The Archaeology Iceberg Explained

archaeology it's a fascinating field of science devoted to unearthing the shared past of humanity to most people it's mainly mummies and stonehenge but to archaeologists like me it's more than that today i trade the explainer i'm going to take a deep dive into some of the weirdest most obscure and just fascinating finds and stories in the history of archaeology that the average person doesn't really get to hear about and i am doing this in the iceberg meme format where at the top are things people generally know about and as we get closer and closer to the bottom the topics will get weirder and weirder and more niche okay are you ready this is the archaeology iceberg [Music] the sphinx's nose job this refers to the apparent absence of the great sphinx of giza's nose a popular legend claims that the nose was shot off with the cannonball by a couple of napoleon bonaparte soldiers during the 19th century this story however is clearly false as many illustrations show the sphinx already lacked a nose centuries before napoleon was even born the nose is thought to have been intentionally removed sometime during the 3rd to 10th century's a.d it also once had a beard it was aliens this statement refers to the fringe ancient astronaut or ancient aliens conspiracy theory popularized by eric vondenkin the theory is essentially that ancient civilizations namely non-european ones couldn't have constructed or made their technological advancements without the assistance of a more advanced civilization of aliens teaching them how to do it aliens apparently helped build everything from the pyramids to stonehenge to the nazca lines because we were too stupid to do it ourselves five thousand year old murder mystery a reference to otzi the iceman a naturally mummified human body dating to 3300 bc he was discovered encased in ice on the border between austria and italy with his clothes belonging skin and organs all intact he is perhaps one of the oldest and most well-preserved human specimens to date scientists explored its colon and everything on live television examinations of his body appear to show that otzi was murdered by an unknown assailant and left for dead in the snow thousands of years ago for reasons unknown it's a real cold case dead sea scrolls these are possibly one of the most significant archaeological finds of the past century they are a collection of hebrew manuscripts discovered in a system of desert caves and the west bank originally by a goat herder this collection of documents consists of some of the oldest surviving copies of the hebrew bible or old testament dated to about 408 bc to 318 a.d giant skeletons this is a reference to nephilim conspiracy theories on the internet where dozens of poorly photoshopped images of giant skeletons are presented as evidence for a race of building-sized humans in our distant past lion man this is the lowenmench a prehistoric figurine of a lion-headed man carved into mammoth ivory and dating to between 35 000 to 40 000 years old it is one of the oldest examples of figurative art and personas some say it might be a bear-headed man instead of a lion but who knows curse of king tut this refers to the superstitious belief that the opening of the tomb belonging to the boy pharaoh tutankhamun in 1923 placed a curse on the excavation team and other visitors resulting in many untimely deaths in truth out of the 58 people who were present when the tomb was open only about eight died prematurely within a dozen years many of those deaths were the result of outside factors such as malaria and fever and probably not related to the excavation at all most people who worked on the tomb went on to live otherwise healthy and long lives the shroud of turin the shroud of turin is a controversial linen cloth which contains the negative image of a bearded man many have claimed that the cloth was used to wrap jesus christ after his crucifixion however numerous scientific tests conducted on the cloth have shown it to be most likely a counterfeit product of the middle ages rather than an authentic relic seven wonders according to ancient historians there were seven legendary man-made monuments built in antiquity that greeks and romans marveled at for their beauty and sheer impressive scale all of them save one the great pyramid of giza have been destroyed or lost to time the terracotta army this is an immense collection of terracotta sculptures depicting the vast army of qin shi-huan the first emperor of china and buried with him for the purpose of protecting him in the afterlife oak island oak island is an island in nova scotia that has been the focus of pseudo-archaeologists for several hundred years many enthusiasts have become convinced that anything from alien technology to pirate gold to the ark of the covenant to shakespeare's lost plays exist beneath the island in the so-called money pit the search has been fruitless for many decades as no significant treasure site or artifacts have been uncovered despite the claims of its proponents there's probably nothing there also like king tut's tomb a curse is believed to exist around the site however this hasn't been substantiated [Music] it wasn't aliens if there's one thing archaeologists have discovered it's that humans are crafty and smart buggers constantly finding unique and ingenuitive ways to reach a goal just because it was in white people doesn't mean it was aliens the walking heads in 2012 a team of archaeologists successfully transported a 5-ton moai head replica using only ropes and manpower as an experiment to replicate the methods by which the people of easter island in the past might have transported the heads themselves no aliens were required internal ramp theory this refers to one of the several competing methods by which the great pyramid of giza was constructed the internal ramp theory posits that an internal spiral ramp exists within the pyramid itself and aided in the dragging of building materials during construction archaeological evidence supporting this view exists although it has not been fully accepted yet there is seemingly a universality of humans tendency to draw these little rocket ships on everything augustus under the stairs this is the moroi augustus a decapitated bronze head originally belonging to a statue of the famous roman emperor it was discovered beneath the staircase of an ancient cushite temple in what is now sudan in 24 bc the head was hacked off from its original body in roman egypt by invading kushite soldiers who took it across the border as a prize of war back in kush as a gesture of victory the head was buried beneath the temple staircase so worshipers would symbolically step on the defeated emperor's face this insult however had the unintentional consequence of preserving it over thousands of years better than pretty much any other roman bronze notably the head retains its decorative inlaid eyes that are often missing in other specimens also the eyes look like prime me material cave paintings are movies this is an interesting theory concerning the extra heads and extra limbs that are commonly depicted in prehistoric cave paintings of animals the theory speculates that these duplicated body parts were drawn intentionally to create the illusion of movement the light of torches would twist the shadows along the cave walls and make the images appear to come alive through a primitive form of animation by early humans i was here throughout history humans have always had the tendency to leave dumb goofy inscriptions simply stating they were here there's literally thousands of examples of these work in progress the best way for archaeologists to learn about how peoples in the past did things is to see what they just gave up on and left incomplete or abandoned for example there are dozens of unfinished moai or easter island heads and egyptian obelisks chiseled out of the rock but never fully completed these are often due to accidental damage during construction or a simple lack of enthusiasm to finish them some of these things are still waiting to be finished after thousands of years man i thought my procrastination was bad europeans ate mummies from the middle ages up until relatively recently wealthy europeans would consume the flesh of egyptian mummies by grinding them into a powder called mamiya it was believed that this powder had great medicinal properties and could treat gout epilepsy and cataracts king richard found in a parking lot remember that one time archaeologist straight up from the skeleton of king richard iii the last king of the plantagenet dynasty beneath the car parking lot good times ancient statues and buildings were colorfully painted although many of the ancient statues and buildings that survived us today appear to be rather drab stone or smooth white marble in the past they would have looked much different closer analysis of these monuments have shown that many would have been beautifully painted in their heyday with faint traces of their pigments still detectable the ancient world was in truth very bright and vibrant from this statue of augustus to the entire parthenon to aztec temples to the sphinx's face all of it would have been filled with color but due to time many of these pigments have long since faded hi doggie [Music] kv-55 is akhenaten refers to the interpretation of the mummy and valley of the king's tomb kv-55 is the infamous monotheistic pharaoh akhenaten dna evidence appears to support this long-suspected identity as the individual in this tomb was both the son of amun hotep iii as well as the father of tutankhamun creeping feathered serpent shadow during the spring and autumn equinoxes at the mayan temple of kukulkan in chichen itza the sun hits the pyramid in just the right way that it causes a series of triangular shadows to creep down the front stairway this effect only lasts a few minutes out of the entire year but through this clever arrangement of architecture the dark body of the feathered serpent god appears to slither down to its fearsome carved head donkey headed jesus this is the alexa menos graffito a piece of graffiti in rome that might be the earliest depiction of jesus dated to around 200 a.d the graffiti shows a young man worshiping a crucified figure with the head of a donkey an inscription accompanies the image stating in greek alexa menos worships his god it is thought that the drawing was created to mock an early christian named alexa minos the donkey-headed figure being an insulting caricature of jesus of nazareth mesoamerican grills among several pre-contact cultures in mesoamerica the teeth of elites were drilled into and filled with inlays of precious stones and jewels these ancient grills were a type of status symbol as well as a huge health hazard so much has been lost everything that has survived is only an incredibly small fraction of what actually existed in the past roman bikinis there are several well-preserved roman floor mosaics that depict a bunch of women wearing bikini-like athletic outfits voynich manuscript the voynich manuscript is a rather mysterious document written in an unknown writing system it consists of nearly 240 pages and is filled with illustrations of fictitious plants mythical creatures and people it has been carbon dated to the early 15th century although its exact origin is a little muddy it is unclear who wrote the manuscript and why it seems probable that it was written in some kind of cipher or code that only the author understood andean brain surgery several civilizations in the andes mountains conducted skull and brain surgeries and were actually pretty good at it as evidenced by the high survival rate of patients estimated to be around 90 percent gospel of judas this refers to one of the lost gospels found in the nag hamadi library a collection of religious texts belonging to an early but now extinct sect of christianity the only fragmentary copy of the gospel of judas that survives us is one of the most intriguing of these documents as it narrates an alternate narrative of jesus's crucifixion and frames judas not as a traitor but a loyal servant to the end undeciphered languages all around the world there are dozens if not hundreds of inscriptions on everything from clay tablets to old boulders written in systems of glyphs and symbols that are as of yet undecipherable to modern experts although we would very much like to we currently have no way to read what these inscriptions say because the languages they are written in have been lost to time from rongorongo on easter island to linear a in minoan crete to the somali scripts to the singapore stone to the writing on the back of the starving saquara statue all of these are completely unreadable scripts and they still keep their secrets at least for the moment that is main penny there is a norwegian medieval coin that was found in what is now the state of maine in the united states if this artifact is genuine it would support the idea that norsemen from europe had not only crossed the atlantic ocean on their longships but had contact and conducted a trade with native americans centuries before christopher columbus rock music several fragments of paleolithic flutes have been discovered in caves and dated to tens of thousands of years old these ivory and animal bone flutes were made by some of our earliest ancestors during the ice age archaeologists have reconstructed them to determine what stone age music would have sounded like and boy is it eerie to imagine hearing their sad notes echoing throughout the forest in the dark of winter want to listen to some tunes cat on the roof as this roman roof tile shows even after two thousand years cats have never changed hey don't touch that mask refers to an image of a carved green stone mask discovered beneath the pyramid of the sun in teotihuacan mexico back in 2011 due to its resemblance to the stone mask and jojo's bizarre adventure and the mask and the mask a lot of people online joked that the archaeologist should leave the mask alone because disturbing it would end the world ah that might have been right faces of the dead in roman egypt mummies of people belonging to the upper class were typically buried with highly detailed portraits of their living faces many of these coffin portraits have survived us over the centuries and are incredibly lifelike showing a wide range of facial shapes hairstyles and personalities ocean man in the summer of 1964 the nets of an italian fishing trawler snagged something off the coast of the adriatic this was what they found the fishermen had discovered an ancient bronze sculpture encased in centuries of patina and sea scum extensive cleaning revealed that the statue was a lithe and beautiful athlete and consequently he is now referred to as the victorious youth he was sculpted sometime during the hellenistic period possibly by the famous greek artist lysippus the sculpture likely ended up off the coast of italy on a roman ship that sunk in a storm although the wreck of the ship itself has not been located [Music] meteoric iron before the iron age iron was as to be expected in short supply humans had no means to produce it from raw ore however iron from meteorites provided people in the past a very rare opportunity to fashion metal tools and weapons scientific evidence has shown that artifacts like king tut's dagger and the spearheads of some inuit lances were in fact fashioned out of iron harvested from space rocks fallen from the heavens whoa the nazis took the lance of longinus during the 1930s several nazi leaders took a keen interest in the field of archaeology heinrich himmler greenlit several searches for legendary places and artifacts like the city of atlantis and the ark of the covenant apparently to no avail one object that was supposedly recovered by the nazis was the lance of longinus or holy lance the spear allegedly used to pierce jesus's body on the cross the imperial regalia of the holy roman empire dubiously claimed to have acquired the lance in the middle ages in 1938 after the annexation of austria the relic was brought to adolf hitler and displayed in germany for a short time after the war ended however the holy lance was returned to vienna crown of nails well maybe not the iron crown of lombardy is a metal crown made during the early middle ages for a christian italian king a band in the crown was supposedly made from one of the iron nails used in jesus's crucifixion however an examination of the headwear has revealed that it is 99 silver not iron meaning the legendary story surrounding it is almost definitely false ramsay's the second passport in 1976 the 3 000 year old mummy of pharah ramses ii was flown from cairo egypt to paris france so that he could receive a much-needed restoration a popular internet rumor states that in order to leave and enter the two countries ramses had to be issued a passport this is a bit of a half-truth as although a lot of paperwork was created for him an actual physical passport was never produced this image circulating around on the internet is a clever photoshop golden eye at the site of char sucde a skeleton belonging to a woman possesses the oldest artificial eyeball ever found the eyeball was covered in a thin layer of gold and was worn regularly while the woman lived ancient barbies ancient dolls for children have been discovered at several archaeological sites around the world some of these dolls are really creepy looking and incredibly similar to modern barbie dolls with posable limbs and decorative clothes that can be swapped out gay caveman this was an incredibly bad piece of journalism okay so in 2011 in the czech republic archaeologists uncovered a prehistoric skeleton that appears to have been biologically male but had been buried in a ceremonial manner that was typically reserved for females in this society this led the archaeologist to speculate that this individual might have represented an example of a third gender or an individual with a gender role that was neither wholly male nor wholly female something common in many cultures throughout history third gender burials like this are actually quite common in archaeology particularly in north america and in pagan societies now the media totally misunderstood the story news article shouted gay caveman when the original archaeologist said nothing of the sort it might be more accurate to think of this individual as a transgender caveman or non-binary caveman that being said there are some archaeological finds that might represent two individuals in same-sex relationships but as with many things in archaeology it's hard to know for sure dindra light bulb this is a stone relief in the egyptian temple of hathor vaguely resembling a modern light bulb the relief is actually a depiction of a scene out of egyptian mythology involving a serpent emerging from a lotus flower the nearby hieroglyphics confirmed this interpretation scooby-doo mug refers to these really amazing greek terracotta vases made in the shape of realistic dog heads the hobby lobby smuggling scandal oh boy this is quite the doozy okay so starting around 2009 representatives of the popular arts and crafts store chain hobby lobby you know that store your grandma gets her minion stickers and scented candles from purchased 1.6 million dollars worth of ancient iraqi artifacts from dealers in the united arab emirates literally thousands of mesopotamian cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals the evangelical christian green family the owners of hobby lobby wish to put many of these artifacts on display in their museum of the bible a museum that has often been criticized for its let's just say lenient views towards historical accuracy now you might be wondering how these artifacts from iraq ended up in a completely different country and i'm happy you wondered that because hobby lobby allegedly sure as heck didn't as it happens the majority of the items lacked much if any supporting documentation of their past ownership which is crucial to ensuring an artifact was obtained legitimately and not through i don't know looting well guess what hobby lobby bought over 5000 illegally looted artifacts you see after the american invasion of iraq in 2003 the country was left in complete disarray and looters quickly began to pillage iraq's archaeological sites and museums selling the stolen artifacts to dealers on the black market these items would then resurface outside the country their shady origins left unquestioned by future buyers we know that some looters were just local civilians just trying to make money to feed their families however others have been connected to more malicious organizations in 2011 us custom agents seized several shipments of hobby lobby's artifacts after correctly suspecting that they had originally been acquired through illegal means now it is uh debatable if the parties involved were aware of the illicit origins of these artifacts but let's just say that they had been uh um accidentally mislabeled in custom declarations as ceramic and clay tile samples from turkey in israel and not iraq or the united arab emirates whoops archaeologists have since determined that several of the pieces hobby lobby purchased originally came from the national museum of iraq which was rather violently ransacked less than a decade prior the united states government prosecuted hobby lobby for the scandal and in 2017 the company made a settlement returning more than 5 500 artifacts to iraq and having to pay a three million fine cats domesticated themselves this is a popular theory on how wild cats were domesticated into house pets they did so themselves when early human farmers began to create food stores for their excess crops it attracted mice and other pests cats drawn by the high concentration of easy prey began to live near human houses until gradually over time cats learned to live with us and we just kind of let them hang out the original dark-skinned europeans several genetic studies on prehistoric human remains in europe have revealed that several of the earliest europeans looked very different when compared to the europeans of today cheddar man for example was a 9 000 year old man in england who according to genetics possessed dark skin dark hair and light-colored eyes [Music] el gigante el gigante is the name given to the largest moai or easter island head ever constructed however it was never lifted or transported from its original quarry due to the sheer impracticality of its size mickey mouse pre-columbian car the wheel and axle are often regarded as one of the earliest and most essential inventions to humanity as they make transportation especially over long distances much easier however in some regions like in mesoamerica it appears that wheels and axles never gained as much prominence oh the mesoamericans invented them but appear to have only used them for kids toys never incorporating them into larger wagons or chariots the reasons for this are unclear but it appears it might have something to do with the fact that mesoamerica lacked large domesticated animals to be used as beasts of burden to pool said inventions so there was little practical use for them green sahara there was a period in pre-history where much of the sahara desert one of the most inhospitable places on earth was not a sandy wasteland but once a lush and wet grassland evidence of this period exists in prehistoric rock art showing that giraffes rhinos elephants and other animals once lived in this region people swam in freshwater lakes and had thriving communities here but they died out or moved elsewhere once the desert sands crept in ancient trade several archaeological finds have revealed that the world of the past was surprisingly much more interconnected than often thought although it was difficult for a single person to travel far from home in these times objects could travel great distances through a complex network of trade we found a buddha figurine in medieval scandinavia ancient greek tapestries depicting centaurs in china and carvings of hindu deities in roman pompei you could get goods thousands of miles from their original locations but let's just say the shipping times were quite the long wait prehistoric shark attack the remains of this three thousand-year-old japanese hunter-gatherer show that he had been attacked by either a tiger or great white shark at some point neolithic gummy bear this amber amulet was found in a polish bog its provenience can't really be attested but it seems like it was dropped by a prehistoric hunter sometime during the neolithic period it also looks really uh tasty wooden ship underneath the world trade center after the september 11th attacks on the world trade center in new york a massive construction effort was made to rebuild the destroyed area of the city in 2010 an excavation site revealed that 20 feet below the new york city street level was the intact hole of a wooden ship dated to the 1700s pygmy mammoth in egypt there's a mural in an egyptian tomb the rec murray tomb that seems to depict a small hairy elephant on a leash there is a kind of fringe theory that the animal depicted as not an elephant but a woolly mammoth although not entirely impossible this probably isn't the case as per my previous tablet four thousand years ago a babylonian administrator wrote a complaint on a cuneiform tablet that reads i am not getting water for my sesame field the sesame will die don't tell me later you did not write to me the sesame is visibly dying ibi ilabrot saw it that sesame will die and i have warned you are you lifting sun refers to the infamous baibon stone a large block of granite found near olympia greece and dating to the 6th century bc the stone has been engraved presumably by a man named bibon with an inscription that reads vibon son of fola has lifted me over his head with one hand can we just take a moment to appreciate how bye bond wrote his inscription in the first person perspective of the stone viking was a job description an extensive genetic study of viking age remains revealed that the quote vikings were an incredibly genetically diverse group and not the necessarily homogeneous people that they're often thought of they came from all over europe and it is perhaps better thought of as a job description like pirate or mercenary rather than an ethnic group haunt fema in the city of navagarad in russia archaeologists found the spelling homework of a seven-year-old medieval child named anthem anfield was obviously disinterested in his homework as he doodled all over it i took a deeper dive into this story in a previous video so you should check that out caligula's coffee table in the first century a.d the notorious roman emperor caligula ordered the construction of two of the largest wooden ships ever built in antiquity these pleasure barges were some of the most expensive and technologically advanced of their day and were said to host the emperor's lavish parties and orgies caligula's fancy ships eventually sunk to the bottom of lake nemi where they remained for almost 2 000 years in the 1920s however italian dictator benito mussolini ordered the lake be drained in the wreckage of the ships recovered the two nimi ships were successfully raised and eventually housed in their own museum but in 1944 an allied attack resulted in a fire that eventually burned down the museum sadly almost completely destroying the remains of the original ships in the process little managed to survive that was until 2017 when a new york attorney's office confiscated a mosaic panel from a private collector in new york city the artifact turned out to be a roman mosaic used to decorate the floor of one of the nemey ships surviving the fire it had been sold by an italian aristocratic family to antiquity dealers in america the owner of the mosaic apparently had no idea how special it was and was using it for years as a coffee table knowing what caligula probably did on that ship i just hoped they wiped it down a little before they used it it's ritual it refers to the tendency for archaeologists to explain something like an artifact or burial custom as ritual which basically means that we don't know what the heck this thing is or what it was used for it's kind of a vague catch-all term that really means nothing in the end brushing your teeth can be considered ritual and a whole bunch of other stuff mormonism the religion of mormonism has this kind of weird relationship with archaeology the founder of mormonism joseph smith was a bit of an amateur archaeologist himself in 1823 smith claimed to have discovered with the help of an angel an ancient book of gold plates buried on a hill in manchester new york smith claimed that they were the remains of a bygone civilization of israelites called the nephites who cross the atlantic ocean in ancient times now with the hindsight of modern archaeology and genetics this claim of an ancient transatlantic crossing is simply not supported by the evidence but it is possible that smith might have actually uncovered the remains of the very real native american mississippian culture which existed across the eastern part of north america from 800 to 1600 a.d these native americans did know a bit of metalworking and crafted decorative copper plates with glyphs and designs perhaps smith found a few of these copper plates and misidentified them as israelite the schliemann level this level is devoted to the story of one of the founders of modern archaeology the man us archaeologists really love to hate heinrich schliemann and oh boy was this guy wild heinrich schliemann was a german businessman in the mid to late 1800s who had a passion for the works of the ancient greek poet homer and used his extensive wealth to finance his hobby of digging up ancient sites across the aegean schliemann's lifelong dream was to hunt down the legendary city of troy mentioned in homer's iliad in the odyssey at the time this was seen as a bit of a fool's errand up until the late 19th century troy and the trojan war was largely thought of as a fantasy or a myth with no historical basis schliemann disagreed and believed that the war was an actual historical event and the city was at one point a real location after some sleuthing he identified the site of hyserlick in what is now turkey as the historical troy and began excavating it in the 1870s with the most delicate of archaeological methods dynamite the crazy thing is is that he was right hisserlik is seen by modern archaeologists as the historical troy unfortunately for us however schliemann was the one who found it first and his explosive methods were devastating destroying much of the important historical context of hyserlick forever for example we now know that the soil level that schliemann identified as the trojan war was too old to be homer's troy and in order for him to access this older level schliemann had to recklessly remove the younger lairs above it effectively obliterating all traces of the real trojan war in the process schliemann kept few of any records or maps of his excavations too so he took little care to document the locations of objects or finds he also had this tendency to claim any artifact he found must have belonged to someone historically significant calling things like the treasures of king priam or the mask of egaminon based on absolutely nothing he literally just went yeah sure that sounds right source i made it all up but wait it gets worse schliemann smuggled several of the more valuable of troy's treasures out of anatolia and the ottoman empire only knew about this because schliemann let his wife sophia wear the priceless 4 000 year old jewels in public at like parties and stuff which is like what upon learning this the ottoman government understandably banned schliemann from digging in their country and tried to sue him for the gold but he just fled to another country and dug up the ancient city of maisine in greece instead all agree schliemann was pretty bad pretty pretty bad even for the time when the field of archaeology was still in its very infancy the amount of damage to science schliemann did through his needlessly careless methods is immeasurable to say the least we can never get the knowledge he destroyed back schliemann's story basically serves as the textbook example of how not to do archaeology oh schliemann you rap scallion you [Music] kings of earth refers to a rather obscure fresco at the umayyad caliphate site of kuzra amra it is said to depict the six kings of the world known at the time the fresco was very damaged so it's hard to say who all of them would have been but of the ones we know there was the visigothic king of hispania roderick the anigas of the kingdom of aksum najashi an unnamed byzantine emperor and an unnamed sasanian emperor the identity of the last two kings is a subject of much debate but they are speculated to be a chinese emperor and a king of india but this is still very much conjecture bronze age crop top this is a reference to the ectvent girl's well-preserved clothing this bronze age girl was buried in a wooden coffin in what is now denmark her surviving 3 400 year old clothes consist of a loose bodice that left her waste bear in a short string skirt with a large decorative disc a bit of a bronze age waifu arabic coin for the pope refers to a rather unique gold coin minted by the english king apha of mercia in 774 a.d the coin appears to have been a blatant copy of a coin struck by an islamic caliph with the words offa rex awkwardly added in the engraver who produced it tried their best to copy the original arabic inscription but obviously had no understanding of the language so the text contains many grammatical errors and typos why this bizarre coin was made in the first place isn't clear but one theory posits that it was a gift to the vatican pope which is kind of funny when you realize that the arabic letters on it read there is no god but allah alone i'm guessing that probably wouldn't have gone over well with the christian pope medieval panties in 2008 archaeologists discovered a secret chamber in langberg castle austria inside was a hidden stash of clothes dating to around the 1400s among these garments were some of the best preserved medieval underwear including four linen bras this was a bit of a surprise as it had been previously thought that female bras like these with two separate supportive cups wouldn't be invented until much later in the victorian era discovery provided i quote a missing link in the history of women's underwear also it is pretty funny that the linen panties found in the chamber probably belonged not to a woman but a dude hey i get it i'm more of a brief sky myself hair gel the cloney caven man is a well preserved iron age bog body found in ireland analysis of his body showed that the man liked to style his hair using tree resin as a primitive type of hair gel [Music] coffin juice when the so-called black sarcophagus in alexandria egypt was opened in 2018 news outlets reported that it was filled with bones floating in a soup of red dark sludge the story and its accompanying photos quickly captured the attention of the public in maybe not the best of ways many online petitions circulated around demanding that the archaeologists allow people to drink the coffin juice the juice in the coffin was actually sewage from alexandria's underground drains so it is in my humble opinion that you probably shouldn't drink it pre-contact dogs prior to european contact the indigenous peoples of north and south america had their own unique dog breeds found nowhere else in the world however aside from chihuahuas and a handful of other breeds all these dogs became extinct after european contact likely due to disease and competition with european dogs i also did an entire video on these guys so check that out voskop man in 1913 the fossil remains of a prehistoric human were discovered in south africa and according to anthropologists at the time it apparently had a massive brain the boss cop man as it was later known had a calculated cranial capacity between 1700 and 2000 ccs by comparison the average human today has a cranial capacity around 1400 to 1500 cc's now re-examining the story it is hard to ascertain the truth of this claim the fossil was highly fragmentary so i would chalk this unusual cranial capacity to researcher error olmec heads were actually thrones it appears that at least some of the famous olmec heads of central america were not at least originally meant to be heads at least two of the colossal craniums show the unmistakable signs of being recarved they originally seemed to have been stone chairs or thrones prior to being re-sculpted star wars archaeology for decades people have been searching in some of the most remote parts of the globe not for the remains of lost civilizations but for artifacts from a galaxy far far away you see after filming the iconic star wars film franchise the behind the scenes crew for several of the movies apparently just left many of the original props at their filming locations where they sat abandoned for years enthusiastic movie fans have tracked down several of these artifacts from the charred ruins of uncle owen in ontario's house to the fiberglass skeleton of the krait dragon in the deserts of tunisia to the fragmentary wreckage of jabba's sailbarge in buttercup valley arizona unfortunately many of these unique pieces of film history have either been destroyed by the elements or scavenged by locals and resold to private collectors the stain there was once an ancient greek statue called the aphrodite of kindos it was supposedly so attractive and lifelike that at night young men would sneak into the temple that housed it and let's just say used it inappropriately according to legend this happened so often that over time a dark stain became visible in the statue now we can't verify the truth of this claim because although we have numerous roman copies the original statue has not been found and most likely it never will but who knows the statue in its possibly legendary stain might still be out there boba fett mayas the helmets of mayan ritual boxers look a lot like mandalorian helmets from star wars these boxers use giant spiky cotch cells as boxing gloves in their very bloody sport the boiler boys there is an obscure and ancient grave in what is now germany that commemorates two brothers named saluda and mcgrethro they were persian cataphracts or heavily armored knights soldiers like these were often demeaningly called boiler boys because they tended to boil in the sun under all that metal plate these particular boiler boys apparently fought on the roman side against barbarians in germany circa 235 a.d the two brothers appeared to have originally come from all the way in mesopotamia and served under the sasanian king adeshir they were likely mercenaries who sold their services to whoever needed strong fighters under ardeshir they might have traveled as far as the indus before serving under rome in the defense of its borders on the rhine this simple grave and truth tells the story of two brothers who traveled the whole width of the known world together and fought in dozens of brutal and bloody battles only to die in a swamp so far from home and fighting for an empire they probably didn't particularly care for [Music] fun times in pompeii this refers to an image of a cast belonging to a man killed in the eruption of mount vesuvius in 79 a.d originally uploaded on pompei's instagram that sounds super weird when i say it this image started to circulate in line with people claiming that the man was uh having a fun time the moment he died as it turns out no he's not giving it one last stroke before then the man probably just ended up in this position because his arms and legs flexed after death due to the intense heat of the volcano's pyroclastic flow sweet potatoes the common narrative we are taught in school is that north and south america and their native inhabitants were isolated from the rest of the world for tens of thousands of years and it wasn't until christopher columbus crossed the atlantic ocean in 1492 that this isolation was broken however something is overturning this view something you wouldn't expect sweet potatoes potatoes sweet potatoes are a crop native to the americas and were cultivated by native americans for many thousands of years interestingly though archaeological evidence has shown that sweet potatoes were being cultivated in some of the very distant pacific islands since the 1000s a.d polynesians on the cook islands easter island hawaii and even new zealand were growing sweet potatoes centuries before christopher columbus or any other european knew about the americas how these sweet potatoes made it all the way from central or south america to these islands in the pacific ocean is a bit of a mystery these potatoes are some of the strongest pieces of evidence that there might have been actual interactions and trade between polynesians and south americans long before european contact on top of this the word for sweet potato in polynesian languages in south american languages are suspiciously similar suggesting a shared origin perhaps some canoes from the polynesian islands like easter island traveled to south america or perhaps the dispersal of this crop occurred naturally and the language thing is a weird coincidence the point is we don't know exactly and the whole trans-pacific sweet potato debate remains as this kind of unresolved mystery hammurabi's shoe return this refers to one of the mari letters a series of clay tablets in syria documenting written conversations sent and received by the king zimri lim a rather curious letter records an interaction between king zimri lim and the king of babylon hammurabi yes that hammarami in the letter it states that hammurabi received a pair of cretan leather boots or sandals as a gift from zimri lim but hammurabi returned them these boots would have been a rather fancy and expensive gift especially to transport so far so it begs the question why did hamirabi return them were they too small or too big for his feet as historian air klein points out he could have at least re-gifted them had to do it to him refers to the guinol lioness a supposedly 5 000 year old mesopotamian statue allegedly found near baghdad iraq it is better known as the most expensive antiquity to be sold in an auction in 2007 it was sold for 57.2 million dollars why i have no idea don't ask me somebody must really like their 5 000 year old jacked furries throwing a king's arm in the trash possibly the oldest royal remains ever found was a skeletonized arm found in the tomb of king juror by egyptologist flinders petri petre gave the arm to fellow egyptologist emil brooch who supposedly promptly threw it away thinking it was too crab for the museum to feature well sabretooth lips okay this refers to a paleolithic statuette from the prehistoric french site of izuwitz the statuette has been lost since at least the early 20th century so all we have of it are drawings based on the original it depicts some kind of big cat but what type of big cat is a point of contention most think it is a representation of a cave lion but a small minority have posited that it might represent a saber-toothed cat specifically a homotherium which is definitely the more intriguing possibility as it would be the only eyewitness depiction of such a creature while it still lived if this is in fact the case it raises another question why are there no saber teeth this oddity has spawned a theory that contrary to most pop culture depictions sabertooth cats had fleshy lips that actually hid their long fangs in life but this is a bit of an extrapolation based on pretty tenuous evidence cursed grilled cheese this refers to a pretty funny tumbler thread where users wanted to use the combined ingredients of the world's oldest cheese a lump of 2000 year old butter and pieces of 500 year old bread from jordan on an ancient non-stick frying pan discovered in italy to make the world's oldest grilled cheese the lost giant aztec snake statue this refers to a very enigmatic and poorly understood artifact in 1824 the english naturalist william bullock held a museum exhibition at the egyptian hall in london england titled ancient mexico this exhibit primarily consisted of aztec artifacts acquired by bullock such as authentic pottery and codices however the main features of ancient mexico were several full-scale plaster casts of aztec statues these casts being based on the stone originals all the way back in mexico two contemporary sketches exist of this exhibition and we can see that almost all the statues are known to us all but one that is the most eye-catching of the plaster statues is this incredibly large and fearsome serpent with a man's head in its mouth suspiciously there are no references to this giant aztec snake statue outside of bullock's exhibit and the original it was set to be based on has not been found some have said it could have been straight up fabricated or invented by bullock but this seems unlikely to me we know that pretty much everything else at the exhibit was based on real authentic aztec specimens many of which we still have all except this one even the plaster cast appears to have gone missing as contemporary sources report it was sold to a private collector after the exhibit ended never to be seen again but like how does something this big get lost or misplaced it's all very weird and crazy that this huge badass snake statue has straight up disappeared from history and no one knows any details about it or where it went with hope it's still collecting dust in the basement of some old english manor right now just waiting to be uncovered massive cookie jars this refers to the plane of jars and laos scattered across the valleys and foothills of the shanquan plateau are thousands of stone jars some small and some truly gigantic they were constructed by an unknown prehistoric culture between 1240 and 660 bc for an even more mysterious purpose some human skeletons were buried around the jars while others have been found within them a few show signs of cremation so maybe the jars were prehistoric crematoriums most of the jars are unadorned lacking any inscriptions or pictures all that is save one which has a pictogram of a frog-like humanoid on it the plane of jars are truly an archaeological mystery they obviously served a religious or spiritual function to bygone people but we can't really say much beyond that indiana jones's gold idol is fake in the first indiana jones film the fictional archaeologist grabs a gold idol from an abandoned temple somewhere in south america this prop is actually based on the real dumbarton oaks birthing figure this figurine is said to be a piece of pre-contact art depicting an aztec goddess giving birth now the dumbarton oaks figure has come under scrutiny and it very well might be a clever fake the provenience or origins of the artifact cannot be confirmed because it first appears on the shelves of an antiquity store in paris france additionally recent microscopic analysis of the artifact have shown that the incisions and drill holes on it were probably made by modern tools not ancient ones this is an incredibly similar situation to the infamous crystal skulls reportedly discovered in mesoamerica stone age um personal massagers there are several uh interestingly shaped stone artifacts found in prehistoric sites all over the world some were probably simply ceremonial or artistic in their purposes while others uh seem to have been used for something else by our early ancestors yeah i'm glad she's wearing gloves venus figurines are prehistoric selfies this refers to a theory presented by anthropologist mccoyd and mcdermott to explain the puzzling venus figurines a collection of stone age statuettes with large breasts and hips and often lack heads or faces the scientists suggest that the venuses look this way because they were made by prehistoric women looking down at their own bodies according to them without mirrors early humans had to rely on their first person perspective to describe themselves and the reason why many of the figurines lack heads or faces is because the artist did not have mirrors to see their own faces to top it off mcdermott's paper had these really great visual experiments that essentially consisted of pictures taken from a woman's first person perspective looking down at her own nude body other anthropologists have criticized this interpretation because prehistoric humans would have obviously had access to streams and puddles which could have been used as mirrors the last maki wattle the maki wattle of mesoamerica was one of the most badass weapons in history it essentially consisted of a wooden club held in one hand with several obsidian blades as sharp as steel razors embedded in its sides it was said to be so sharp that some spanish conquistadors reported it could cut the head of a horse with one strike although this might be a bit of an exaggeration the makiwato was the choice weapon of countless aztec mayan and toltec elite warriors for centuries so it might be a little shocking to learn that up until recently there was not a single surviving makiwattle dating to the pre-columbian era oh there were replicas made centuries after european contact but no authentic specimens from before the last pre-columbian machuatal was apparently housed in the royal armory of madrid after hernan cortes sent it back to spain as a prize of war following his conquest of the aztec empire now this is where things get a bit hazy and messy the makiwato in question appears in a catalogue of the armory in 1837 and in a photo taken in the late 1800s alongside a suit of japanese samurai armor and a persian shield and based on this image the madrid makiwatal looks way longer than any previously known one to me it almost looks like guts's golden age arc sword some experts have suggested that this specimen in the madrid royal armory represented a rare two-handed version of the weapon almost like a european longsword the armory along with the unusual last maki wattle burned down in 1884 meaning this elusive two-handed variant has been lost to time some have suggested that it might have served a purely ceremonial purpose but with no artifact to examine it's hard to say thankfully for us however recently a second and maybe even a third authentic pre-columbian macchiato was unveiled within the museum of the temple mayor in mexico bringing the number of known surviving maki waddles back up to one and maybe even two since 1884 and there you have it the archaeology iceberg i hope you enjoyed and learned something new tell me what you thought of some of these obscure and weird pieces of trivia i just have a love and a passion for this unique and diverse field of science it's amazing how much hard work archaeologists around the world have done to advance our understanding of the past definitely feel free to share your strange niche archaeology factoids because i obviously couldn't talk about them all on this list and had to leave a lot of stuff out okay thank you so much for watching this installment of trail explainer i hope to see you next time if there's a prize for rotten judgment i guess i've already won that no man is worth the aggravation that's ancient history been there done that

Channel: TREY the Explainer

Views: 3,361,213

Keywords: history, archaeology, historical, roman, ancient, greek, ancient greece, Aztec, Archeology, History, Rome, Ancient History, prehistoric, prehistory, Middle Ages, Medieval

Id: 1o2fnTNxE_Q

Length: 53min 58sec (3238 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/mleibowitz97]

I love me some Trey. I highly recommend the other videos he talks about here. Pre-contact dogs is really cool

[u/anonymous_coward69]

Watched it this morning. Good video. Would be awesome if they found that giant snake statue.

[u/Atmos56]

1 hour of pure interesting content. Thank you for this gem.

[u/CosmoFishhawk2]

I'm really disappointed that he slept on the opportunity to coin the portmanteau, "Gayveman."

[u/longringlong]

The Chichen Itza equinox shadow serpent thing is a myth. Source

[u/DanRowbo96]

love this guy!

[u/Brandon4chem]

I understand that the word, iceberg, is signaling there is some hidden story pervading the archeology field and Trey is going to explain the story. Can someone please explain what the technical meaning is when someone describes a topic with by invoking this iceberg metaphor?