10 Ancient Discoveries Found Where They Should Be Impossible

Roman coins turning up in Japan, a Viking coin buried in Maine, and a Roman looking head in Mexico were only the beginning. Ancient Indian, Roman, and Chinese artifacts somehow travelled thousands of miles from where they were made while one massive stone was hauled across Britain long before modern roads existed. And a 500-year-old Indian ship's bell somehow ended up in New Zealand where it spent generations being used as a cooking pot. These are ten ancient discoveries found where they should be impossible. You know where I'd never expect to dig up ancient Roman coins? Japan. Back in 2016, archaeologists were digging around Katsurin Castle in Okinawa and they came across four tiny copper coins. The face stamped on the metal was Constantinus II, a Roman emperor who ruled in the 300s. Rome was completely gone long before Katsurin Castle existed. So finding these coins didn't really add up, and what makes it weirder is what kind of coins they were. Viable gold and silver Roman coins sometimes made it into China via the Silk Road. But these were cheap, low-value copper coins, basically ancient pocket change that almost never travelled far. On top of that, right alongside them was an Ottoman coin stamped with a date matching 1687, more than two centuries after the Japanese castle was supposed to be abandoned. Back in 1957, an amateur archaeologist digging around a Native American site in Brooklyn, Maine, pulled a 900-year-old silver coin out of the dirt, dubbed the Maine Penny. Turns out it was minted back in Norway between 1065 and 1080, right near the end of the Viking Age. So the big question is, did Vikings actually show up in Maine? We know for a fact they made it to North America, they had settlements in Greenland and Newfoundland, Canada. But this silver coin is the only Viking object anyone's ever dug up in Maine. The coin has a hole punched through it, like someone wore it as a necklace, and it's super worn down. The place he found it was a huge spot where different tribes met to swap goods back in the 11 and 1200s. They think that, instead of Vikings pulling their ships right up to the Maine coast, the coin probably got traded from person to person along indigenous trade paths, slowly working its way south from Canada, until it got dropped in Maine. Right in the middle of Stonehenge, there's a six-ton slab of sandstone called the Altar Stone. For over a hundred years, everyone assumed the builders hauled it from Wales, which was Turns out it may have come from even further, though. Geologists zapped tiny mineral grains inside the stone with lasers to trace its actual origin. What they found was, the rock didn't come from Wales at all. The chemical fingerprint was an exact match for bedrock up in northeastern Scotland, over 430 miles away from Stonehenge. Study co-author Nick Pierce talked about how drastically that changed their understanding kilometers from Stonehenge, give or take, to 700 kilometers from Stonehenge. Getting a stone that heavy across that kind of distance around 4,500 years ago sounds almost impossible. Because the land route was full of mountains and thick forests, researchers think the builders put the slab on simple boats and maybe floated them all the way down the coast instead. Over in southern Japan, archaeologists were digging through a 5th century tomb in Nagaoka when they found two tiny glass beads, each one only about 5mm wide. First they looked pretty ordinary, but when researchers tested them, they realized these things definitely weren't made locally. Glass contained natrin, a natural compound used by ancient Egyptians for mummification and by Roman glass makers to make glass. Even crazier, the beads were made using a fancy technique that trapped real gold leaf between layers of glass, something you see a lot with Roman craftsmanship from around the 1st to 4th century. So how did Roman gold-covered glass end up inside an ancient Japanese tomb? Well, I don't think some Roman guy hopped on a boat and sailed straight to Japan. Rome and Japan weren't doing direct trade at the time. These beads probably made the journey through the huge network of trade routes we now call the Silk Road, changing hands over and over. However they got there, these tiny pieces of Roman glass ended up in a very unexpected place. When archaeologists opened up the famous royal tombs in Mycenae, Greece, they expected to see gold and weapons. But buried right alongside the ancient kings, they found a crazy amount of amber beads. One single grave had nearly 1,300 of them, dating all the way back to 1,600 BCE. The weird thing is, Greece doesn't have amber. Tests showed these beads were made from fossilized tree sap that came straight from the Baltic region up in northern Europe, hundreds and hundreds of miles away. So how did it get all the way down to Greece during the Bronze Age? Nobody thinks some Greek prince packed a bag, walked up to the Baltic Sea and hauled a giant sack of sap back home. Instead, it worked like a giant game of telephone. People in the north would trade the amber to a neighboring tribe, who traded it to another tribe a little further south, over and over again. It passed through tons of different hands, slowly trickling down through central Europe until it finally reached the Mediterranean, where Greek elites treated it like pure gold. Over on the island of Helgo in Sweden, archaeologists were digging through an old Viking settlement when they pulled a tiny three-inch bronze statue out of the dirt. When they cleaned it off, they realized it wasn't a Viking piece at all, it was a Buddha figurine. Tests showed it was made back in the 6th century, came all the way over from northern India. So how in the world did an Indian Buddha end up buried in a Swedish Viking village? Nobody knows for sure, but once again, they don't think a Viking hopped on a longship and sailed straight to India. Instead, it would have traveled through massive trade networks through Central Asia and Eastern Europe, probably making its way through Russia before landing in Scandinavia around the 800s. By the time it reached Sweden, it had a leather strap tied around its neck and wrist, meaning whoever owned it was probably wearing it like a lucky charm. In 1933, an archaeologist digging under a pyramid in Calixtohuaca, Mexico, pulled a small clay head straight out of a sealed grave. The tomb was buried under three untouched floors and held gold, turquoise, and pottery, dated between 1476 and 1510, right before the Spanish ever set foot in Mexico. Weird part was what the head looked like, though. It had a beard, and its hair was styled in a way that looked totally European. Decades later, researchers examined the piece, and Bernard Andre, director at the German Institute of Archaeology in Rome, said, quote, It is without any doubt Roman, and the lab analysis has confirmed that it is ancient. The stylistic examination tells us more precisely that it is a Roman work from around the second century A.D., end quote. To back that up, lab tests on the clay dated the head somewhere between 800 BCE and 1270 BCE, proving it wasn't made during Spanish colonial times. So how did a second-century Roman piece end up inside this sealed Mexican tomb? Some people think an ancient European ship wrecked on the American coast, but there's also a little conspiracy that maybe a student on the dig planted it as a prank. The lead archaeologist's family always denied that, but it's always a possibility. Back in 1836, a missionary named William Colenso was walking through a Maori village in New Zealand when he saw some local woman using a heavy bronze object to boil potatoes. When he looked closer, he realized it was actually a broken ship's bell, turned upside down. The bell was covered in an inscription written in an ancient script. Scholars eventually translated the lettering, finding that it read, Mahoyadin Busk's Ship's Bell. The script on the bell was in Tamil, an ancient language from southern India and Sri Lanka. Testing dated the bell to around 1400, roughly 250 years before the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman became the first official European to spot New Zealand. So how did a 500-year-old Indian bell land on a beach in New Zealand? One theory is that a Tamil merchant vessel blew off course hundreds of years ago and wrecked off the coast of New Zealand. Either way, the Maori found it on the shore, kept it for generations, and used it as a kitchen pot. In 1938, archaeologists digging through Pompeii found a tiny carved ivory figure buried in one of the city's wealthiest homes. At first, it was labelled as a Roman piece, but the more researchers studied it, the clearer it became that the ivory was actually made in India, and carved in the first century before Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii in 79 CE. That means somebody had somehow gotten this little Indian sculpture from South Asia all the way to a Roman city in southern Italy, and we're talking about a time when the fastest way to travel between these places was by ship, caravan, and a whole lot of walking. Researchers think it may have originally been part of a small piece of furniture, possibly a table or stool. It seems the homeowner valued it enough to keep it even after the rest of the furniture was gone. We actually know Rome and India traded with each other, so there's no need to invent some lost Roman expedition to explain it, but still, finding an Indian artifact inside a Roman house in Pompeii is kind of wild. Back in 2019, some researchers were digging into the cargo of a 3,500-year-old shipwreck they found off the coast of Turkey back in 1982. The ship was hauling a ton of tin, headed to get it turned into bronze, and when they ran chemical tests on it, they found that about a third of that tin came all the way from mines in what is now Uzbekistan, over 2,000 miles away. We already know Bronze Age trade networks were pretty extensive, but finding tin from Central Asia in this cargo just showed how insanely far these networks actually stretched. But here's the really weird part. Who was actually mining this stuff? It wasn't some massive empire with roads and armies. These mines were up in this mountainous part of Central Asia, worked by small communities of highland herders living thousands of miles from the Mediterranean, so this tin had to travel across the brutal terrain, make its way all the way to the coast. One of the researchers, Michael Frichetti, compared it to the whole US getting its energy from some random backyard oil rigs in Kansas, for example. That's basically the scale of what was happening with this tin trade. And that's been the video, I'll catch you, yes you specifically, in the next one.