8 Ancient Discoveries Scientists Still Can't Explain

Hi, it's Katrina. We've been taught that history is a slow climb from primitive tools to high-tech machines, but some discoveries just don't fit the timeline. There is an ancient drill in Egypt that dates to before the Bronze Age, evidence of metalworking from 4,000 years ago that mimics modern industrial techniques, and even a prosthetic found on an ancient mummy that proves that primitive surgery was far more successful than we ever imagined. How did they do it? And what else are we missing? This ancient drill should not exist. Archaeologists have discovered an artifact that defies explanation. It is 5,300 years old, which means it predates dynastic Egypt, as in it is older than the pharaohs and the pyramids. For such a small, seemingly insignificant object, it is having a massive impact on the archaeological community. Scientists are saying this prehistoric tool is far more advanced than anything they could have imagined. The object is a bow drill, a simplistic yet ambitious piece of ancient technology forged from a surprisingly advanced metal alloy. More on that alloy in a second. The discovery is such a big deal that it's changing how scientists interpret Egypt's industrial capabilities. To be frank, this bow drill is 2,000 years too advanced. They call it 1924.948A. That's its catalog number. The tiny tool measures only two and a half inches and weighs 1.5 grams. And while it's changing history today, it was originally found over a century ago at the Badari site, known for its pre-dynastic ruins. After its discovery, the object remained in a drawer for years, dismissed as nothing but an ordinary copper awl wrapped in leather. But when scientists re-analyzed it recently using new technology, they realized it was part of a rotary drilling system. The wear marks on the drill show that somebody spun it at high speeds to bore into something, probably wood or stone. And that is incredible because scientists didn't think the Egyptians could do something like that in the fourth millennium B.C. Through microscopic examination, researchers led by Dr. Martin Adler identified fine striations on the tip, which could have only been made from the object spinning rapidly. They also found six coils of leather wrapped around the shaft, which they think were part of the original bow drill mechanism. The discovery is even more important than you might think. It's like discovering the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, or the first time that somebody used steam to power something. The ability to use rotary motion changed manufacturing forever. Suddenly, people were able to punch holes in beads, work wood with expert precision, and drill holes into stone like it was butter. This may have been the technology that propelled Egypt into the future. Without rotary drilling technology, they probably couldn't have built the pyramids, hollowed out the Valley of the Kings, or erected their glorious temples. But how did they master the technology in the first place? The craziest part about the drill is its composition. It's a unique alloy made from copper, arsenic, nickel, silver, and lead. All of these metals inside one object suggest whoever crafted it had an unparalleled understanding of metallurgic properties. But again, I have to ask, how? This wasn't an object forged from a single piece of ordinary metal. It's full of different metals. A copper alloy that is harder and more distinct than ordinary copper, including silver and lead, made the object more durable and more reliable. And someone did that on purpose. How did they develop this technology? Could the ancient Egyptians have inherited knowledge from an older civilization? Until now. The oldest known example of rotary drilling in Egypt dated to between 1550 and 1070 BC. The newly identified bow drill is 2,000 years older than that. It makes you wonder why there is such a big gap. The Egyptians clearly had access to this metal drill technology in 3,300 BC. So why is there no other evidence of this technology for another 20 centuries? It's as if they had the tech, used it, and then forgot about it. And then a whole lot of years later, they re-learned it. Even Dr. Martin Adler admitted the discovery hints at Egyptian craftsmen mastering complex tools before the pharaohs existed. Graham Hancock and other researchers like him have suggested that before the Egyptians, there was Atlantis. It was a glorious civilization, light years ahead of all other civilizations on Earth when it came to architecture, government, and technology. You still had people living in caves and living in the jungle, but then you also had Atlantis, an island kingdom who through one means or another gained exceptional technology. The Atlanteans were this global civilization, built pyramids, crafted objects made of advanced metal alloys, and sailed around the world with ease. But then, an estimated 12,800 years ago, something horrible happened. Atlantis was destroyed, their island nation sank, and the survivors scattered to the winds. Some have theorized that a wayward group of survivors from Atlantis arrived in Egypt, where they got to work building a new civilization. They managed to maintain some knowledge from their homeland, but only some of it. Their records, libraries, and repositories of wisdom were destroyed. Without direct access to their previously deep pool of knowledge, they started going backwards. Maybe by the time this bow drill was made, they had lost the vast majority of what they had already known. Then, the technology for this bow drill was lost too, and not found again for another few thousand years. Let me know what you think in the comments! THE JEWELRY OF ANCIENT BOHEMIA A woman who lived in Central Europe almost 4,000 years ago has been resurrected, thanks to scientists scraping her DNA off of her skull. But it's not even the resurrection that's the exciting part. It's the jewelry. This woman was buried with more bling than Mr. T. She was discovered with five bronze bracelets, two gold earrings, and a gorgeous three-strand necklace consisting of over 400 amber beads. This was just her personal jewelry, what she was buried with in death. But she was also entombed with some grave goods, like three bronze sewing needles. While no one is exactly sure who this woman was, archaeologist Michal Ernej out of the Czech Republic said she was clearly wealthy. She also likely belonged to the Unetice culture. They were a mysterious Bronze Age society living in Central Europe about 500 years after the pyramids were built in Egypt. They are most famous today for their fancy metal artifacts, like their daggers and axe heads. But apparently they also made excellent jewelry. Some of their jewelry honestly feels too advanced for 4,000 years ago. Like these crazy orbs. These weren't found in this particular woman's burial, but in a different set of elite burials also discovered in the Czech Republic. The orbs are strange spherical artifacts crafted with such an insane amount of precision, scientists don't understand how ancient people pulled it off. They don't appear to be machines or anything like that. They're just unique golden globes fashioned with the kind of meticulous detail you expect from a Fabergé egg. Once you see this woman resurrected in all her bohemian glory, you're going to understand what I mean about advanced jewelry. When you think about humans living in Europe 4,000 years ago, whose best technology was bronze bracelets and metal daggers, you probably don't expect someone to look this modern. But behold, she looks just like someone I saw at the craft fair last week. But nope, she lived in Europe at a time when woolly mammoths were still thundering around on Wrangel Island. She had dark hair, was petite, and researchers believe she was one of the richest people in Bronze Age Bohemia. Her skeleton was found in a graveyard near Mikulcice, where those crazy sophisticated orbs were unearthed. Radiocarbon dating revealed that she lived around 1880 BC. And she wasn't buried alone. She was joined by 26 other graves, many of them women. In fact, 40% of the female graves here contained amber artifacts, a total of about 900 of them. There is more amber in these women's graves than in all the graves of the Unetice culture found in neighboring Germany. Erné said the amber likely came from the Baltics, which is pretty dang far away from Mikulcice. This indicates that these people were active traders, likely part of a vast trading network. But where did they learn to make such sophisticated and complex jewelry? That's part of the mystery. Humans have been making jewelry for tens of thousands of years, starting with the bones and tusks of dead beasts, and slowly upgrading to seashells, beads, and finally metal. I think the likely explanation is that they had better artisans and metalworkers than modern scientists have been willing to admit. The bottom line is that ancient humans were just as great a craftsman as anyone alive today. They just had to use more rudimentary tools to pull it off. The difference today is that we have technology. And our technology is what allowed scientists to scrape DNA off the bones of this rich woman's skeleton. With the DNA secured, they completed a genetic sequence to get all the juicy details about what she looked like – brown eyes, brown hair, fair skin, and strong bone structure. Then, it was up to anthropologist Eva Vanichkova and sculptor Andrei Bilek to make the model of the woman that I showed you. Pretty cool, huh? Next, I'm going to show you one of the oldest prosthetics ever found inside a mummy. The Prosthetic Scythian Jaw 2,500 years ago in Siberia, a woman underwent a surgical procedure that nobody should have been able to perform 2,500 years ago. Scientists found a mummified Scythian woman in a cemetery in 1994. Inside her face was a prosthetic jaw. Or rather, part of a jaw. I've known about this discovery for a while, and I'm still shocked about it. She must have undergone a serious head injury, something that completely ruined her face. Yet she was able to undergo surgery to have her jaw reconstructed with help from a prosthetic. It's pretty crazy because even today, prosthetics aren't always the best. Sure, you see the high-tech ones on YouTube that turn someone into Iron Man, but those aren't the norm. So here comes the question. How did the Scythians figure out how to pull off jaw surgery and make useful prosthetics thousands of years before Europeans realized that washing their hands was a good idea? The Scythians were a loosely connected culture of nomads most famous for their horse archers. The Greeks created the myth of the Amazons based on the Scythian women of the Eurasian steppes. They emerged about 3,000 years ago and lasted until at least the 2nd century AD, leaving behind hundreds of burials known as Kurgans all over Siberia and Central Asia. In 1994, archaeologists from the Russian Academy of Sciences excavated one of their cemeteries on the Ukok Plateau. In ancient times, the plateau was home to the Pazyryk culture, an offshoot branch of the main Scythians. The cemetery contained five burial mounds, one of which belonged to a woman of around 25 years old at her time of death. She was discovered lying on a wooden cot and dressed in a wig. However, archaeologists at the time weren't particularly interested in the burial because it didn't have any valuable artifacts. They wanted treasure. The burial was not fully investigated at the time, but her mummified head was preserved. Fast forward to more recently, a group of scientists decided to perform a CT scan of the woman's mummified skull. They found evidence of a head injury that completely destroyed her right temporomandibular joint, or TMJ. Anyone who has ever had annoying clicking while moving their jaw or general pain on the side of their face knows all about TMJ. Based on the severity of her injury, scientists believe she would not have been able to speak or eat normally. But the CT scanner also revealed something unexpected. Thin canals had been drilled into the two bones making up the woman's TMJ, horse hair and possibly animal tendon in the canals to hold the joint together. There was a full prosthetic, albeit a primitive one, holding the articular surfaces together to allow the woman to move her jaw. She still probably couldn't chew food on the injured side of her face, but the prosthetic helped the joint to function. It would have been the difference between being completely miserable and being only a little bit miserable. Although I've got to say, having the bones in her face drilled into with what I can only assume was a very primitive instrument must have hurt like the dickens. I mean, we all struggle at the dentist now, so I can't imagine the agony of going through surgery without modern anesthetics. As for how long she lived after the surgery, scientists aren't entirely sure. They know that she lived thanks to the evidence of healing around the prosthetic, like the new bone tissue that grew around the canals. What I'm curious about is where a bunch of nomadic horse warriors learned to perform complex face surgery. Ancient people had a lot more impressive medical capabilities than we give them credit for, that's for sure. The Seal of Tadim Fortress An artifact has been discovered at an archaeological site in Turkey that dates back 7,500 years. The artifact comes from a Neolithic society that was significantly more advanced than previously thought. It's a seal, a simple little seal that even Stone Age people could make with ease. But it's not the object itself that has researchers shrieking and throwing up their hands. Scientists are excited over what the object was used for. The seal was found in Tadim Fortress, located in Turkey's Elizim region, the area's most famous today for being the homeland of the Urartu civilization. The Urartu are already considered one of the earliest advanced cultures in the world, with their territory stretching from the Armenian highlands to Iran, Iraq, and even Azerbaijan. They lived in parts of Mesopotamia before it became the cradle of civilization. This seal predates the Urartu by thousands of years. It could be evidence that human beings were already evolving a complex social structure before the Urartu kingdom established itself. What exactly the seal was used for, there's no way of knowing. Maybe somebody used it to stamp their lunch so that their co-workers wouldn't eat it. In all seriousness, though, the seal is a shocking thing to find in Neolithic ruins. Still in ancient times, but not quite as ancient, seals were used for all kinds of daily administrative duties. They were used like modern signatures to sign contracts and receipts. They marked legal documents and verified royal correspondence. Seals made sure that storage jars remained untampered with. If you were a Neolithic person who ordered several jars of grain, you wanted to make sure that nobody messed with the grain before you got it. If you received the grain, and the seals on the jars were broken, you weren't paying. Throughout human history, seals have been massively important. You can consider them a staple of organized society, which is exactly why this object is so exciting. The 7,500-year-old seal proves that even Neolithic humans suffered from the curse of bureaucracy. Did a Stone Age king use this thing to mark official documents? It's the only seal of its kind found so far, but the fact it exists at all means there were definitely others. They may just all, at this point, be either destroyed or buried under layers of history. As for the fortress itself, it was a bastion of ancient civilizations. The seal was discovered under layers of Roman ruins, Ottoman artifacts, Byzantine relics, and Seljuk remnants too. Countless empires have taken the fortress and used it for their own purposes, but its earliest history predates all known empires on the planet. Scientists even found some of the oldest evidence of religion in the area. They discovered what appears to be a temple with a stone altar and a ritual blood channel from 6,000 years ago. When I say ritual blood channel, if the first thing that came to your mind was human sacrifice, you've been hanging out with me for too long because that's exactly right. Archaeologists discovered a mess of ancient animal and human remains, confirming the altar was used for blood sacrifices. Animals and human beings were brought here, killed on the altar, and their blood flowed through those channels to appease the gods. The only question is, what gods were those who demanded death and blood? Prehistoric Hunting Kit When you leave your home, what do you take with you? Phone, wallet, keys, right? For people living today, those are the essentials. But what did a hunter leave their cave with 7,000 years ago in Texas? Archaeologists have found artifacts in a cave that appear to make up a Neolithic hunting kit. It's among the oldest kits ever found in North America, and it is packed full of goodies. The artifacts were found near Marfa, where a prehistoric hunter took shelter in a cave. That hunter built a fire, rummaged through their hunting tools, and left behind the ones they didn't need anymore. Those unneeded tools remained sitting on the cave floor, exactly where the hunter left them, until researchers came along and dug them up. Archaeologists found the remains of the hunter's fire. They found a folded animal hide, wooden darts with stone tips, and pieces from a throwing tool used to fling spears at bullet speeds. They also discovered small wooden shafts which they think were used for delivering poison. These little pieces of wood may have once been used as poison darts, but were they meant for humans or animals? Then archaeologists found a boomerang. I didn't even know that boomerangs existed outside of Australia, but apparently ancient humans in Texas used them too. Altogether, these items make up the toolkit for a prehistoric hunter. Archaeologist Brian Schroeder from Sul Ross State University told the New York Times that he and his colleagues were stunned by the discovery. I like the quote that Brian gave the gave him a sense that these people were actual people, as in they were going about their business, taking their tools with them, and leaving what they didn't need behind. James David Kilby from Texas State University said the mixture of stone tools with other tools made from organic material, like the hide of a prehistoric antelope-type creature called a pronghorn, make up a complex assemblage of items. It's not just one or two objects that you could say were advanced tools for their time. This is a whole kit which shows forethought, planning, practice, and a deep knowledge of how to hunt. This hunter knew exactly what he needed. He crafted the items, and then he kept them in a toolkit, a primitive version of the toolbox in your garage you haven't touched in five years. Dr. Schroeder said that looters have ransacked the site for years. The researchers crawled between rocks and had to go to a really, really deep part of the site to find anything. Dr. Morgan said the hunter gathers, they're just people like you and me, and they are super smart. Do you agree with that? Let me know in the comments. Roman Machine Gun Did you know the Romans had machine guns about 2,000 years before the First World War? If not, don't feel bad, because neither did anyone else until archaeologists found something strange at Pompeii. In the year 89 BC, just over a century before the volcanic disaster that would petrify the city in stone, Pompeii launched a rebellion against the expanding power of the Roman Republic. They were unhappy with the amount of control that Rome was exerting over them. They got unhappier when Roman General Lucius Cornelius Sulla crushed their uprising by attacking the city with a wide range of siege weapons. Siege weapons such as small catapults called scorpions and giant stationary crossbows called ballistae. These were among the most effective Roman siege weapons. These were fired at the northern walls of the city, and scientists know this because they left marks all over the walls that are still there today. However, some of the marks on the walls don't match the weapons I just described. Archaeologists found a different pattern. The ballistae and the scorpions left large round holes in the walls. Something else left clusters of tightly grouped holes forming a fan shape across sections of stone. If it were only a few of these clusters, archaeologists probably wouldn't think anything of it, but the spacing is consistent across multiple spots. Something with rapid-fire capabilities was unloaded on these walls. Researchers believe it was a very different kind of weapon than a ballistae. A team led by Adriana Rossi, along with Silvia Bersaki and Veronica Casadei, studied these marks in detail. They used laser scanning, high-resolution imaging, and 3D modeling to measure the holes and analyze things like their depth, angle, and distribution. From that data, they worked backward. They estimated the size and force of the projectiles and how quickly they must have been fired. Their conclusion points to a rare and unusual machine known as the polybolos. The polybolos was described in ancient texts but has never been physically found. Up until this unexpected discovery, a lot of historians didn't even think the polybolos was real. According to those texts, it functioned using a system of gears and chains that automatically loaded and fired bolts one after another. The design is known from the writings of Philo of Byzantium, who lived in the 3rd century BC. He credited the invention to Dionysius of Alexandria, who worked on the In 96 BC, just a few years before the siege of Pompeii, Dionysius served as governor of Cilicia, a Roman province that included Rhodes. It was less than a decade later that Pompeii was hit with the polybolos. Researchers believe that Sulla invented this proto-machine gun in Rhodes and then made sure it was included in the attack on Pompeii. If true, it would explain the strange pattern of impacts on the walls. So what does this all mean? Did the Romans truly invent the machine gun 1800 years too early, beating out the Maxim gun of 1884? And if they did, why hasn't any other evidence of the polybolos ever been found? The Tarkin dress. Around 3500 BC, somebody created a simple yet elegant tailored linen dress. They probably never considered that yours truly would be talking about it on a thing called the internet. Whoever created this dress probably thought it would be worn and worn out and that was the end of it. The Tarkin dress, as it's known today, is the oldest known woven garment in existence. It was discovered by famous archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie in 1913. Flinders excavated a large flat-topped Egyptian tomb known as a mastaba. A mastaba was what the Egyptians buried their elite members in prior to the more sophisticated tombs you and I are familiar with today. Also, Tarkin is about 37 miles from Cairo, so not far from the pyramids. Inside the mastaba, Flinders found a massive pile of linen cloth that ancient tomb raiders had discarded. Thieves had broken into the burial, ripped apart the dead, stripped them of their clothing, and threw all the fabric in a pile on the floor. Then, they made off with the treasure. The fabric wasn't valuable to them, nor was it treated with much care in 1977, because the dress was thrown into a pile and forgotten back in the UK. But now, it's considered one of the most important artifacts to ever be found in Egypt. You can see it for yourself not in Egypt, but at University College London, where it's kept on display. The dress sports a modest V-neckline crafted from three pieces of linen that was hand-woven from flax. Unfortunately though, the bottom of the garment is missing and nobody can figure out what it actually was. Was it a shirt? A dress? A tunic? Experts at the museum believe it was crafted specifically for a young woman with a slim figure. The most impressive part is that it's even here at all. The survival of perishable textiles is practically non-existent in the archaeological record. Clothing, as you may know, decays rapidly. Finding clothing in a burial from the Middle Ages is rare, never mind from before the First Dynasty. The Tarkin dress has the potential to blow the doors wide open on the invention of clothing. Why? Because it's the earliest surviving example of a garment that's been cut, fitted, and tailored. It means that even before Egypt existed as a unified kingdom, people living along the Nile in primitive villages made sophisticated advanced clothes. Where did they learn these skills? And how far back does it go? The oldest gold artifact ever found. Have you ever wondered when humans began their obsession with gold? Who was the first one to look at a dirty lump of gold and decide it would look good hanging from their neck? A surprise discovery is closer than ever to answering that question. In Bulgaria, at an archaeological site called the Varna Necropolis, scientists found the oldest known gold artifacts ever. They are 6,500 years old, proving advanced metallurgical techniques existed in prehistory. This gold predates the Egyptians' unique copper alloy by roughly 1,200 years. The discovery kicked off in 1972, when workers in the coastal city of Varna accidentally found a cemetery filled with treasure. Over 3,000 gold artifacts have already been found in the burial ground, making it the oldest gold hoard ever found. Excavations took around 20 years. It was a whole lot of digging. 62 out of the 300 graves contained gold objects, but listen to this. The vast majority, about one-third, came from a single burial, grave 43. Grave 43 belonged to the skeleton of a man who died around the age of 60. Nobody knows who he was, but experts suspect he may have been one of the world's first metalsmiths. They think he may have been the one who forged all of the gold artifacts in all of the other graves. Check out what was found in his burial plot. Beaded gold necklaces, gold bangles, gold earrings, gold pendants, and small gold discs. The discs are particularly intriguing because scientists believe they were originally attached to his clothes. Do you remember when bedazzling your jeans was cool? Okay, I mean, neither do I, but these gold discs may have been a similar idea. They were likely stitched into his clothing as symbols of either wealth or power, or maybe both. His grave also contained an axe with a gold-wrapped handle, and, I'm not even sure if I should tell you this, a gold manhood sheath. Don't ask me why, all I know is that it was in his grave. In total, 13.2 pounds of gold has been extracted from the Varna Necropolis. What scientists are trying to figure out today, decades after the discovery, is why so much gold was being manufactured here. These are the oldest gold artifacts anywhere, so they very well could be the first. What provoked the invention of gold jewelry 6,500 years ago? Where did the technology come from? Did the love for gold spread out from Bulgaria and get picked up by other civilizations? Or did others decide that gold was the best all by themselves? It's questions like these that really make me wish I had a time machine. Speaking of time machines, if you had one, where would you go and what mysteries would you want to solve? Please let me know in the comments and thanks so much for watching. Be sure to subscribe and I'll see you soon for more amazing discoveries. Bye!