buried with such care and respect when bones were found that had been broken and healed scientists compared them to that of noblemen with similar injuries and found they received the same level of medical care 600 tombs were uncovered in total containing half males and half females a quarter of all skeletons were children suggesting whole families lived around the pyramid's construction site they'd work for three months and then return home and be replaced with fresh skilled workers how all these families were convinced to take up the dangerous work is still up for debate some suggest they did it out of respect for their pharaohs and the honor of contributing to such a magnificent project the cynics proposed farmers whose lands were flooded or those who had little work would be drafted in for room and board some sort of ancient form of unemployment benefits that would ensure you wouldn't starve in times of hardship whichever it was the archaeologists no longer needed to search for the graves of the slaves who built the pyramids [Music] considering it's a language written largely in emojis by one of the most impressive civilizations in human history i'd think that hieroglyphics would be easy to decipher or if not at least possible to decipher however the ancient egyptians managed to create writings that were so complicated full of multiple meanings puns and tricks they couldn't even be read by the common people of the time probably on purpose some words were written phonetically others were pictographic with the picture literally representing what it looked like and somewhere ideographic where a symbol could represent a whole concept pictures could be used as a sound in an otherwise phonetic word like an ancient form of dingbats for example a picture of the sun would stand for the sound ra to complicate things further there were no gaps between words no vowels and the writer could choose the order and direction of symbols to be more aesthetically pleasing expecting the reader to just figure it out this complexity acted as a gatekeeper to the education of the masses it also meant that when control of egypt fell to the romans and christianity and later islam the old gods and the ability to read hieroglyphics were eventually lost the egyptian people lived for centuries unable to access their culture and history which was written right before their eyes that is until 1799 when french soldiers rebuilding a fort near the egyptian town of rosetta uncovered a slab of black grand diorite that held the key to unlocking the ancient language the stone was carved with the decree inscribed in 196 bcs celebrating ptolemy's coronation it explained at great length why he was such a magnificent ruler who lowered taxes and cut rebels to pieces among other accomplishments it also detailed exactly how his subjects should celebrate him by wearing garlands and giving offerings however while mildly interesting the stone's content didn't matter anywhere near as much as the fact that the same message was written three times in three different languages egyptian hieroglyphics egyptian demotic script and the still taught at the time ancient greek this provided the key to reading a language that hadn't been understood for over a thousand years captain pierre bouchard saw the potential alerted scholars and the stone was held along with other egyptian treasures by the french fortunately they didn't keep it completely to themselves and plaster copies were made and sent to linguists around the world i'd like to say that there was an incredible race to decipher the text but the truth is it was beyond most who attempted it many others were put off from even trying by the mistaken belief that the symbols represented concepts of great wisdom rather than individual words or sentences two scholars however were up for the challenge englishman thomas young and frenchman jean-francois champollion thomas young had the first breakthrough in 1841 he realized that the oval-shaped outlines known as cartouches were only drawn around names this enabled him to identify the symbols for ptolemy and some phonetic hieroglyphs this was the starting point that was needed but he struggled to get much further jean-francois and polio used jung's discovery but had more success after one breakthrough he famously burst into his brother's office and declared i've got it and then fainted it took him five days to recover he announced the translation is complete in 1822 23 years after the stone's discovery this enabled scholars throughout the world to begin translating the hieroglyphs that had baffled the community for decades archaeologists were able to learn more about the history culture and religion of ancient egypt they could also look for clues names and locations of yet undiscovered tombs and treasures although widely praised for his success and contribution to our understanding of egyptian history controversy remains as chapolion didn't give young the credit he deserved for his early breakthrough there's also the issue over ownership of the stone itself following napoleon's english took possession and have held it in the british museum ever since while i'm sure the french would like it back perhaps it's time for the key to egypt's past be returned to egypt so i really hope you found this video interesting if you'd like to watch a video about archaeological discoveries we've done one on that i'm going to link to it on the screen now and thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: Sideprojects

Views: 1,394,687

Keywords: megaprojects, construction, engineering, projects, real pyramid builders, who built the pyramids, 5 Incredible Discoveries, archaeological discoveries, recent discoveries, amazing discoveries, mysterious discoveries, incredible discoveries, strange discoveries, archaeological finds, archaeology, archaeological, incredible finds, mysterious finds, bizarre discoveries, Unexplained discoveries

Id: 1k2hOUHi7F4

Length: 17min 30sec (1050 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 20 2022