12 Most Ancient Technology And Mysterious Artifacts Finds Scientists Still Can't Explain

Some of the artifacts left behind by our ancient ancestors can't be explained by modern experts. The experts might be able to say where they were made, when they were made, and perhaps even why they were made, but there are small details that don't make sense. Objects sometimes seem to be ahead of their time or inexplicably similar to other artifacts found thousands of miles away. We love these little mysteries, and we hope that you enjoy this video full of them. In December 2021, scientists and archaeologists in Russia undertook a re-examination of artifacts discovered in Zityazer, Kazakhstan during the Soviet era. They didn't know what they expected to find, but this one in particular jumped out at them. One of their 4th century lyres looked almost identical to a lyre that was found at the famous site of Sutton Hoo in England. This is surprising for two reasons. The first is that Sutton Hoo is a 7th century site, so the Kazakhstan lyre is far older. The second is that it suggests either immigration to England from Eastern Europe between the 4th and 7th centuries, or a direct Eastern influence on Anglo-Saxon culture. When the lyre was first found at Sutton Hoo during the 1930s, it was the first time the musical instrument had ever been discovered in the modern world. For that reason, it became known as the Anglo-Saxon lyre. Now that it's been proven that the same instrument existed in Kazakhstan long before it was included in the grand burial of an unknown Anglo-Saxon king in England, it might have to be renamed. The Kazakhstan lyre has a nice ring to it. The ink pen is an invention that so many of us take for granted that it's probably never occurred to you to wonder when and where it was invented. It may also surprise you to find out that we don't have a conclusive answer to that question. However, we do know that it was around by the 10th century. We know that because in December 2021, an ink pen was found in the It might not look much like the kind of ink pen we use today, but it features a clever design. The barrel is made from a hollow bone with a copper alloy tip. That isn't the most remarkable thing about the find, though. The fact that the pen was found in a ring fort suggests that at least someone living in the ring fort was literate. Historians have long believed that only the highest ranking members of the church in Ireland at the time were allowed to be literate, but that can't be the case here because the ring fort isn't a religious site. All the other pens in Ireland at the time seem to have been feather quills, so the ink pen is quite the anomaly. Who would invent a steam-powered pigeon and why? To answer that question, you'd have to travel back in time 2,300 years and speak to Archytas of Tarentum, Magna Gracia. Today, that's part of Italy. Archytas was one of the most accomplished men of his era. Aside from being an inventor, he was also a politician, mathematician, military strategist, and astronomer. As far as we know, his steam-powered pigeon was the first artificial self-propelled creation ever to fly, so you could even call him the originator of powered flight. His design is ingenious. The pigeon has an opening at the rear, which leads to an internal bladder. The bladder connects to a boiler. As the boiler heats up and produces steam, the pressure of the steam fills up the bladder and then forces its way out of the hole, launching the pigeon through the air. It could cover around 4,000 feet per flight. While it sounds like an amusing invention, Archytas was hoping to find out more about how birds flew, and he considered his steam pigeon a disappointment because he learned nothing from it. Egypt's tourism industry has taken a hit in recent years, and whenever that happens, the government funnels money into archaeology in the hope that new discoveries will lead to new tourists. In January 2021, a team of Egyptian archaeologists discovered the long-lost temple of Queen Niet, the wife of King Teti. He's a historically significant figure because he was the first king of the 6th dynasty. The pharaoh's remains weren't found at the temple, but the mummified remains of several dozen people were discovered there inside elaborately painted wooden coffins. The remains are more than 4,000 years old. Finding coffins and human remains in this part of Egypt isn't unusual. It's called Saqqara, and it's an enormous ancient necropolis. Assorted grave goods have also been recovered from the area, including board games, death masks, statues, and fragments of the Book of the Dead on papyrus. Extracts from the book were often left with the remains of the dead because it was believed to have magical properties and could assist the souls of the deceased on their journeys through the afterlife. Planning large-scale military operations was very difficult thousands of years ago when nobody had invented the telephone or the radio. Different armies came up with different solutions, but Aeneas of Greece came up with a particularly innovative one 2,400 years ago. His invention was the hydraulic telegraph. In practice, it was little more than a stick in a bottle of water, with pre-agreed messages attached to the stick. If two encampments of soldiers needed to communicate with each other, they would signal each other by torchlight and then pull the plug on the bottle. When the water level has dropped far enough to reveal the desired message, another torchlight signal would be sent to tell the other encampment to put the plug back in. So long as both encampments did their job properly and they were using identical hydraulic telegraphs, they could send each other basic messages. It's not exactly WhatsApp, but it was a massive advantage for the Greeks over their less sophisticated enemies. It was certainly a faster and more nuanced way of communicating across long distances than smoke signals, which were the only other option at the time. When did human beings first begin to weave fabric and make clothes rather than dressing themselves in furs and skins? We don't have a precise answer to that question yet, but it's possible that it began in Katahoyuk, Turkey around 8,500 years ago. Katahoyuk is already an area of interest to archaeologists because of its size. Evidence suggests that there were as many as 10,000 people living here more than 9,000 years ago, which is unheard of for that period of history. All those people left a few scraps of their existence behind for archaeologists to find, and one of those scraps is made of linen or wool. The textile in question is made of bast fibers and has been declared the oldest preserved woven fabric ever found anywhere in the world. It was discovered in September 2021. The big surprise here is that rather than using wool or anything obtained from animals to weave cloth, our ancient ancestors appear to have used trees instead. It's the least obvious material to use from the options available, so we're left wondering what prompted them to do it. How did our ancient ancestors keep food cold in a time before refrigerators? Storing food in cold water or in ice was an option, but only if you lived in a part of the world where ice and cold water were plentiful. That wasn't the case in the Persia of 2,400 years ago. So, they came up with another solution, the yokchol. Yokchols might look primitive and smell terrible, but they're good at their job. The word yokchol means ice pit, although that isn't an accurate description of their form. Rather than being a pit, a yokchol is a hollow mound. An average yokchol would be 60 feet tall and full of water channeled in from the nearest springs. Wind catchers inside the yokchols would cool the water down as it arrived, and a sophisticated cooling system ensured that heat and moisture were removed through evaporation. To ensure that everything inside a yokchol remained cold, the Persians coated them with clay, sand, goat hair, and egg whites. That's where the stink came from. The mixture repelled the heat of the sun, and everything inside the yokchol stayed fresh. There are even still a few yokchols in Iran today, and they're cold when you walk inside them, even when it's boiling hot outside. Our next artifact has several names, but precisely zero credible explanations of its origin or purpose. It's the Disc of Sabu, also sometimes known as the Schist Disc or the Saqqara Disc. The latter name is a clue that it was discovered in Saqqara, Egypt. The best guess of archaeologists is that the 5,000-year-old artifact is a highly elaborate candlestick holder. If that's the case, it's the only one of its kind we've ever found. The fact that it's obsidian suggests there's more to it than a simple candlestick holder. Obsidian is a notoriously difficult material to work with, and nobody would go to the trouble of making a candlestick holder out of it back then when other materials were available. Even the fact that it's shaped like a wheel is a puzzle, because as far as we're aware, the Egyptians were yet to discover the wheel 5,000 years ago. Conspiracy theorists on the internet will try to tell you that this is the steering wheel of an alien spaceship. We're not about to believe that, but the candlestick explanation is wholly unsatisfying. Did the ancient occupants of India have access to technology that allowed them to fly 3,500 years ago? That seems like a preposterous question, but let's entertain it. Go back through ancient Hindi and Sanskrit texts and you'll find multiple descriptions of flying vehicles known as vimanas. A text called the Veda is particularly helpful in this regard, as it gives us an incredibly detailed description of a vimana, right down to the fact that they have wheels, 12 internal pillars, over 300 fully articulated pivot points, and a control panel. Not only that, but when they took off from the ground, they left a trail of flames behind them. This description is corroborated, albeit in not as much detail, in the Ramayana text and the Mahabharata text. The extra detail added in the Ramayana text is that only the ruling elite was permitted to own and use vimanas. Why is there so much detail available and so many sources for something that common sense tells us couldn't possibly have existed? On the other hand, if the ancient Indians really could fly, what happened to that knowledge, and why did it take us so long to rediscover the secrets of powered human flight? Can we learn anything about the secrets of ancient Roman war chariots from a child's toy version of one? Perhaps so. The child's toy is about 2,000 years old and was discovered on the banks of Rome's Tiber River in 1897. It's now in the British Museum. After studying the object with new technology in 2017, experts believe it to be a perfect scale model of the real thing. Because of that, they now think they know why Roman chariots never crashed at high speed. They came with a special iron rim on the right wheel that prevented such a thing from happening. The wheels of the time were made of a combination of wood, rawhide strips, and animal hide glue. Adding a strip of iron to the right wheel could have improved a chariot racer's chances of winning a race by up to 80%. Races ran anticlockwise, so the iron helped the right wheel from overloading while turning left. It didn't make the wheel any faster, but the reduced risk of crashing meant the driver could take more risks and lose less speed going through corners. The Galloway Hoard is the most valuable collection of Viking objects ever found in Britain. It was discovered by an amateur metal detectorist in a field in Castle Douglas, Scotland in 2014, and is still being carefully investigated item by item. In December 2021, a carved rock crystal jar was carefully cleaned up by specialists at a facility managed by National Museums Scotland and re-examined. That re-examination revealed it to be not of Viking origin, but of Anglo-Saxon. It's a Roman-style crystal jar from either the 8th or 9th century, and an inscription on its base bears the name of an Anglo-Saxon bishop. It says, Bishop Heigald had me made. This raises the possibility that the Vikings might have raided a church in Northumbria and buried their stolen goods with other artifacts of theirs. It also means that there might be other non-Viking artifacts in the Hoard. One of them could be the star of the whole collection, a silver pectoral cross covered in nyloenamel decoration that has no parallel anywhere in the world. Until now, we've always assumed the Vikings made it. Now, we're back to having no idea. The last stop on this tour is in Beitz, a German village not far from Brandenburg. There, in January 2022, archaeologists found just over 40 gold cup-shaped coins. Coins of this type are known as rainbow cups. They're Celtic in origin, and this collection is the only set of rainbow cups ever to be found in this part of the world. Of the many Celtic cultures that once lived in mainland Europe, the La Tène culture is the most likely to have made and used them. Still, though, that hasn't yet been proven. The rainbow part of their name comes from a myth. Old folk stories say that the coins are often found by farmers when they plow their fields following storms as if they were left behind by rainbows. This might even be where the myth about there being a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow comes from. Rainbow coins are rare, but coins like the ones found in Beitz are even rarer. They're unmarked and undecorated, which is unusual. And also, they seem out of place because history has no record of there being a Celtic settlement near Brandenburg. Maybe their owners got lost! Subscribe to the channel, turn on the notification bell, and enjoy watching new videos on my channel. Thanks for watching and see you soon!