This Cave Shouldn't Exist

this cave shouldn't exist in fact those carvings there almost can't exist but obviously there they are and what's more they're being treated as unimportant just like any other rock yet if this cave is what they claim it is it will probably be one of the most important archaeological finds of my entire life and honestly i think the only reason that that hasn't happened yet is that nobody's come here to see it my third night in the azores i was invited to a party with some locals and as is my way immediately offended some old man from lisbon he was absolutely adamant that the portuguese discovered these islands in 1427 and it was clearly not just a source of personal anger but national pride yeah but here's the thing though they didn't so in the interest of following up on that conversation i'd like to lay out the same argument that i made that night i believed that the first people to make it here were actually norse not portuguese and hopefully you'll be a little bit more willing to hear me out than he was so let's start with a couple of the easy ones the first and perhaps most obvious issue with the idea that these islands were found by the portuguese in 1427 is that they appear on two separate maps in the 1300s which well feels a bit self-explanatory it's pretty hard to be on the map if you've never been found but to play devil's advocate against myself it might have been that they were added to the map 100 years later or it could have just been a mistake that we retrofitted once we found something that sort of fit the bill it's unlikely granted but it isn't enough to say for certain either way so we can't rest our laurels on that let's move on to the second the name the early portuguese named these islands after a type of hawk that was already here in abundance when they first arrived a hawk that they believe was a mainland variety called well you guessed it the azores granted they were mistaken it was a different type of hawk but that's not important to this story what's important is that those hawks relied on rodents to survive and to take that one step further by the time those first sailors arrived the ecosystem would have already had to change to suit the diet of those birds it's almost imperative that there are rodents here already for some time the thing is though the azores don't have endemic rodents the only ones that have ever been found here were brought in the bellies of ships and perhaps more tellingly those that do exist here today are genetically descended from northern european mice and rats not iberian it's not exactly the hardest bit of evidence i get that but it's certainly something to think about the third issue which i'm even hesitant to mention at all is that those original sailors used a verb to describe the discovery of these islands that in portuguese is well a bit ambiguous much like the english word discover the portuguese can mean both to find in the respect of genuinely coming across something new and also to further explore something that you've already found sort of like discovering your sock at the back of the dryer obviously you already know about your sock but finding it again was in effect discovery it's pretty iffy i get that but bear with me because i'm trying to be as thorough as i can in this video so the fourth as you'll see in much more detail in another video coming out presumably sometime after this one is that when the portuguese found the far western island of corvo on the top of a hill was a worn down statue made out of stone that was in the year 1500 and according to their accounts it had already been weathered for what seemed like hundreds of years beforehand and that's kind of hard to explain but again to devil's advocate against myself there's absolutely nothing to prove that they weren't lying i highly doubt they were granted but highly doubt is not the same thing as a fact plus before anybody was able to study that statue it was broken into pieces brought back to lisbon and subsequently lost there are no drawings of it no paintings or really anything beyond the obviously untrue mythology that the current islanders tell each other it's a good story granted but not enough to convince an old man at a party thankfully none of these are the reason i'm confident the reason i'm certain that somebody was here before the portuguese is because all of this conjecture has recently been backed by hard science on the island of tercera in just the last few weeks before i started writing this script in the ponds near the cave that i promise i'll eventually get to they found clear indication of both the consumption and excretion of human grown cereals and what's more it's from somewhere before 10 50 a.d which if you've been paying attention is about 400 years before the arrival of the portuguese and i'm sorry for the pun but that's some pretty solid evidence but i suppose there's a little bit of icing on the top of that cake there's also an 11th century bowl carved up in the hills above the capital i couldn't actually find it myself apparently it's quite deep in the forest and i didn't really feel like getting lost plus it's not like i was going to do my own tests anyway for a lot of this episode i'm kind of just trusting the science okay we can essentially confirm that someone was here before portugal and personally even if you think those mice came in on a cruise ship the day before those researchers caught them there's two other rather telling reasons why i'm guessing that these people were norse one is the fact that we know the vikings found the east coast of canada at the very latest by the beginning of the 11th century and the second is that i've spent about 20 minutes on google learning how the trade winds work here's the thing as it turns out getting to the azores from the mediterranean is actually a much bigger hassle than it seems on the map it looks like you can just beeline over from lisbon but that's not how wind works to get to the azores from portugal is a massive ordeal you have to go south to essentially the gambia turn into the ocean and then overshoot the islands by something like a thousand kilometers before you turn around and ride the trade winds back at no point do you get to touch land and anyone who has been that deep in the atlantic knows that ocean waves are not forgiving so for a mainland iberian of that time there's like zero reason to do that if you don't already know that there's something there you're looking for it would be akin to suicide however if you're coming from the north let's say vinland or greenland it's a different story if you're coming back to europe from newfoundland specifically if you're aiming for the mouth of the mediterranean you're almost compelled to come through these islands that's just how the atlantic works so in 1500 when the portuguese sailors found the last desorian island corvo they didn't do it from another azorian island they did it by going all the way to newfoundland and coming back which if you understand the trade winds makes sense so yeah long story short that old man was definitely wrong i might not be totally right but he was definitely wrong and now that i've proven what i need to feel comfortable i want to take a huge step further and walk the fine line right into fantasy because like i said at the beginning i'm standing in a cave that as of yet can't be explained or i should say it can be explained but nobody's explained it yet it might be norse it might be portuguese but and not even trying to sound crazy here there are reasons however extremely unlikely to believe that this is thousands of years older old enough to genuinely change our understanding of ancient history of the atlantic so to conclude this video i want to look into the very scant evidence that humans got here not just in the 11th century but before the era of christ let's start with what i can actually get to in the back of a farmer's field near the northern coast of tercera there are two caves that offer signs of something historic the first contains small shelves carved into the wall and the second is completely covered in soot well so i'm told it's currently being used as a hay barn locked behind a metal door so i'm just sort of trusting the locals when they say that but they do call it the fire cave and i presume that's for a reason the one i could enter however closely resembles what's called a dove coat a structure for keeping pigeons like livestock it's an absolutely reasonable explanation to think it's that especially when you go inside and see that modern-day pigeons are still living there without even being coaxed the thing is though dovecotes have been used all over the world for thousands of years by the norse the portuguese and virtually all the ancient people of the mediterranean so if this was for birds which it likely was it really doesn't narrow it down all that much however if it is a dove coat why only here the early iberian settlers built windmills out of stone so you're telling me that the only aviary they can achieve is a few carved notches in a cave that just seems a little suspect however if it was the norse the carthaginians or the phoenicians well they'd only have been here for a single season waiting out the weather so that seems like a pretty reasonable amount of effort to put in but just to keep my little fantasy going let's say it wasn't a dove coat or at least not originally the other thing that this cave resembles is called a columbarium a burial chamber for urns in fact that's what they call it on google maps as well although they call it roman which is almost certainly not true so huge grain of salt with that info but if that was the case it would explain all that soot lining the second cave walls just as with the first lighting fires underground very directly aligns with the common funeral rites of ancient mediterranean people if we're imagining a phoenician or carthaginian died here this isn't far off from the sort of burial chamber we'd expect to find from them there even appears to be a bit of ground rising up like an altar in the center again if someone was only here for a season it isn't a stretch to imagine they put in this much effort to respect their dead but if that's the case why so many holes there's no evidence of houses here no urns no artifacts of any type why carve enough holes for a hundred people it's not like they colonized here we know that pretty much for certain so if someone came here by accident just for a season i can't imagine they'd need this many graves even as a major expedition there's over a hundred individual shelves here it just seems extremely unlikely they'd go through this much trouble however on another part of this island there's an even more complicated set of caves it's actually on a military base and we couldn't film there but not because in the military or they were worried that we'd ruin the cave or something like that it's actually because this time of year the deer are exploring each other's bodies shall we say and they get a little violent but in light of not being able to see it directly i read all the studies and perused all the pictures that exist for research online and what i've found is that this cave is much harder to explain than the dovecote not just because it's clearly carved by man but because it's done in a way that most directly aligns with phoenician and carthaginian culture and virtually nothing else it's not norse it's not portuguese it would not make sense for the people we know were here to have done this even if they did the odds of them accidentally framing the walls to let them know the changing of the seasons in a specifically phoenician culturally religious way are just astronomically small and yet if it was those ancient people these caves would have let their sailors read the seasons and know when the wind might safely take them home if they were here just for one season this is the sort of thing they would have carved so without any more info to the contrary that's hard to explain when making this episode i was constantly reminded of a famed roman historian who once told a story about the phoenicians by his time it was already a legend as old as rome is to us now but he said that a powerful king sent his best sailors on a journey around the tip of africa and they supposedly returned through the mouth of the mediterranean three years later there's no evidence that this is true except hearsay passed down for thousands of years through a long dead people and then repeated by an untrustworthy source it's nothing more than fantasy but if it was real if they did go on that journey there is a chance that they stopped here there's a chance that they carved that cave set themself up some graves and then went home it's just nobody's proven it so if you're planning on becoming a phd in archaeology you might want to think about coming to the azores because clearly there's still a lot left to prove plus would really help me with my argument with that old man this is rare earth ah

Channel: Rare Earth

Views: 1,491,077

Keywords: Chris Hadfield, Hadfield, YouTube Documentary, Documentary, History Documentary, History, Unique Places, Unique, Tom Scott, Smarter Every Day, Veritasium, Crash Course, Vsauce, Scishow, Evan Hadfield, Rare Earth, BBC, Natgeo, National Geographic

Id: odib5XTgz_o

Length: 12min 37sec (757 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 13 2022