12 Most Incredible Ancient Artifacts Finds..

An ancient artifact is an object carved by the hands of our ancient ancestors, and then left behind for us to find. If we find the right artifact in the right place, it can tell us new information about the past. If we find the wrong artifact in the wrong place, it leaves us with a mystery to solve. That's why we love ancient artifacts on this channel, and we're taking a video tour of some fantastic ones right now. There are some artifacts out there in the world that you can understand almost everything about just from hearing their name. The Kendrick's Cave Decorated Horse Jaw is one of them. It's a decorated horse jaw, and it was found in Kendrick's Cave. Your first question is probably, where's Kendrick's Cave? And the answer to that question is Llandudno in Wales. Your next question is likely to be, who decorated it, and how? And that's a much harder question to answer. The artifact, which has been in the collection of the British Museum since it was discovered in 1959, is approximately 10,000 years old. The jawbone is mostly complete, save for its teeth, of which only three remain. On the underside of the jaw, someone has created a zigzag pattern using a flint tool, resulting in a herringbone effect. Scientists think that the artwork was enhanced with red ochre when it was first created, but all traces of the ochre are now gone. The pattern has the effect of making the areas between each incision appear raised and dynamic. We don't know who performed the work or whether it had any symbolic meaning. Next, we go to Jerusalem, where archaeologists discovered an ancient wine-making table in January 2020. Experts from the Israeli Antiquities Authority say that the table, which was found in the City of David National Park, is approximately 2,000 years old. It's only the third wine-making table ever to be found in the history of the city. Aside from being used for the manufacture of wine, tables like this could also be filled with wine in order to determine a measure of the valuable liquid. This was especially useful in trades, as shopkeepers could verify and standardize measures. Speaking of trade, this is the first-ever evidence that trade was conducted in this part of Jerusalem, which lays to the south of the old city and isn't far from the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan. While it might be technically correct to refer to the artifact as a wine-making table, making wine wouldn't have been the only thing the table was used for. It would also have been used in the making and measuring of olive oil. We hope that someone cleaned it in between uses, else the wine would have started to taste extremely unpleasant after a while. Continuing our trip around the world, we now move to China for a discovery that took place in January 2022. If you've been watching this channel for a while, or even if you just have a keen interest in archaeology, you've probably seen battle armor made from almost every material imaginable, from teeth to coconut shells. However, you probably haven't seen armor like this before, it's been labeled fish scale armor, and it's approximately 2,500 years old. The name is a little misleading, as the armor found inside the tomb in Turfan, on the edges of the Taklamakan desert, isn't actually made of fish scales. Instead, it's made of more than 5,000 overlapping scales of leather, arranged in a pattern to make them look like fish scales. Experts think that it was imported from the Middle East, so might represent a rare form of technological exchange between the two territories at that point in history? Armor like this would have been useful, because it offers better protection from blunt force attacks than male armor, and is also cheaper to make, but it lacks flexibility and coverage. Templo Mayor has already given us many fantastic ancient artifacts over the years. It was once the heart of a huge religious complex in the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan. What's left of it is now an archaeological site in Mexico City. Experts and archaeologists have been digging through the site for decades, and will continue to do so for several decades more. But in June 2022, they confirmed the discovery of more than 2,500 wooden objects believed to have been left at the site as religious or ritual offerings. There's no set pattern to the objects. They include figurines, headdresses, masks, jars, earrings, and scepters, all of which were probably deposited by priests during the 14th century as a means of consecrating the Templo Mayor to the gods that the Aztecs believed in. It's rare for wooden objects to survive for so many centuries in such good condition, but in the case of these artifacts, it seemed they were preserved by a combination of the high level of humidity in the region and the anaerobic conditions in the soil. In 2011, an exquisitely carved skull was found in an antique shop in Vienna, Austria. The antique shop is unable to say who donated it to them, when, or why. They assume that it was little more than an ornament. But it isn't. This is a real human skull, belonging to someone who passed away at least 300 years ago and covered in intricate symbols and decorations that nobody has thus far been able to transcribe. Local folklore says that the skull arrived in Vienna with a doctor who'd travelled extensively through Asia and was given the strange object as a gift by a Tibetan monk after providing him with medical treatment. It's a lovely story, but sadly it can't be verified. There might be something to it though. The style of the lettering does appear to be Tibetan, even if it can't be fully transcribed. One of the figures on the top of the skull has been identified as Siddhapati, who's seen as a protective deity according to some ancient Buddhist traditions. Skulls aren't easy things to carve and decorate like this, so whoever carved this one went to a lot of time and effort to do so. We wish we knew why. With all of our modern knowledge, we're intelligent enough to know that palmistry is nonsense. You can't tell anything about a person's fate or future by looking at the lines on their hands. However, our ancestors believed in palmistry very deeply. You can see that just from the level of detail included in this 17th-century palm reading chart. It's a woodcut illustration taken from Les Oeuvres by Jean-Baptiste Bellot, which was published in 1640. Bellot was attempting to prove that there was a scientific basis for palmistry, and this chart was his best attempt. In it, he assigns zodiac and astrological significance to each part of the hand and fingers, thus defeating his own objective of being scientific. He associates a tiny piece of flesh under the thumb with such matters as incest, bigamy, birthing illegitimate children, and being lecherous. A line on the top of the thumb means that you were destined to die from fear. There's also an ideal length for your love line to reach if you're destined to experience, as Bellot calls it, victory in love. There's no scientific basis to anything in the picture, but it's a fun piece of art. If the ancient Sumerians or Mesopotamians wanted to dedicate a building to a particular god, they did it with a clay nail. Also known as foundation pegs, clay nails, like the ones we see in these images, first entered use around 5,000 years ago. The clay would be delicately inscribed, baked hard, then pushed into the mud-brick walls of temples as proof that the building was divine property. Later versions were made from metal. The funerary cones that were later used in ancient Egyptian tombs are thought to have been based on Sumerian clay nails. If we interpret the cuneiform as a type of writing, you could say that the clay nails are written records of a temple's erection and dedication, and as such they're the oldest written documents in the world. The problem is that they're not particularly reliable documents. Aside from recording the details of to whom the temples were dedicated, clay nails also recorded who sponsored the work of erecting the temple. As such, they often exaggerated the worth, background, and past accomplishments of those sponsors. It seems that the aristocrats of the past enjoyed boasting as much as the aristocrats of the present. The Quimbaya Artifacts of Colombia are beautifully decorated artifacts and fine examples of ancient craftsmanship. Is there more to them than that, though? The objects, which range in age between 2,300 and 3,000 years, are sometimes also called the Tolima Artifacts, and have only ever been found in the region around Bogota, the country's capital city. More than 100 of them have been discovered so far. While many archaeologists consider them to be nothing more than stunning examples of zoomorphic figurines, they don't all appear to be based on living creatures. Some of them can easily be identified as bats, birds, fish, or insects, but others don't look like any other known creature. It's these anomalous artifacts that pose a problem because rather than being based on animals, they appear to have distinct fuselages, wings, stabilizers, and other features that you'd expect to find on modern aircraft. They also have perfect aerodynamic properties, by which we mean if you scaled one of them up and launched it, it'd be capable of flying and gliding. How could such knowledge be available to people living so long ago? If you're looking to answer the question of how long ago humans, or rather our human-like ancestors, began making and using tools, you need only look to the Oldowan tools. They're so named for they were first found in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania by the archaeologist Louis Leakey during the 1930s. They're also known as Mode 1 tools, and experts think the earliest examples of them were created around 2.6 million years ago. They don't look much like the kind of tools you might have in your toolkit today, in most cases Oldowan tools are simple stones with a few flakes chipped off them by other stones. In basic terms, you can divide Oldowan tools up into scrapers, choppers, and pounders. Scientists can't say for sure which of the early hominin species invented and used the first Oldowan tools. Their appearance seems to coincide with the appearance of a species called Australopithecus garhi. But correlation is not causation, and we shouldn't assume that the two facts are related. What we do know is that the early Homo erectus began refining Oldowan tools around 1.7 million years ago and created the first Archeleon tools. So thanks for moving things along, Homo erectus! It's not easy to tell what our next artifact is at first glance, but keep looking at it and pay close attention to the markings around its edges. Found inside Denisova's cave in November 2019, this is believed to be a figurine of a lion. And if it is, it's the oldest animal figurine ever discovered. Experts say that it's more than 45,000 years old. The small carved sculpture made from a mammoth tusk appears to show a lion's underbelly, hind legs, and upper torso. For some reason, there aren't any front legs and nor is there a head. Archaeologists aren't sure whether it was designed without a head or whether the head broke away and disappeared thousands of years ago. The multiple lines on the torso of the figure are thought to represent fur, and the piece was polished after it was finished. Whoever made it was presumably very proud of their work. This is yet another remarkable discovery in the Denisovan caves. It seems that the more archaeologists look into the cave, the more evidence of an advanced civilization they find. In 99 out of 100 cases, the most interesting thing about an ancient mummy is the mummy itself. That's not the case with the Zagreb mummy. The mummy is that of an anonymous woman who passed away and was mummified in Ptolemaic Egypt and then sold to a Hungarian businessman in 1848 who later donated it to the State Museum of Croatia. It wasn't until 1877 that someone took a closer look at the material that the mummy was wrapped in. The material is now known as the Liber Lentius, and it's among the most important ancient Etruscan texts ever discovered. The words on the material were written 2300 years ago. As we've never been able to translate the Etruscan written language fully, we're sad to say that we have no idea what the text says. As the names of months frequently appear within the text, it's possible that it's a calendar. Although that's by no means certain. There are some historians who feel it might be the legendary Etrusca Disciplina, an important Etruscan religious and cultural text that's mentioned by several ancient Roman writers. Hopefully, we'll finally translate the ancient language one day, and we'll find out for sure. Ireland is well known for its ancient and historical artifacts and monuments, but perhaps none of them is as hard to explain or understand as the Ballyshannon Sun Disc. This small disc, made of an improbably thin gold foil, is thought to be the oldest example of sheet gold work, not just in Ireland, but also in all of the Written records from the date of the discovery of the Sun Disc in 1669 are frustratingly brief and limited, but they suggest that the disc was found inside the tomb of a man described as having giant stature. That single statement has gone on to feed a whole belief system in Ireland that says literal giants once roamed the land. The Ballyshannon Disc is about 4,000 years old, with a cross at the center surrounded by circles and spiral shapes. The term Sun Disc is a group label that's applied to any object that resembles this. In reality, we don't have the first clue about what its purpose might have been, or even if it was anything more than a simple decoration. We've rolled out the red carpet for you at CineMysteria, where you'll be gripped by the highs and lows of Hollywood legends. We dig deep into movie mysteries, unveiling the secret subtext in epic films and the failures that make franchises flop. It's a terrific tour of silver screen success and cinematic catastrophes. Subscribe to CineMysteria, where Hollywood's hidden stories come to light. Subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications and you will be the first to know when a new video comes out. 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