How Baboons Helped Solve the Land of Punt Mystery

There once was a kingdom where the ancient Egyptians traveled to buy gifts for pharaohs, sort of like an ancient shopping mall. This kingdom, named the Land of Punt, was rich in luxury goods, including gold, aromatic resins, blackwood, ebony, ivory, and exotic animals like leopards and baboons. All of these sound like great gift ideas to me! The Land of Punt was an especially important trading partner for Egypt for over a thousand years. But if you plan to go there, the bad news is that it hasn't survived to these days, and nobody knows for sure exactly where Punt was located. We only know about it from records. The most famous of them were left on the walls of the temple of Queen Hatshepsut, who had sent an expedition to Punt. Scientists have been trying to find the exact location of this rich land for over 150 years. It could've been southeast of Egypt, in a coastal region south of it along the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, and the Indian Ocean. Or it could've covered the Horn of Africa and the area across the sea in southern Arabia. Now researchers were finally able to narrow down the possible locations thanks to a study of baboon mummies. Ancient Egyptians admired baboons and even thought they were related to the deity of the moon in wisdom. One species, the sacred baboon, was often shown in wall paintings, sitting with its tail curled to the right and was mummified in this position. Another type, the olive baboon, was wrapped up in one giant cocoon. Both types were found in the tombs of the Valley of the Kings. But if you remember geography lessons, baboons just don't wander around Egypt, so they must've been brought there through trade with other regions. Primatologists, Egyptologists, geographers, and geochemists look at the mummified baboons from two different time periods in ancient Egypt. Some were from the New Kingdom period, and others were from the Ptolemaic period. The scientists did some more hard work and analyzed tissues from 155 baboons from 75 separate places in eastern Africa and southern Arabia. Those were all areas that they thought could be the ancient land of Punt. They measured oxygen and strontium in the baboons' bodies. When animals drink water and eat plants, their teeth, hair, and bones show a geographic signature of where they've lived thanks to these elements they contain. Scientists used a special method called isotopic mapping and found out that the New Kingdom baboons they analyzed came from a location in Eritrea, Ethiopia, or Somalia. Five mummified baboons from the Ptolemaic period had strontium levels that matched those found in Egypt. So ancient Egyptians might've had a special place to breed and keep baboons, probably in Memphis, a city in lower Egypt, not Tennessee. Meanwhile, paleontologists from New Zealand got lucky, as some boulders had split open from the tide and revealed fossils of the largest penguin that has ever lived on Earth. The scientists used laser scanners to make 3D models of the ancient penguin bones. They compared these bones to the flipper size of modern penguins and did some math as to how much the old penguins might've weighed. Today, the biggest penguins, emperor penguins, weigh between 55 to 100 pounds. Researchers think that the penguins from the past that they found weighed around 340 pounds – real giants in the penguin world. These huge flightless birds lived in the oceans around New Zealand more than 50 million years ago, after the dinosaurs went extinct. They totally took advantage of their big bodies to stay warm in the cold water. They might've even traveled the world thanks to it. And they'd scare off any predators, but they didn't have any. The asteroid that took down the dinosaurs also got rid of most big marine reptiles, and the ancestors of seals and whales were still living on land. Back in 1992, four farmers in China were draining water from their ponds and accidentally bumped into a ship full of gold and ancient statues worth millions. Just kidding, they actually found the Longyu Caves. Those are 24 big caves created by people a long, long time ago. Even though they are so large and well-made, no one knows who built them, why they were built, or how they were built. Experts think the caves are at least 2,000 years old, but they don't understand why these caves aren't mentioned in any historical records. All of the Longyu Caverns look the same and aren't connected to each other. Each cave has one entrance connected to a vertical shaft with a carved staircase. Rain and water from the surface can flow into the caves through these stairs. To manage this water, the caves have special grooves, channels, and a system to catch the water at the bottom. So it looks like the ancient builders were real pros when it came to drainage and water management. Maybe my town could learn a lesson from them as it turns into Venice after every heavy shower. Anyway, the caverns were built below a hill, named after a bird that is one of the most respected creatures in Chinese mythology and culture. It symbolizes all the best things, like high virtue, grace, and the union of yin and yang. Scientists think there could be a connection between the caverns and the bird, but it's just a theory so far. Experts from the National Institute of Ocean Technology in India were doing their routine pollution surveys when they found some structures that look like a city underwater. Using special sonar technology, the team found big geometric shapes on the ocean floor. They brought up different items from the site, like pottery, beads, sculptures, parts of walls, and even human bones and teeth. They thought the ruins belonged to a civilization older than the Bronze Age-induced Valley Civilization, which is the earliest urban culture of the Indian subcontinent that we know of so far. But not everyone joined in on celebrating this awesome discovery. Some archaeologists refused to believe it and thought it could be some computer tricks. And even when they saw hundreds of artifacts from the ocean floor, they said an ancient river could've brought them there from someplace else. The team that discovered the underwater site decided to prove they were right. They chose a piece of wood as their main evidence. They tested it and found it was 9,500 years old. That could be the age of the entire site. Skeptics still insist that we can't rewrite all human history because of one piece of wood. Even 23 years since the discovery, no one is sure about the final answer. This is partly because it's hard to explore the site. It's in extremely dangerous waters with strong currents and riptides. During the cool Antarctica summer, from late November through January, geologists from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee climbed the frozen slopes of the McIntyre Promontory in the Transantarctic Mountains. High above the ice fields, they looked through the mountains' gray rocks for fossils from when the continent had green forests. By the end of their trip, the geologists found fossil pieces from 13 trees. These fossils show that the trees are over 260 million years old. This means the forest grew at the end of the Permian period before the first dinosaurs even appeared. More than 90% of all species on Earth disappeared back then, including the polar forests. These trees would've been very tough if they grew in Antarctica and could've survived. But a huge increase in gases, like carbon dioxide and methane, must've taken them down. This Antarctic forest is a terrific way for us to see what life was like before the extinction, and we might even understand what caused it. It also shows us how plants were different back then from those we are used to now. That's it for today! So, hey, if you pacified your curiosity, then give the video a like and share it with your friends. Or if you want more, just click on these videos and stay on the Bright Side!