100 Ancient Structures Hidden Inside Mountains

KirTop Top 100

From an emperor’s unopened tomb to hand-carved caves and lost civilizations, these ancient mysteries are hiding everywhere—and some are stranger than fiction. Come explore the secrets buried beneath mountains, deserts, and seas! #History #Archaeology #Mystery  Subscribe for more fascinating journeys into the past. Tell us what you liked most about the video in the comments!  👉 This channel was created in collaboration with https://www.youtube.com/@kirtop-100samyh  0:00:00 - Ancient Tombs, Caves, and Desert Blueprints 0:09:37 - Sacred Sites and Unexplained Structures 0:19:47 - Ancient Landscapes and Lost Civilizations 0:29:53 - Prehistoric Finds and Hidden Histories 0:42:16 - Strange Histories and Mysterious Artifacts 0:55:38 - Burials, Fossils, and Ancient Monuments 1:10:01 - Archaeological Finds Across Land and Sea 1:22:53 - Drilling Toward Earth's Mantle  We're now available on Spotify! Listen now https://open.spotify.com/show/03446rMw7NEQKZvD764T3X

Transcript

00:00:00I'm Kier Kirtop, and this is 100 Ancient Structures Hidden Inside Mountains.

00:00:11And now, let's go back to the place where this video began.

00:00:14In China, not far from the city of Xi'an, under a huge burial mound lies the tomb of Qin

00:00:19Shi Huangdi.

00:00:20The first emperor who unified China introduced a single writing system, currency and laws.

00:00:25In 1974, some farmers were digging a well and accidentally discovered the first terracotta warrior.

00:00:32The entire army emerged from the ground, thousands of clay soldiers, chariots, horses and weapons.

00:00:39Each warrior has his own face and details, but this was only the outer part of the complex.

00:00:44The main tomb of the emperor has not been opened to this day, and the reason is not that it

00:00:48can't be found.

00:00:49The location is known.

00:00:50The burial mound has been studied for decades.

00:00:52According to researchers, there is a huge underground palace beneath it.

00:00:56But archaeologists are in no hurry to open that door.

00:00:59The ancient historian Sima Qian wrote that inside the tomb flow rivers of mercury,

00:01:03the ceiling is decorated like a starry sky, and in the floor, booby-trapped crossbows are hidden for uninvited guests.

00:01:09For a long time, this sounded like a legend, but soil analysis above the burial mound showed abnormally high levels

00:01:15of mercury.

00:01:15So, the story about rivers of mercury might not be made up.

00:01:18And that's already a serious problem.

00:01:21If there really are large amounts of mercury inside, opening it could be dangerous for people and for the environment.

00:01:27No one knows for sure what will happen if you disturb a chamber that has been sealed for more than

00:01:312,000 years.

00:01:32Traps also can't be completely dismissed as fairy tales.

00:01:35In nearby Qin-era tombs, ancient crossbow mechanisms have been found, preserved surprisingly well.

00:01:41But that's not even the main fear. The main fear is destroying what lies inside.

00:01:46When the pits with the terracotta warriors were opened, the bright paint on the figures began to deteriorate almost immediately

00:01:52after coming into contact with air.

00:01:54And in the main tomb, there could be fabrics, wood, murals, bronze, documents and items that no one has seen

00:02:00since the emperor's burial.

00:02:01That's why China officially says the tomb will not be opened until technology allows everything found to be preserved.

00:02:08And there's logic in that. Sometimes archaeology is not just about the desire to uncover secrets, but also about knowing

00:02:14when to stop.

00:02:15The strangest thing is that we know where one of the greatest unexcavated tombs in history is located.

00:02:19We have radars, sensors, laboratories and money.

00:02:23But the door still remains closed.

00:02:25Qin Shi Huangdi wanted to control everything during his lifetime.

00:02:28And after 2,200 years, it's as if he's still not letting people into his underground world.

00:02:38In 1992, a resident of the Chinese village of Xi'an named Wu Wanan was convinced that the pond next

00:02:45to his house was man-made.

00:02:47Although local legend said that it had no bottom and it was not worth going there.

00:02:51He bought a pump, convinced several neighbors to help him, and they started pumping out the water.

00:02:56For 17 days in a row until an entrance to a huge man-made cave appeared underground.

00:03:02Then another one. And another.

00:03:03And in the end, under the village there turned out to be 24 caves carved out by hand more than

00:03:082,000 years ago.

00:03:10Ancient and primitive are not synonyms.

00:03:13Just because it was ancient doesn't mean they didn't have the technology to achieve all of this.

00:03:18Each one is about the size of a football field, with a ceiling as high as a nine-story building.

00:03:23The walls are covered with parallel grooves.

00:03:25All the same. Same depth, same angle, same distance between them.

00:03:29Clearly, someone did this intentionally.

00:03:32But there's one odd thing that archaeologists noticed.

00:03:34The exact same pattern was found on ancient pottery from this same area over 2,000 years old.

00:03:40Someone deliberately copied the ornament from the pottery onto the stone walls.

00:03:44No one knows yet who did this or why.

00:03:47People extracted about a million cubic meters of stone from the rock formation.

00:03:51That's roughly equal to the volume of 400 Olympic swimming pools.

00:03:55Where it all went is unclear, because there's nothing near the caves.

00:03:59No piles of earth. No traces that anything was ever dug here at all.

00:04:02China has a unique feature. Throughout its entire history, the government has kept records of everything.

00:04:08The names of officials, harvests, floods, disputes between neighbors.

00:04:12But there isn't a single line about these caves in the Chronicles for 2,000 years.

00:04:16As if they never existed. And now the most interesting part.

00:04:20The caves were not discovered by a scientist or an expedition with modern equipment and funding.

00:04:25They were discovered by a single man with a water pump whom everyone considered an odd ball.

00:04:30And here's something to think about.

00:04:32If under one Chinese village there turned out to be 24 caves that no one knew about for 2,000

00:04:37years,

00:04:38how many such places around the world are right now waiting for their own oddball?

00:04:42The ancient catacombs of Lorderia.

00:04:45In Sicily, between the cities of Ispica and Madica,

00:04:49there is a long canyon with caves and archaeological sites called Cava d'Ispica.

00:04:54It stretches across the landscape for 13 kilometers.

00:04:57In some places it is about 100 meters deep and up to 500 meters wide.

00:05:03Evidence of human activity in the canyon dates from the Bronze Age to 1693.

00:05:09Here you can see ancient necropolises, cave churches and Christian catacombs,

00:05:13dwellings and monastic hermitages, as well as historic villages.

00:05:17The Lorderia catacombs are a cave in which 464 tombs have been carved into the rock.

00:05:23The cave was used from the 3rd century BC to the 5th century AD as a Hypogean necropolis.

00:05:29The area of the catacombs is more than 500 square meters.

00:05:32They make up Sicily's second largest necropolis after the San Giovanni catacombs,

00:05:37which are located in the city of Syracusa.

00:05:40The necropolis has two entrances.

00:05:41It is divided into three galleries, which are filled with niches, canopy tombs and ground level graves.

00:05:48The Royal Tomb in Peru.

00:05:50This time we are heading to South America,

00:05:53where treasure hunters from all over the world have been looting ancient burial sites in Peru for decades.

00:06:00Fortunately, they missed a huge tomb that belonged to a little studied civilization.

00:06:04Beneath a layer of sand, this tomb remained hidden from looters for over a thousand years.

00:06:10In the place called El Castillo de Huarme,

00:06:13Professor Milos Gersh saw more eerie things than he had anywhere else in the world.

00:06:18Here, the remains of ancient insects that fed on human flesh were discovered,

00:06:23and snakes coiled at the bottom of ceramic vessels.

00:06:26And during one of the expeditions, a swarm of giant bees attacked the archaeologists.

00:06:30It sounds like a movie plot.

00:06:33But that's exactly what the work of archaeologists looks like in the impenetrable jungle.

00:06:37And all this so that we can study the ancient world.

00:06:41For over a hundred years, tomb raiders have hoped to find a tomb with mummies,

00:06:45wrapped in precious fabrics and adorned with gemstones.

00:06:49Milos Gersh believed that in El Castillo he could find that very mysterious tomb,

00:06:54even though most people around him tried to dissuade him from this expedition.

00:06:58He believed that about a thousand years ago, some important event of that time took place at this site.

00:07:03Many artifacts of the Peruvian Huari civilization were found in these parts.

00:07:08Thanks to a drone, the group of researchers managed to see the outlines of walls on the hill.

00:07:13It turned out that this was just the beginning of a great expedition.

00:07:17Underground, there was a giant labyrinth of high walls and towers.

00:07:21Archaeologists even managed to determine that the walls were painted bright red.

00:07:26Underground, a royal tomb was discovered with four queens and the remains of more than 50 people.

00:07:32Copper axes, silver cups and gold jewelry were what tomb looters were after,

00:07:36and only Milos Gersh was able to find them in the tomb at El Castillo.

00:07:41In ancient times, it was believed that the person's status was important not only during life but also after death,

00:07:47which is why the burials of important people were so lavish.

00:07:51From the little information we know about the Huari civilization,

00:07:54we know that women were skilled crafts women and made fabrics that were better than markers.

00:08:06And now we will embark on an exciting journey into the past,

00:08:09where we will uncover the mystery of ancient drawings that are an astonishing 8000 years old.

00:08:15Imagine a huge structure that can only be seen from the air.

00:08:19It's not just stones and a pile of sand.

00:08:22No, these are great creations of ancient people whose purpose still makes us wonder.

00:08:27Scientists call them desert kites.

00:08:30According to one theory, these huge structures could have served as hunting traps for ancient people.

00:08:36But what if we have the key to understanding their true purpose?

00:08:39Take a look, my friends, at the rock carvings found in Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

00:08:44Their age is astronomical and astronomical 8000 years.

00:08:47These lines and stars decorate the rocks and megaliths that are part of our desert kites.

00:08:52But what if these drawings are not just decorations but actual blueprints?

00:08:56Blueprints that ancient hunters used to build their huge traps, ancient structures several kilometers long.

00:09:02This is exactly the hypothesis that scientists are proposing.

00:09:05They compared the blueprints engraved on the rocks with the shape and size of known desert kites.

00:09:09One of these blueprints is found on an ATCM limestone monolith from Jordan.

00:09:14It has long lines engraved on it ending in an eight-pointed star.

00:09:18It is believed that hunters drove their prey into just such a star.

00:09:22And the second piece of evidence was found in Saudi Arabia.

00:09:26Here, on a sandstone slab measuring 2x4 meters blueprints of two desert kites were found.

00:09:31And they all have something in common, star-shaped enclosures and pit traps at the ends of the star's rays.

00:09:38Volcano that spits out gold, Mount Erebus, the largest volcano in Antarctica, literally spits out the finest crystals of metallic

00:09:46gold into the air.

00:09:48Gold ranging from 0.1 to 20 micrometers is found in volcanic gases and up to 60 micrometers in the

00:09:54nearby snow.

00:09:56Interestingly, although other volcanoes are also known for their gold emissions, Mount Erebus is the only one that releases gold

00:10:03in its metallic form.

00:10:04Before you decide to go searching for gold in Antarctica, let me disappoint you.

00:10:08Mount Erebus emits only about 80 grams of gold per Dalton Y.

00:10:12It's more of a geological curiosity than anything else.

00:10:16However, knowing that volcanoes can concentrate metal may help geologists find gold deposits more effectively.

00:10:24Crocodile stone.

00:10:25Now let's head to the stunning mountains of Laos, where the ancient ruins of the Wat Fu temple are hidden.

00:10:32Among the ruins of this temple, archaeologists found a very strange thing.

00:10:35A huge boulder with carvings resembling a crocodile.

00:10:39But what's even more interesting is that there's a hollow the size of a human.

00:10:42Many people believe that this stone was used as an altar for human sacrifices.

00:10:46If that's true, then such rituals could have taken place back in the days of Chenla, the ancient empire that

00:10:53ruled these lands.

00:10:54According to legends, every year when the Frangipani petals began to fall, the king of Chenla would pray to the

00:10:59spirits of the mountains and offer rice wine to the two most beautiful girls.

00:11:03Then the girls were sacrificed to the gods.

00:11:06Such sacrifices are described in the 6th century history of Sui.

00:11:11All this time the community far from the big cities preserved this story, which suggests its possible authenticity.

00:11:17However, it is unknown what role the crocodile rock played in these rituals.

00:11:21This unique carving makes it even more mysterious.

00:11:25Nothing like this has been found in the ruins of Laos or Cambodia, and here's the question.

00:11:29If the crocodile rock wasn't used for sacrifices, then what was it for?

00:11:35A mysterious stone structure in the forest.

00:11:37In the early 1950s, geologist Vadim Kolpakov was walking through the remote Irkutsk taiga and saw something that shouldn't have

00:11:45been there at all.

00:11:46Amidst the forest, stones, and the typical Siberian landscape, there stood a huge mound that looked less like a hill

00:11:52and more like the trace of some powerful eruption from within the earth.

00:11:55Seder, this place would be called the Potomsky Crater, the Kolpakov Crater or Kolpakov Cone.

00:12:01Imagine a stone ring about as tall as a 12-story building.

00:12:04Inside, there's a crater. In the center, another dome. All around are shattered limestone blocks.

00:12:09It's not an ancient volcano, not an ordinary mountain, not a quarry, and not a man-made structure. Just a

00:12:15strange stone structure in the middle of the taiga.

00:12:17And what puzzled scientists the most was its age. According to various estimates, the crater is about 500 years old.

00:12:22That is, it didn't appear in ancient times when there couldn't have been any witnesses, but already in historical times.

00:12:28Somewhere in the same century when books were being printed in Europe, cities were being built, and chronicles were being

00:12:33recorded, in the Siberian taiga, something brought thousands of tons of stone to the surface.

00:12:38But there are no witnesses, and no records either. There are legends, but no proper description of the event.

00:12:43The first theory was the most obvious one. A meteorite. It looks too much like the trace of something falling

00:12:48from the sky. A huge formation, a crater, ejected rocks, a remote place.

00:12:52But the longer the scientists looked, the less this theory held up. A real meteorite crater should have its own

00:12:58features. Impact rocks, signs of an explosion, characteristic destruction. Here, everything was different.

00:13:04Then another theory appeared. Maybe gases, water, and rock were rising from below. The pressure was increasing.

00:13:10The permafrost prevented this from coming out smoothly, and at some point the ground was literally pushed upward.

00:13:15That's how this stone cone could have formed. That sounds more plausible. But still, something doesn't add up.

00:13:21Magnetic anomalies were recorded around the crater, and its shape remains too unusual.

00:13:25Oh, it doesn't look like an ordinary hill that slowly formed over thousands of years.

00:13:29It looks more like a place where something happens suddenly, with great force, and without any witnesses.

00:13:34That's why the Potomsky crater still looks strange even without any mysticism.

00:13:39Not because an alien ship necessarily crashed there, or because it's the work of some unknown ancient civilization.

00:13:45But because there's an object in the taiga that appeared almost yesterday by Earth's standards.

00:13:50Yet we still can't say for sure what exactly created it.

00:13:53And after seeing places like this, you start to look at the very ground beneath your feet differently.

00:13:58A room for getting high? High in the Andes, at the ancient Chavin de Huantar complex.

00:14:04Archaeologists stumbled upon a room they weren't supposed to find.

00:14:06It was completely buried, with no visible entrances. No windows, no doors, just a narrow crawlspace.

00:14:13As if someone had deliberately hidden this space from prying eyes, inside there were 23 artifacts.

00:14:19All of them connected to the use of psychoactive substances. Some of them are thin, hollow bird bones.

00:14:24Sharp, perfectly crafted, like tubes. Research showed that traces of tobacco remained on them.

00:14:30And now, this is where the questions begin.

00:14:33What was the purpose of this small dark room, with tubes for inhaling?

00:14:37Why was it isolated? Why was it built in such a way that it would be hidden forever?

00:14:42One of the authors of the study says, this is not spontaneous shamanism.

00:14:47This is a ritual, strictly controlled and formalized. And perhaps it was not meant for everyone.

00:14:51Only the elite had access to these practices, possibly priests or ruling castes.

00:14:56Because hallucinations here are not just a journey inside oneself.

00:14:59This is a mechanism of power, a small room, two or three people darkness,

00:15:04and a hallucinogen that changes the perception of reality.

00:15:07Such conditions could bring about encounters with the gods, trances and visions.

00:15:11And if people usually believe that priests really talk to spirits,

00:15:15then the priests could use this as a tool both for control and for governance.

00:15:19When the blood becomes liquid, Naples, the cathedral.

00:15:24Three times a year, the crowd waits for the same thing.

00:15:28He lifts the silver reliquary with two sealed ampoules, turns them over,

00:15:32and the dark mass inside usually becomes liquid before everyone's eyes.

00:15:36This is the liquefaction of the blood of Saint Januarius, San Gennaro, the patron saint of the city.

00:15:41The dates are fixed. September 19th, the feast day, the first Saturday of May, the translation of the relics,

00:15:48and December 16th to commemorate the city's deliverance from an eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

00:15:52If the blood does not liquefy, Neapolitans see it as a troubling sign.

00:15:56In the chronicles, years when this happened are marked by plague, earthquakes and financial crises.

00:16:01The holy bishop from Benevento was executed around the year 305 in Pozzuoli.

00:16:05According to legend, a Christian woman collected his blood in vessels.

00:16:09In the Middle Ages, the relics ended up in Naples.

00:16:12In the San Gennaro chapel, two ampoules are kept.

00:16:14The larger one contains a brown substance, the smaller one is almost empty.

00:16:18They cannot be opened, so direct chemical analysis is impossible.

00:16:22The church describes the phenomenon, but does not provide an official scientific explanation.

00:16:27Scientists believe it is thixotropy.

00:16:29Some gels become fluid when shaken or heated, and thicken again when left to stand.

00:16:33Chemists have shown laboratory samples of blood, and blood-like mixtures based on iron-containing compounds,

00:16:40iron oxides, and gelatin proteins.

00:16:42When gently warmed in the hands and moved, they transition from a gel to a liquid.

00:16:46There are also down-to-earth explanations.

00:16:48The temperature in the cathedral, constant turning of the reliquary, natural aging of the contents.

00:16:53The composition of the ampoules remains a secret.

00:16:56The ampoules aren't available for analysis.

00:16:58It's impossible to directly verify any hypothesis.

00:17:00Why does this work for believers?

00:17:02The ritual takes place in front of everyone.

00:17:04The priest lifts the ampoules at the altar, tilts them.

00:17:07The dark substance begins to flow down the glass and becomes lighter.

00:17:10The audience can see the process even from the back rows.

00:17:12For Neapolitans, this is not a chemical trick, but a sign of the city's protection.

00:17:17A reasonable compromise looks like this.

00:17:19Scientists suggest possible mechanisms.

00:17:22The church gives it meaning.

00:17:24Tradition maintains trust.

00:17:26Communities.

00:17:26An unknown god of ancient Egypt.

00:17:29Here's a name you probably haven't heard.

00:17:32Pelusium.

00:17:32An ancient Egyptian city on the eastern border of the Nile Delta.

00:17:36Egypt's first line of defense against eastern invasion.

00:17:40And at the same time a major port city through which everyone passed.

00:17:43Persians, Greeks, Romans and Arabs.

00:17:46Whoever controlled Pelusium controlled the entrance to Egypt.

00:17:49Today this place is called Tel El Farama.

00:17:52And Egyptian archaeologists have been excavating temples there for 6 years.

00:17:55Recently they found a circular temple with a huge pool in the center.

00:17:5835 meters in diameter.

00:18:00About half the size of a football field.

00:18:02The pool was connected by a canal to one of the branches of the Nile.

00:18:05And the water flowed there on its own.

00:18:07Muddy and rich in silt.

00:18:09Around the pool there was a whole network of canals and reservoirs to control the flow of water.

00:18:14And right in the center stood a square platform.

00:18:17On which most likely stood a large statue of a deity.

00:18:20To whom was this temple dedicated?

00:18:22To a god named Pelusius.

00:18:24So little known that most historians have never heard of him.

00:18:27His name is presumably derived from the Greek word Pelos.

00:18:30Meaning mud, clay, silt.

00:18:33So he is the god of Nile silt.

00:18:35A symbol of fertility and renewal.

00:18:37Every year the Nile would flood and leave a layer of fertile silt on its banks.

00:18:41Without which Egypt simply could not survive.

00:18:43And the round temple was built for this god with a living pool that breathed together with the river.

00:18:48The architecture of the temple shows traces of several cultures at once.

00:18:51Egyptian layout.

00:18:52Greek proportions.

00:18:54Roman details.

00:18:55Which is quite expected for a city at the crossroads of civilization.

00:18:58The temple was used since the 2nd century BC.

00:19:01Until the 6th century AD.

00:19:03Almost 800 years surviving the transition from the Ptolemies to Rome.

00:19:06And from Rome to Byzantium.

00:19:08They found it using a satellite and special equipment that scans the ground like an x-ray.

00:19:12And shows what's inside without digging.

00:19:14The scan revealed a large building several meters underground.

00:19:18Then they made a small test excavation and saw brick walls.

00:19:21Amulets depicting Egyptian gods.

00:19:23And a scarab with the name of Pharaoh Thutmose III.

00:19:26Who lived a thousand years before this temple was built.

00:19:29But was revered as a saint for a very long time after his death.

00:19:32For almost 800 years this pool was filled with water from the Nile.

00:19:36People came here to pray.

00:19:38Bringing amulets and offerings.

00:19:40And then everything was covered with sand.

00:19:42And lay buried for another one and a half thousand years.

00:19:45Until a satellite looked down from above.

00:19:47The Band of Holes in Peru.

00:19:49In the Pisco Valley in Peru.

00:19:52There is a mysterious place known as the Band of Holes or Monte Sierpe.

00:19:55This narrow strip of land.

00:19:5814 to 20 meters wide and about one and a half thousand meters long.

00:20:01Is covered with thousands of shallow pits.

00:20:04Their exact purpose remains a mystery.

00:20:07Although scientists have put forward many theories.

00:20:10The site first gained fame thanks to an aerial photograph by Robert Shippey.

00:20:14Published in the 1930s in National Geographic.

00:20:17For a long time archaeologists avoided Monte Sierpe.

00:20:21It was only in the 1950s that Victor Von Hagen studied the pits.

00:20:25And suggested that they were empty graves.

00:20:26And their total number is estimated at 5000.

00:20:29Later John Hislop put forward the theory.

00:20:32That the pits were used as storage facilities.

00:20:35Similar to those found in other parts of Peru.

00:20:37Each hole is about a meter in diameter.

00:20:40And up to a meter deep.

00:20:41They are made in different ways.

00:20:43Some are dug into the embankment.

00:20:45Others are surrounded by stone walls.

00:20:48Modern research.

00:20:50Including a detailed drone generated map of the pits.

00:20:53Has shown that the strip of holes.

00:20:54Consists of five to six thousand pits.

00:20:56Divided into blocks with unique patterns.

00:20:59Nearby are Inca roads.

00:21:01And the remains of storage buildings.

00:21:03And pottery found there suggests.

00:21:04The pits date to the 15th century.

00:21:07When the Incas conquered the Chincha people.

00:21:10Archaeologist Charles Tanish believes.

00:21:12That the pits may have been used.

00:21:13To measure agricultural tribute.

00:21:15That local farmers gave to the rulers.

00:21:18Other scholars.

00:21:20Such as Jean-Pierre Protzen believe.

00:21:21That the line of holes may be even older.

00:21:24He thinks the pits could have been used.

00:21:25To store fertilizers.

00:21:26Such as excrement.

00:21:29To this day.

00:21:30The line of holes remains.

00:21:31One of the most mysterious.

00:21:33Archaeological discoveries in Peru.

00:21:35Who created it.

00:21:36Why and how.

00:21:37Are still subjects of debate.

00:21:38And ongoing research.

00:21:41Ruins of a Minoan structure.

00:21:43During the construction.

00:21:45Of a new airport in Crete.

00:21:46Archaeologists discovered.

00:21:47A unique circular structure.

00:21:49About 48 meters in diameter.

00:21:52It is about 4000 years old.

00:21:54The Greek ministry of culture.

00:21:56Called this discovery.

00:21:57Extremely interesting.

00:21:59The structure.

00:22:00Covering an area.

00:22:01Of 1800 square meters.

00:22:03Belongs to the Minoan civilization.

00:22:04Of the Bronze Age.

00:22:05Which existed on Crete.

00:22:07From 3000 to 1450 BC.

00:22:11The Minoans.

00:22:12Were a highly developed society.

00:22:14Known for their maritime trade.

00:22:15And art.

00:22:16Experts believe.

00:22:17That the building.

00:22:18Was mainly used.

00:22:18From 2000 to 1700 BC.

00:22:21When the first palaces.

00:22:23Were being built on Crete.

00:22:24Such as Knossos.

00:22:25And Phaestos.

00:22:26The exact name.

00:22:27Of the structure.

00:22:28Is unknown.

00:22:29But the animal bones.

00:22:30Suggest.

00:22:30The possibility.

00:22:31Of ritual ceremonies.

00:22:33Including sacrifices.

00:22:34The interior space.

00:22:36Was divided.

00:22:37Into several halls.

00:22:37And surrounded.

00:22:38By eight stepped.

00:22:39Stone walls.

00:22:40Each 1.7 meters high.

00:22:42The size.

00:22:43And complex layout.

00:22:44Indicate.

00:22:44The public significance.

00:22:45Of the building.

00:22:46Which required.

00:22:47Significant labor.

00:22:48And specialized knowledge.

00:22:50The Maya Cosmogram.

00:22:52In southern Mexico.

00:22:53In the state of Tabasco.

00:22:55Archeologists.

00:22:56Studied.

00:22:56The Aguada Fenyx site.

00:22:58A massive earthen structure.

00:22:59Hidden beneath.

00:23:00The forest.

00:23:01It's almost invisible.

00:23:02In satellite images.

00:23:03But lidar.

00:23:03Laser scanning technology.

00:23:05Capable of removing.

00:23:06Vegetation.

00:23:06Revealed the clear.

00:23:07Outlines.

00:23:08Of a platform.

00:23:08Nearly one and a half.

00:23:09Kilometers long.

00:23:10This structure.

00:23:11Turned out.

00:23:11To be older.

00:23:12Than all known.

00:23:12Maya centers.

00:23:13Dating back.

00:23:14To around.

00:23:141000 BC.

00:23:15Which is a thousand.

00:23:16Years earlier.

00:23:17Than the appearance.

00:23:18Of their famous pyramids.

00:23:19And cities.

00:23:24With cardinal directions.

00:23:26All of this.

00:23:26Looks like a carefully planned complex.

00:23:28Built without stone.

00:23:29Using only earth and clay.

00:23:31Scientists call.

00:23:32Aguada Fenyx.

00:23:33A cosmogram.

00:23:34It's not a temple.

00:23:35Or a city.

00:23:35But.

00:23:36Rather a symbolic space.

00:23:37A model of the world.

00:23:38Embodied in the landscape.

00:23:40Here.

00:23:40Judging by the findings.

00:23:41There were mass gatherings.

00:23:42Rituals.

00:23:42And feasts.

00:23:43But there are no traces of kings.

00:23:44Palaces.

00:23:45Or sculptures.

00:23:45It seems that all of this.

00:23:47Was built.

00:23:47Not under the rule of a leader.

00:23:48But collectively.

00:23:49By communities.

00:23:50Without central authority.

00:23:51The discovery of the cosmogram.

00:23:52Was unexpected.

00:23:53For archeologists.

00:23:54It was previously believed.

00:23:55That monumental structures.

00:23:56Among the Maya.

00:23:57Appeared only after the formation.

00:23:59Of complex cities.

00:23:59And an elite.

00:24:00Aguada Fenyx.

00:24:01Shows the opposite.

00:24:02Large structures.

00:24:03Could have appeared.

00:24:04Before the formation of states.

00:24:05As a result.

00:24:06Of collective efforts.

00:24:07Today.

00:24:07The site continues to be studied.

00:24:09For the local residents.

00:24:10It becomes a point of pride.

00:24:12And for archeologists.

00:24:13A reminder.

00:24:14That history.

00:24:14Does not always develop.

00:24:15In a straight line.

00:24:17Sometimes people create.

00:24:18Not for power.

00:24:19But for an idea.

00:24:20An empire.

00:24:22Erased from textbooks.

00:24:23In 2001.

00:24:24In the south of Iran.

00:24:25A river.

00:24:26Overflowed its banks.

00:24:27And eroded its shore.

00:24:28In the Halil Valley.

00:24:30When the water receded.

00:24:31Ancient graves.

00:24:32Were exposed.

00:24:33And it was pure coincidence.

00:24:35No one was looking.

00:24:37For this place.

00:24:38And no one even suspected.

00:24:39That there was anything there.

00:24:40It was just.

00:24:41That the river flood.

00:24:42Revealed something.

00:24:42Science had never even suspected.

00:24:44An entire.

00:24:45Forgotten civilization.

00:24:46Which was named.

00:24:47After the nearest city.

00:24:48Jiroft.

00:24:48Stone vessels.

00:24:49Were taken from the graves.

00:24:51Completely covered.

00:24:51With intricate carvings.

00:24:53Snakes.

00:24:54Scorpions.

00:24:54Predators.

00:24:55Mythical beasts.

00:24:56Intertwined so tightly.

00:24:57That on the dark stone.

00:24:58They seemed to move.

00:24:59Nothing like this.

00:25:00Has been found.

00:25:01Anywhere else.

00:25:02And the finds.

00:25:03Dated back four or even five thousand years.

00:25:05To the very dawn of written history.

00:25:07To the times of the first great cities.

00:25:09We learned in school.

00:25:10That there is only one cradle of civilization.

00:25:13Mesopotamia.

00:25:14The land between two rivers.

00:25:15Where supposedly the first cities.

00:25:17The first state.

00:25:18And the first writing appeared.

00:25:20This is printed in every textbook.

00:25:22But Jiroff does not fit into it.

00:25:24Excavations here were led by the archaeologist.

00:25:26Yousef Majidzadeh.

00:25:27And he said directly.

00:25:29This Iranian culture was not inferior to Mesopotamia.

00:25:31And in some ways even surpassed it.

00:25:33Other scholars disagreed.

00:25:35Saying there was not enough evidence.

00:25:36The debate continues to this day.

00:25:38But there is one trump card that Jiroff has.

00:25:39That can't be taken away.

00:25:41Among the ruins.

00:25:42Clay tablets with inscriptions were found.

00:25:43And this script is unlike any other in the world.

00:25:46It's neither Sumerian.

00:25:47Nor Egyptian.

00:25:48Nor anyone else's.

00:25:49It's a system of symbols.

00:25:51That has never been seen before or since.

00:25:52That's what's strange.

00:25:54We have proof in our hands that a whole people once lived here with their own language and

00:25:58writing.

00:25:58We are holding their tablets.

00:26:00But we still can't read them.

00:26:02It's as if this civilization left us a letter.

00:26:05But didn't give us the means to read it.

00:26:08A new ocean on our planet.

00:26:11We should start with a place where history doesn't just hold a mystery.

00:26:15But literally shows it in real time.

00:26:17In Ethiopia.

00:26:19In the Afar desert.

00:26:20There's an area where Africa is slowly splitting at the seams.

00:26:24And this isn't just a beautiful metaphor.

00:26:26But a real geological process.

00:26:28Which will one day result in the formation of a new ocean.

00:26:31In 2005.

00:26:32After the activity of the Dabahu volcano.

00:26:34The ground there split open in just a few days.

00:26:37Forming a crack about 60 kilometers long.

00:26:39In some places its width reached up to 8 meters.

00:26:43The ground was sinking.

00:26:44New fissures were appearing all around.

00:26:46And it all looked as if the planet had decided to speed things up.

00:26:50Which usually takes not a human lifetime.

00:26:52But millions of years.

00:26:54The strangest thing here is not that the earth cracked.

00:26:56Faults are nothing new for geologists.

00:26:59What's strange is that the birth of a future ocean is usually hidden somewhere underwater.

00:27:03On the sea floor.

00:27:04Far from human eyes.

00:27:06But in Afar this process can be seen almost at the surface.

00:27:09Several tectonic plates meet here at once.

00:27:12They are slowly moving apart.

00:27:13The crust is getting thinner.

00:27:14Hot mantle rises from below.

00:27:16And Africa is gradually preparing to split into parts.

00:27:19Scientists say that in millions of years water may come here.

00:27:22And in place of today's dry desert a new ocean will appear.

00:27:26But what catches my attention in this story is something else.

00:27:29We are used to thinking of the world map as something permanent.

00:27:32As if the continents have always been the way they are now.

00:27:35And will stay that way in the future.

00:27:37And then you find a place where the planet itself calmly shows that for it our borders,

00:27:41countries and cities are just temporary markings on the surface.

00:27:45The Afar Rift personally scares me exactly because of this feeling.

00:27:48It reminds us that the formation of the earth is not finished yet.

00:27:53People mined the material for weapons here.

00:27:57If you look from the air at a piece of land in the English county of Norfolk.

00:28:00It looks like a field after a bombing.

00:28:03Hundreds of round pits of various sizes are scattered over a large area.

00:28:07But there was no war here.

00:28:09These pits are four and a half thousand years old.

00:28:12And they are mines.

00:28:13Grimes Graves is one of the largest Neolithic flint mines in Europe.

00:28:17In the stone age, flint was about the same as what steel is for us today.

00:28:22It could be split into thin blades with razor sharp edges and used to make knives, scrapers and arrowheads.

00:28:28But high quality flint isn't just any stone you pick up from the ground.

00:28:32It had to be extracted from deep layers where the rock hadn't weathered yet and hadn't lost its properties.

00:28:37To date, 433 mines have been found here.

00:28:41The deepest ones go down 14 meters with a surface diameter of up to 12 meters.

00:28:46From the bottom of each mine, horizontal tunnels branched out along the flint layer to extract as much rock as

00:28:51possible.

00:28:52The workers used pickaxes made from deer antlers and shovels made from animal bones.

00:28:57Small recesses were carved into the walls.

00:28:59Fat was poured into them to make homemade lamps.

00:29:01The soot from these lamps can still be seen on the ceilings of the tunnels today.

00:29:06Imagine 4,000 years ago.

00:29:08A person crawling in a narrow tunnel 14 meters deep with a homemade fat lamp and digging with a deer

00:29:13antler.

00:29:14These weren't primitive people.

00:29:16They were professional miners, just without hard hats or salaries.

00:29:19From a single mine of average depth, about 60 tons of flint were extracted from which almost 10,000 stone

00:29:26axes could be made.

00:29:27The mine operated roughly from 2700 to 1400 BC.

00:29:32That is, at the very time when Stonehenge was being built.

00:29:35Then bronze appeared.

00:29:36Metal tools became a status symbol.

00:29:39The demand for flint dropped and the mines stopped operating.

00:29:41Iron Age people buried their dead in pits that someone had dug a thousand years before them in search of

00:29:48stone.

00:29:48Today, in one of the mines, you can see thousands of years of history.

00:29:54The quarry is 220,000 years old.

00:30:03In South Africa, scientists from Germany began digging in a place where sharp hard stones were sticking out of the

00:30:09ground, perfect for making cutting tools.

00:30:11They shifted every cubic meter of soil by hand, so as not to miss a single fragment.

00:30:17And they found from 200,000 to 2 million worked fragments per cubic meter.

00:30:22This is not a typo.

00:30:24Thousands of traces of work.

00:30:25Stones used to test the strength of the rock.

00:30:28Tiny chips from processing.

00:30:30Heavy hammer stones.

00:30:31Yet almost no finished tools.

00:30:33No traces of dwellings.

00:30:35No food remains.

00:30:36People came here, did a little stone processing, took the blanks with them and left.

00:30:40Purposefully.

00:30:41As if going to work.

00:30:43Dating has shown that this place was used from 220,000 to 110,000 years BC.

00:30:49For 100,000 years straight.

00:30:51For comparison, the entire history of Egypt from the first pharaoh to the present day is about 5,000 years.

00:30:56Rome, from its founding to its fall, is less than 3,000.

00:30:59A knowledge of this particular site and its high quality stone was passed down through generations for 20 times as

00:31:05long as what we call human history has existed.

00:31:07Without books.

00:31:08Without maps.

00:31:09Without records.

00:31:11A father showed his son where to go.

00:31:12And so it went on for 100,000 years.

00:31:15One of the researchers took 353 recovered fragments and began putting them back together.

00:31:20Matching the breaks like a three-dimensional puzzle.

00:31:22In the end, he restored the original blocks of rock and literally saw exactly how the craftsman worked 200,000

00:31:28years ago.

00:31:29How he held the stone.

00:31:30Where he struck.

00:31:31What he wanted to achieve.

00:31:32Before this discovery, it was believed that ancient people picked up stones randomly along the way.

00:31:37This site showed otherwise.

00:31:38They knew where the best material was.

00:31:40They planned routes and organized extraction.

00:31:43220,000 years before any writing.

00:31:45Before any city.

00:31:46Before any state.

00:31:49Millennium.

00:31:49The Maya Settlement.

00:31:52Archaeologists discovered a mysterious ancient Maya settlement in the Mennonite farming village of Mina.

00:31:57The ruined dwellings looked like white mounds.

00:32:01Scientists studied the pottery found in these places and dated it between 250 and 600 AD.

00:32:08As is known, this period went down in history for its large-scale construction and urbanization.

00:32:13At that time, the Maya had highly developed artistic skills.

00:32:16The buildings have plastered floors and a collection of household vessels for cooking.

00:32:22And in some buildings, archaeologists found agricultural tools made of flint.

00:32:27The Maya had well-developed agriculture and they used the forest to raise animals in their natural environment.

00:32:33This is indicated by the large accumulation of bones in this area.

00:32:38One of the structures resembled an ancient temple completely plastered with white limestone.

00:32:43And the flint artifacts found they were most likely used as ceremonial offerings.

00:32:49Archaeologists estimate that the settlement is 150,000 years old.

00:32:53Let's imagine ourselves in a world a very long time ago, about 150,000 years ago.

00:32:58We are in Africa, the place where humans as we know them today first appeared.

00:33:02But even today, we still have many questions about how this magical story unfolded.

00:33:06Recent archaeological discoveries in West Africa help us with this, like wonderful cheat sheets on an exciting journey into the

00:33:14past.

00:33:14Scientists have discovered a settlement in West Africa that is about 150,000 years old.

00:33:19Stone tools were found here, which are considered some of the oldest created by Homo sapiens.

00:33:24Imagine this.

00:33:26These tools were used by people as far back as 140,000 years ago, for much longer than other human

00:33:32groups did.

00:33:33And do you know what's most amazing?

00:33:34Humans appeared in Africa about 300,000 years ago.

00:33:38They used stone tools called Middle Stone Age tools, and they used them until about 30,000 to 60,000

00:33:45years ago.

00:33:46So why didn't people in West Africa change their technology for so long?

00:33:51Some scientists suggest that when people started moving to Europe, they had to adapt to new conditions and a changing

00:33:56climate.

00:33:58Perhaps this influenced their technology.

00:34:00And as a final note, people started making stone tools even before the appearance of Homo sapiens.

00:34:05We've already talked about a workshop that's a whole 1.2 million years old.

00:34:10And here's another amazing discovery.

00:34:11Some stone tools can even be made by monkeys.

00:34:15So don't be surprised if next time you're shown a stone tool made by a monkey.

00:34:20A mysterious cave.

00:34:23Scientists discovered a mysterious object in Antarctica using Google Maps.

00:34:28It's not just an object, it's a cave hidden beneath the glaciers.

00:34:32Scientists published a video on YouTube where you can see the cave's ceiling.

00:34:35Some believe that the cave could have been created by humans.

00:34:37In the video, you can see a perfectly shaped vault, 23 meters high and 76 meters wide.

00:34:43Scientists noticed strange paths and steps at the entrance to the cave.

00:34:47Besides, this gives reason to think about their artificial origin.

00:34:50Others think that this is a secret facility for UFOs or a top secret military base.

00:34:55There are also those who believe that these are architectural remains of an ancient civilization.

00:35:00The scientific community has yet to weigh in, but everyone agrees that with global warming, Antarctica will reveal many more

00:35:06secrets.

00:35:08Ancient Roman chest used as a safe.

00:35:10In 1994, in the central part of Spain, near the ancient Roman temple of Mithras, archaeologists found the ruins of

00:35:17the Villa Casa del Mitreo.

00:35:18Built at the end of the 1st century, it was rebuilt several times, until a major fire in the 4th

00:35:24century.

00:35:25Special attention was drawn to a large wooden chest, reinforced with copper and iron plates.

00:35:30In ancient Rome, such chests served as safes for storing valuable items.

00:35:35The chest measures about 3 by 1.5 meters, making it the largest find of its kind.

00:35:40Due to the poor condition of the chest, which was damaged in a fire, archaeologists in 1994 did not dare

00:35:47to extract it, fearing it would be destroyed.

00:35:49The chest was left in place until better preservation methods became available.

00:35:54This is a common practice in archaeology when the preservation of an artifact cannot be guaranteed.

00:36:00In 2017, thanks to new technologies, the chest was extracted and delivered to the Institute of Cultural Heritage of Spain.

00:36:07Here, it was stabilized and preserved.

00:36:10There is no information about the contents of the chest.

00:36:13Most likely, the owners saved their valuables before the villa was destroyed.

00:36:17A temple for the goddess with a lion's head.

00:36:21In Egypt, in the area of Athribis, an ancient temple carved into the rock was discovered.

00:36:26Its age is estimated to be about 2100 years and it dates back to the reign of Ptolemy VIII, who

00:36:32ruled from 170 to 116 BC.

00:36:35This ruler, known for his complicated political and family history, left behind many monuments and the new temple has become

00:36:41an important discovery.

00:36:43Barge leaves have been preserved on the walls of the temple, depicting Ptolemy VIII making an offering to the goddess

00:36:49Repit with the head of a lion and her son Calant.

00:36:53Repit was the wife of the god Minra, who was associated with fertility.

00:36:57Archeologists suggest that the temple was built for this goddess, although its name remains unknown for now.

00:37:03During the excavations, scientists discovered a hall where temple utensils and amphorae were stored.

00:37:08At the entrance to the room, unique bas-reliefs depicting Repit and Minra were found.

00:37:13Of particular interest is the depiction of Minra surrounded by decans, stars that the ancient Egyptians used for navigation at

00:37:19night.

00:37:19These stars have human bodies combined with animal heads, such as a falcon and an ibis.

00:37:27Megalithic Books of the Atlanteans

00:37:29The ethnologist, entrepreneur and collector was born in Hungary, but spent most of his life in South America, where he

00:37:35made a sensational discovery.

00:37:38In 1955, Janusz Juan Morris discovered an astonishing ancient system of underground passages.

00:37:45The public only learned about it several years later, because the researcher was bound by a non-disclosure agreement.

00:37:51The self-taught scientist found underground roads and tunnels stretching beneath Ecuador, Argentina and Peru.

00:37:56Their walls and ceilings were not just worked, but carefully polished.

00:38:01The passages ended with huge underground halls.

00:38:04In one of these, Morris allegedly found ancient books made of metal, with pages measuring 96 by 48 cm.

00:38:11In the scientific community, they are called plaques.

00:38:14Each one was covered with unknown symbols.

00:38:16He knew that.

00:38:17Morris himself and his followers believed that this was the discovery of a library belonging to the oldest civilization, possibly

00:38:24the Atlanteans.

00:38:25According to an alternative version, the books contained the prophecies of the Incas, or knowledge from beings from other planets

00:38:31who came to Earth.

00:38:31In the center of the hall, there was furniture made of an unknown material.

00:38:35The eccentric enthusiast also got hold of a golden figurine of a flying machine, which was sent to the Bogota

00:38:40Museum.

00:38:41After being studied by experts, it became clear that the material of the figurine, which looks like an airplane, is

00:38:47pure gold, which does not occur in nature in this form, but contains impurities such as silver, copper, iron and

00:38:53other metals.

00:38:54In 1976, the story took a new turn.

00:38:58The Americans, supporters of Morris, organized a new expedition, choosing a media personality, astronaut Neil Armstrong, as the official leader.

00:39:07The expedition reached its destination successfully, but found no library with huge metal books.

00:39:12However, in the tunnels, they discovered a burial chamber that had been there for millennia.

00:39:16It contained burials dating to before the common era, and at the same time scientists catalogued about 400 species of

00:39:23plants.

00:39:24Morris passed away in 1991, and never told anyone the exact coordinates of the underground library, which was supposedly believed

00:39:31to have belonged to the Atlanteans.

00:39:35Human skeleton in a flooded cave.

00:39:37At the beginning of the video, we will go to the Caribbean coast of Mexico, to a cave system that

00:39:43was flooded at the end of the Ice Age.

00:39:46Here, an amateur archaeologist discovered the skeleton of a prehistoric human, which is more than 8000 years old.

00:39:53I want to note that these are not the first human remains found in the caves of Mexico.

00:39:58In this place, the government plans to build a high-speed rail line through the jungle, and attract tourists.

00:40:04And as often happens, the best archaeological discoveries occur at future construction sites.

00:40:10Diver archaeologists claim that the skeleton was too far from the entrance to the cave.

00:40:14This means that the ancient human could not have swummed that far without using modern equipment.

00:40:21According to other studies, around the same time, the water level was much lower.

00:40:25This means the caves were flooded after people started living here.

00:40:29Who the skeleton belongs to and its exact age still need to be determined.

00:40:33However, we do know exactly where one of the oldest human teeth on the planet was discovered.

00:40:41Five cows took over an island. In 1871, a farmer named Ertin left five cows on Amsterdam Island.

00:40:50A bare, windswept patch of land in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

00:40:53The climate there is harsh. Cold, damp, and constant wind. There were no people on the island.

00:40:58Ertin just dropped off the five animals and sailed away. After that, these cows were forgotten for 130 years.

00:41:04For a whole century, they lived on their own. No people, no supervision, no help at all.

00:41:09And they didn't just survive. From five animals, a herd of several thousand emerged.

00:41:15Five abandoned animals quietly took over an entire island and multiplied as if someone was helping them.

00:41:20At first, scientists thought it was simple. Five cows locked on an island.

00:41:24They've been reproducing on their own for a hundred years straight.

00:41:27So, we have a textbook example of island evolution.

00:41:29When an isolated herd turns into something unique. Something special.

00:41:33A beautiful story for a textbook.

00:41:35But geneticist Mathieu Gautier and his colleagues sequenced the genomes of several animals and saw something completely different.

00:41:41There was never any pure island herd to begin with.

00:41:44About three quarters of these cows' ancestry came from European breeds such as Jersey cattle.

00:41:48And the remaining quarter from tropical cattle on the other side of the Indian Ocean.

00:41:53Relatives of Madagascar cows.

00:41:55And there's the answer.

00:41:56Those very five cows were not the same from the start.

00:41:59They already had very mixed blood.

00:42:01That's why the tiny herd was able to grow so successfully.

00:42:04Instead of degenerating from close inbreeding.

00:42:07That's how isolated groups usually die out.

00:42:09The island didn't reshape these cows to fit itself.

00:42:12They arrived there already different.

00:42:14And that's exactly what saved them.

00:42:16A place that causes hallucinations.

00:42:20In Kakassia, in the south of Russia.

00:42:23In the mountain range of the Kuznetska Latov.

00:42:25There are caves that the locals call the gates to the underworld.

00:42:28And that's not just a fancy name.

00:42:30Because shamans have used it as a place of sacrifice for the last 2000 years.

00:42:35Animal bones have been found here.

00:42:37Remains of campfires.

00:42:39Suit on the walls and piles of human bones.

00:42:41In vertical shafts 20 meters deep.

00:42:45And all of this is documented.

00:42:47What started as a legend turned into a truly terrifying discovery.

00:42:51In 1985, a scientific expedition went down there.

00:42:55Speleologist Konstantin Bakalin, a man with many years of experience and dozens of difficult expeditions, described it like this.

00:43:02My legs suddenly became weak.

00:43:04I was gripped by panic and terror.

00:43:06And in front of him appeared an elderly man in flowing clothes and a horned hat.

00:43:10His eyes blazing as he beckoned Bakulin deeper into the grotto.

00:43:13Bakulin reached for the safety rope.

00:43:15They pulled him up to the surface and he was never able to go down again.

00:43:20After him, several other scientists told similar stories.

00:43:22One of them recalled how his colleagues abandoned their equipment and ran for the exit, pushing each other aside.

00:43:28Although none of them could explain exactly what happened there.

00:43:31All the speleologists and scientists who have been there say that if you stay in it for too long, you

00:43:35might lose your mind.

00:43:36The locals don't go in there at all because they're afraid.

00:43:39Scientists installed magnetometers inside and found that periodically, pulses of exactly the same amplitude, 1000 nanoteslas, appear in the cave.

00:43:48And it is exactly these low frequency emissions, according to neurobiologists, that cause anxiety, disorientation and hallucinations in people.

00:43:56When the pulse appeared, bats and pigeons at the entrance lost their orientation and began to fly around chaotically.

00:44:01So it's not a matter of imagination.

00:44:03There was indeed a scientific explanation for such behavior.

00:44:06The source of this pulse was never found.

00:44:09There are no generators under the cave.

00:44:11Geologists suggest the fault in the Earth's crust.

00:44:13But for now, that's just a hypothesis.

00:44:15After the study was published, all sorts of theories started to appear.

00:44:19Some claimed it was a forgotten military radar.

00:44:22Others said it was an alien ship that keeps sending a distress signal.

00:44:25Or a portal between worlds.

00:44:27The white shaman seen in the cave is most likely a hallucination caused by this radiation.

00:44:31Most likely.

00:44:33But the scientists who explained this, never returned to the cave again.

00:44:37If you remember how shamans chose places for their rituals, they always looked for something special.

00:44:42Caves with unusual acoustics, where even a quiet sound spreads throughout the entire space.

00:44:47Places where the Earth itself does something to your mind.

00:44:50Plants that alter perception and immerse you in an altered state of consciousness.

00:44:54In Kashkulak, this radiation causes hallucinations even in experienced scientists with equipment.

00:45:01Now imagine what happened to a shaman who came here intentionally in the dark after several days of fasting.

00:45:07He got exactly what he came for.

00:45:09He just didn't know it was physics, not spirits.

00:45:12Warrior Infants

00:45:14In southern Italy, in the municipality of Ponte Cagnano Faiano, builders started digging a pit at a former tobacco factory

00:45:21and called in archaeologists.

00:45:23They arrived and discovered 34 tombs from the 4th and 3rd centuries BC left by the Samnites, an ancient Italian

00:45:31people who fought Rome for several centuries and were eventually absorbed by it.

00:45:36Samnite tombs are regularly found in the area, so there's nothing sensational about that.

00:45:40But when they started examining the contents, one detail kept bothering them.

00:45:4415 out of the 34 tombs belong to children from newborns to 10 years old, which is rare in itself.

00:45:50Children's burials are usually less well-preserved, but that's not the main point.

00:45:53In several of the children's tombs, they found bronze belts, wide and well-preserved.

00:45:58Among the Samnites, such belts were a symbol of an adult male warrior.

00:46:02They were worn as a sign of status and belonging to the military class.

00:46:05A 5-year-old was too small and too young for such a belt, and its symbolism made no sense

00:46:10for a child.

00:46:11So why is it in a child's grave?

00:46:13Scientists offered two explanations.

00:46:15The first explanation is that the belt was a symbol of who this child was supposed to become.

00:46:19He died before his time, but his parents buried him as a warrior, as if they gave him in death

00:46:23what he didn't have time to receive in life.

00:46:25The second explanation is even more interesting.

00:46:28It's possible that the Samnites had a custom of inducting children into the warrior class from a very early age,

00:46:34long before a child could even hold a weapon.

00:46:36Something like an oath from the cradle.

00:46:39Neither version has been proven.

00:46:40But both say the same thing.

00:46:42These people view childhood very differently than we do.

00:46:45In men's tombs there are spear and javelin tips, while in women's tombs there are rings and jewelry.

00:46:50All the burials are arranged in family groups next to each other.

00:46:5334 tombs.

00:46:54And then half of them children with adult warrior belts on their small bones.

00:46:58Black Madonna.

00:47:00All over Europe there are icons and statues of the Mother of God with a very dark face.

00:47:05Thousands of people visit them.

00:47:07There are several reasons, and they are different for each image.

00:47:10An old church's candle suit settled on the paint for centuries.

00:47:13Oil varnishes turned yellow and brown.

00:47:15Sometimes restorers remove the top layer and see a lighter palette underneath.

00:47:19That's how the Madonna of Montserrat in Catalonia became darkened.

00:47:23Many city icons that never left smoky interiors also darkened in this way.

00:47:27There were also deliberate choices.

00:47:29Medieval masters sometimes worked on dark wood.

00:47:32And painters chose deep, dusky tones to emphasize antiquity and solemnity.

00:47:36In Poland the image of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa has a dark face also because of later restorations after

00:47:41damage.

00:47:42The result is the same.

00:47:43The eye is drawn to the deep skin tone against the gold of the halo.

00:47:46The image stands out from the rest.

00:47:48Why did such icons come to be seen as miracle working?

00:47:51Its age and resilience made an impression.

00:47:53The dark face looked like it had survived fires, wars and thefts.

00:47:57That means the image never abandoned the people.

00:48:00Preachers recalled the line from the Song of Songs,

00:48:02I am black and beautiful.

00:48:03People heard it as a sign of humility and mystery.

00:48:05For a pilgrim this was not a museum portrait, but a face with a history of wounds and deliverance.

00:48:10There is a theory about a lingering influence of ancient goddesses like Isis.

00:48:13It sounds striking, but there is no direct evidence.

00:48:16Historians are cautious.

00:48:17In most cases the reason is earthly.

00:48:19Soot from candles, darkened varnish, dark wood.

00:48:21Then comes centuries of prayers, vows and gratitude.

00:48:24That's how an image earns a reputation for working miracles.

00:48:27There is another layer of meaning.

00:48:28The dark face is perceived as universal.

00:48:30It's easier for people of any nation and skin color to accept it.

00:48:34That's why such images became valuable.

00:48:38In the middle of the 19th century London was swept by a craze for medieval lead artifacts.

00:48:50Medallions, amulets and coins with rough carvings, strange dates and meaningless inscriptions appeared on the market.

00:48:56Many experts considered these items to be genuine.

00:48:59No contemporary would make a forgery so carelessly.

00:49:02They were wrong.

00:49:03The authors turned out to be two small time hustlers.

00:49:06Ilya Smeet and Charles Ethan, in 1857 they set up a small scale production on the banks of the Thames.

00:49:12Plaster molds, lid alloys, acid aging, covered with river silt.

00:49:16They didn't know how to imitate inscriptions.

00:49:19They wrote at random.

00:49:20They used Arabic numerals where Roman numerals were used in the middle ages.

00:49:24Crudeness became proof of authenticity.

00:49:27Leading antiquarians, including Charles Roach Smith,

00:49:29seriously claimed that a forger would have worked more cleanly.

00:49:32The scale of the deception was enormous.

00:49:35Up to 10,000 items in just a few years.

00:49:38Doubts arose because of the quantity.

00:49:40In 1858, Henry Sayer Cumming publicly announced the forgeries.

00:49:45But the dispute dragged on until politician and antiquarian Charles Reed organized his own investigation.

00:49:50He persuaded one of the accomplices and obtained the plaster molds.

00:49:54Direct evidence of the origin of the antiquities.

00:49:57Then the story became even more absurd.

00:49:59After being exposed, Smith and Eaton continued their craft and even improved the quality.

00:50:04There were arrests based on a priest's tip release due to lack of evidence and Smith's disappearance after his partner's

00:50:09death.

00:50:10The duo's legacy is still alive today.

00:50:12Their medieval works can be found in museum collections and pop up at online auctions,

00:50:17once again catching those who believe that crookedness is a sign of authenticity.

00:50:21Considering the number of artifacts they made,

00:50:23it's hard to imagine how many are now kept in museums around the world and especially in private collections.

00:50:28After all, few people would want to admit that at some point they bought a metal fake for a huge

00:50:33amount of money.

00:50:34He burned down a wonder of the world for likes.

00:50:37In ancient Ephesus, on the western coast of Asia Minor,

00:50:40archaeologists restored the outlines of the famous Temple of Artemis,

00:50:44one of the seven wonders of the world.

00:50:46Only fragments of columns and the foundation remain,

00:50:49but even that is enough to understand its scale.

00:50:52However, one of the strangest and saddest stories of antiquity is connected with the temple,

00:50:56the story of Herostratus.

00:50:58In 356 BC, he set fire to the temple.

00:51:01Not for revenge or faith, but for fame.

00:51:03Herostratus wanted his name to be remembered, even if he had to pay for it with his life.

00:51:08The temple burned down on the same night, according to legend, that Alexander the Great was born.

00:51:12The fire destroyed one of the greatest structures of the ancient world

00:51:15and became an example of senseless destruction.

00:51:18After the fire, the authorities of Ephesus forbade anyone to speak the name of Herostratus under penalty of death,

00:51:22but this ban had the opposite effect.

00:51:24The name survived.

00:51:26The historian Theopompus recorded it, along with the paradox itself.

00:51:29The man who destroyed the masterpiece became immortal precisely because of his crime.

00:51:34When archaeologists in the 20th century uncovered the lower layers of the sanctuary,

00:51:37they found traces of an ancient fire, charred beams and melted fragments of roof tiles.

00:51:41And even in these ashes, a strange irony can be felt.

00:51:44The greatest temple of its era was destroyed not by enemies, not by a natural disaster,

00:51:49but by a man who needed to be remembered.

00:51:51Today, the name Herostratus has become a symbol of destructive fame.

00:51:54A reminder that history remembers not only creators, but also those who tried to be remembered at any cost.

00:52:00Even today, we often see bloggers who are willing to do terrible things for the sake of popularity.

00:52:04And it turns out, people practiced this even thousands of years ago.

00:52:09They smashed his head and threw him into a well.

00:52:12The city of Nida was the capital of a region within the Roman province of Upper Germany,

00:52:17not far from present-day Frankfurt.

00:52:19The settlement was completely abandoned by 260 AD,

00:52:22and it was only discovered in the second half of the 20th century,

00:52:26during the construction of Römerstadt.

00:52:28The skeletons in the well were found in 1993, during extensive excavations in the Hedernheim area.

00:52:35The 10-meter-deep well was located in the courtyard of a stone house

00:52:38and was filled with bricks, ceramics and other debris.

00:52:41At the bottom lay the bones of a young woman,

00:52:43a man aged 25 to 30 and a child aged 2 to 3 years.

00:52:48All three died from cranial injuries around the year 250 AD.

00:52:52The discovery quickly attracted attention and became known as the murder in Nida.

00:52:56In 2011, it was presented at an exhibition on crime in the Roman Empire

00:53:01at the Frankfurt Archaeological Museum.

00:53:03Forensic experts from Frankfurt,

00:53:05Constanzia Nis, reconstructed the face of the murdered woman,

00:53:09and specialists from the Frankfurt Police Department investigated the details of the crime.

00:53:14Apparently, the fatal injuries were inflicted with blunt objects

00:53:17while the victims were lying on the ground.

00:53:19Judging by the absence of injuries on the adults' hands, the victims did not resist.

00:53:23They were either tied up or already unconscious.

00:53:27Researchers believe that the victims belonged to the local population.

00:53:30Their deaths occurred during a turbulent time,

00:53:33when the Romans were already gradually leaving the city.

00:53:36Numerous buildings stood empty, and some areas were abandoned.

00:53:39Raids by the Germanic tribes resulted in casualties among the city's residents.

00:53:44Perhaps these three died as a result of one of those raids.

00:53:47But local crime could also have been the cause.

00:53:49DNA analysis showed that the woman was related to the child, but the man was not his father.

00:53:54Unfortunately, we are unlikely to ever learn the details of the drama that unfolded.

00:53:58The poet kept an ancient ant.

00:54:01Sometimes the past disappears in entire layers, and sometimes it is preserved.

00:54:05It can be preserved in something so small that it goes unnoticed for decades in an ordinary museum box.

00:54:11In Germany, in Weimar, the personal collection of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is kept.

00:54:17We are used to remembering him as a poet, but he was also a passionate naturalist.

00:54:22By the time of his death, he had more than 18,000 stones minerals and various natural specimens.

00:54:27And recently, scientists studied a piece of amber from this collection, and found an ant about 40 million years old

00:54:34inside it.

00:54:35It got trapped in resin back when there were completely different forests, different animals, and a different climate on Earth.

00:54:41Then the resin hardened, turned into amber, ended up in Goethe's collection, and lay among other specimens for almost 200

00:54:47years.

00:54:48The most interesting thing is that the ant was preserved so well, that they were able to scan it with

00:54:52a tomograph, and create a detailed three-dimensional model.

00:54:55Scientists saw details of the internal structure that had never been observed before in such ancient ants.

00:55:00And what I like about this story is not just the age of the find itself.

00:55:0440 million years is almost impossible to imagine.

00:55:07This ant wasn't found on a distant expedition, it wasn't lying underground in a sealed cave, and it wasn't waiting

00:55:13for archaeologists somewhere in the desert.

00:55:15It was lying in a museum collection, in a box that simply hadn't been looked at for a long time.

00:55:20It turns out, sometimes you don't have to travel to the ends of the Earth to make a discovery.

00:55:24It could be sitting on a shelf, labeled by a person who died almost 200 years ago.

00:55:27And while we think that everything important has already been studied long ago,

00:55:32old personal collections may still hold things that have lain undisturbed for tens of millions of years.

00:55:39The mystery of the black slime.

00:55:41Scientists have finally managed to solve the mystery of the black slime that is often found in Egyptian tombs.

00:55:48In 2018, archaeologists in Alexandria unearthed a giant black sarcophagus that was completely filled with this eerie substance.

00:55:56And only a few years later were scientists able to understand what it was.

00:55:59Let me remind you that scientists and historians expected to find Alexander the Great in this sarcophagus.

00:56:06But when they opened it, they were shocked.

00:56:08Inside there were three skeletons.

00:56:10Two men and one woman.

00:56:12These skeletons were covered in a black substance.

00:56:14Conspiracy theorists got involved in the study.

00:56:17They claimed that by opening this tomb, humanity would be cursed,

00:56:21and those who opened it would release a dark force that would spread across the entire planet.

00:56:25Fortunately, scientists are not cowards.

00:56:28The researchers collected more than a hundred samples of slime from other ancient Egyptian burials as well.

00:56:33The analysis showed that the slime consists of vegetable oil, tree resin, beeswax, animal fat, and bitumen.

00:56:41At least, all the samples contained these ingredients.

00:56:44Only the proportions were different.

00:56:46Interestingly, all these ingredients were imported into Egypt and the mixing was done by specialists assigned for this purpose.

00:56:53First, the mummy was placed in the sarcophagus, and then it was either coated or poured over with this liquid.

00:56:59Most likely, besides its religious significance, the black slime also helped preserve the deceased.

00:57:04It was believed that in this way, the mummy would be safe, both spiritually and physically.

00:57:10A huge crater.

00:57:12Researchers in Antarctica have discovered a huge crater.

00:57:15And most likely, it was left by an asteroid.

00:57:17And who knows, maybe it was this cosmic collision that influenced the evolution of dinosaurs?

00:57:23Scientists believe that the effect of the asteroid in Antarctica was even greater than the one that wiped out the

00:57:28dinosaurs.

00:57:28This may have led to catastrophic destruction at that time.

00:57:32The disaster claimed many lives.

00:57:34But as it turned out, it not only took lives, but also gave them.

00:57:38This crater, more than 300 miles wide, was created by a huge asteroid about 250 million years ago.

00:57:44Scientists believe that this asteroid impact may have been one of the causes of the global extinction of species on

00:57:50Earth.

00:57:51But at the same time, this disaster could have created the conditions for the emergence of dinosaurs.

00:57:56As a result of this catastrophe, one of the creatures that came out on top was the archosaur, the ancestor

00:58:01of the dinosaurs.

00:58:02The deepest graveyard. 7,000 meters beneath the ocean's surface.

00:58:07Humans almost never descend to such depths.

00:58:10There is eternal darkness there.

00:58:13The temperature is around zero.

00:58:15And the pressure would crush an ordinary submarine like a simple tin can.

00:58:19Sunlight has never reached here in the entire history of the planet.

00:58:24And it is here, at the very bottom of the Indian Ocean, that the graveyard lies.

00:58:28Its size is beyond comprehension.

00:58:30According to scientists, more than 10 million whales rest in one area.

00:58:34Skeletons.

00:58:35In some places, up to 760 carcasses per second quark kilometer.

00:58:39That's denser than cars in a packed parking lot during rush hour.

00:58:43Only instead of cars, there are dead whales.

00:58:45And this field of bones stretches for hundreds of kilometers in all directions.

00:58:49It was discovered by the crew of a research vessel.

00:58:52The deep sea vehicle made more than 30 dives along a strip, 1,200 kilometers long.

00:58:57It's like traveling across an entire small country from edge to edge.

00:59:01Only underwater and in complete darkness.

00:59:03What lay below is what scientists call a whale necropolis.

00:59:07But what's so strange about that, you might ask?

00:59:09It would seem that at such depths, in the cold and darkness, a dead whale should be preserved forever.

00:59:15Like in a freezer, but it's the opposite.

00:59:16As soon as the carcass sinks to the bottom, it's attacked from all sides by swarms of scavengers.

00:59:23Bacteria and truly incredible creatures.

00:59:25Bone-eating worms.

00:59:26They have neither a mouth nor a stomach.

00:59:29But they can dissolve and consume bone itself.

00:59:31In just a few years, they strip a giant whale down to the last rib, leaving nothing behind.

00:59:37By all rights, the bones shouldn't have lasted long here.

00:59:40But these have been lying here for millions of years.

00:59:42And the oldest of them are about 5 million years old.

00:59:45Moreover, around each skeleton, a separate tiny world is teeming with life.

00:59:50Blind worms.

00:59:50Pale mollusks.

00:59:52Creatures you won't find anywhere else on Earth.

00:59:54An entire ecosystem that feeds on death.

00:59:57And among the remains, they even found a whale that science didn't know about at all.

01:00:01A completely new species, raised from the depths for the first time.

01:00:06A race of giants.

01:00:07We dive into the mysteries of the past.

01:00:10Once, about 5,000 years ago, real giants walked the lands of China.

01:00:15Their height could reach up to 2 meters, which for those times was simply an astronomical figure.

01:00:20You might wonder, where did such gigantic height come from in those distant times?

01:00:25Scientists believe it's all about abundant food.

01:00:28Some huge people, just like in fantasy novels, lived in the Shandong province.

01:00:33Their living conditions could be considered quite comfortable for their time.

01:00:37They had access to a variety of food.

01:00:39Their homes had bedrooms and other amenities.

01:00:42Since 2016, researchers have been conducting excavations near the settlement of Zhengan.

01:00:47And the giants are not the only amazing discovery.

01:00:50Earlier, they found ruined buildings, numerous burials, and even sacrificial pits.

01:00:55Interestingly, the giants were most likely part of the Ineolithic Longshan culture.

01:00:59This was a transitional period from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, when people began to use copper tools.

01:01:05An interesting feature of the culture is three-legged vessels.

01:01:08They may be connected to the development of animal husbandry.

01:01:13The Guardian from Mojo

01:01:15On the highlands in Peru, in the Mojo area, there is a stone statue.

01:01:19It's not tall, looks simple, but nevertheless, it gives off a strange feeling.

01:01:23At first glance, it's just a carved monolith in the Tiwanaku style.

01:01:27Clear lines, a static pose, hands folded on the stomach.

01:01:31But the longer you look at it, the more it seems that the figure is somehow out of place.

01:01:35As if it came not from this time and not even from this continent.

01:01:38The statue is called Mojo Huaca.

01:01:40Its base is made in the shape of a cross, resembling the Andean Chakana.

01:01:45An ancient symbol where each side represents a level of the world.

01:01:48The upper, the middle, and the lower.

01:01:49But in this case, the cross is twisted in a spiral, clockwise, which is rare in itself,

01:01:55and possibly points to a ritual meaning that has been lost over time.

01:01:59However, what draws the most attention is not the style or the symbol,

01:02:02but the strange similarities, the pose, the statue, her hands lowered and folded on her stomach.

01:02:07At the direct gaze, all this unexpectedly echoes the images of the Moai from Easter Island,

01:02:12and even earlier, the stone stells from Gobekli Tepe in Turkey.

01:02:16The same composition, the same gestures, the same restraint, completely different cultures,

01:02:20separated by thousands of kilometers and centuries, but as if using the same language of form.

01:02:26The La Palma Vase.

01:02:28La Palma is one of the canary islands of Spain in the Atlantic, northwest of Africa.

01:02:33On its northwest coast, in the Tijorafia area, in a cave near human remains,

01:02:38a rare item was found, an intact ceramic vase from the 13th to 15th centuries.

01:02:43This pottery was made by the Benahorites, the indigenous people of La Palma before the Spanish conquest.

01:02:49The discovery was made as part of the Proyecto Occidente project.

01:02:52Student Lerdes Boroso noticed the vessel during the survey.

01:02:55Francisco Coamano's team documented the context and carefully extracted the object.

01:03:00Analysis confirmed the burial context. The vessel was found in situ, not in a mixed layer, which is extremely rare.

01:03:06The shape is typical of the local tradition. A rounded bottom, a wide neck, and smooth walls without ornamentation.

01:03:12Such vessels were used both in everyday life and in rituals.

01:03:15Found next to the remains, it is appropriate to interpret it as part of the burial assemblage.

01:03:19Now archaeologists have a chance to analyze the composition of the clay and additives,

01:03:23look for traces of the contents, and compare the shape with other complexes on the island.

01:03:26The main value is its intact condition and precise context.

01:03:30This lets us move beyond generalizations about Canarian style and examine a specific practice.

01:03:35How exactly burials were arranged on La Palma in the late Middle Ages,

01:03:39and what was considered necessary to place next to the person.

01:03:431. The Green Mummy

01:03:44In one of the tombs of the Egyptian necropolis in Ebudos,

01:03:48archaeologists came across a sarcophagus covered on the inside with a thin green coating.

01:03:52At first, they thought it was just traces of copper or mold,

01:03:56but analysis showed that it was actually a mineral deposit of malachite.

01:03:59Over time, they soaked into the mummy's bandages and skin,

01:04:03giving the body a strange greenish tint.

01:04:05The burial is about 2,600 years old.

01:04:08Inside is a man, judging by the bones and artifacts,

01:04:11a wealthy person, but not a pharaoh.

01:04:13In the tomb, they found amulets, vessels with incense,

01:04:17and remnants of an oil mixture that covered the body before mummification.

01:04:20It was because of this mixture, which contained copper salts,

01:04:23that the mummy turned green after centuries.

01:04:25For the Egyptians, green was not just a decorative color.

01:04:29It was the color of rebirth, Osiris, vegetation, and eternal life.

01:04:33That's why even in this accidental chemical reaction, there is symbolism.

01:04:36The body truly became eternal, not metaphorically, but literally.

01:04:40Copper compounds could have entered the tomb from jewelry, vessels,

01:04:43or pigments used in the painting.

01:04:46But the result itself looks so unusual,

01:04:48that the mummy received the unofficial name, the Green One.

01:04:52Gigantsky Stol Korоля

01:04:55In the hills of the English county of Herefordshire,

01:04:58there is a stone structure that locals have associated for centuries

01:05:01with the legendary King Arthur.

01:05:03Nine vertical columns support a huge flat slab.

01:05:07According to legend, this is where Arthur defeated the giant,

01:05:09and the mark from the giant's fall is still shown on one of the stones.

01:05:13It sounds like a tale from a knightly romance.

01:05:15And for a long time, that's exactly how everyone treated it.

01:05:19But then, for the first time in history,

01:05:21archaeologists excavated what lies around and beneath the stones.

01:05:24The fairy tale faded away.

01:05:26Because reality turned out to be much more complicated.

01:05:29The structure was built by the first farmers of Britain about 6,000 years ago.

01:05:33That's one and a half thousand years older than the Egyptian pyramids

01:05:36and noticeably older than Stonehenge.

01:05:38Arthur wasn't even on the horizon back then.

01:05:41It would be several millennia before his time.

01:05:43Teams from the universities of Cardiff and Manchester,

01:05:46led by Professor Keith Ray and Julian Thomas,

01:05:49found out that this is not a solitary stone,

01:05:51but the heart of an entire sacred landscape,

01:05:54with a mound, an entrance, and a procession area.

01:05:57In terms of scale, scientists compared it to Stonehenge and other great sanctuaries.

01:06:01But it was built earlier.

01:06:03And here is what completely changes history.

01:06:05The people who built this were not just primitive people staying in one place.

01:06:10Near the monument, they found a quarry where they took the material from.

01:06:13And among the finds was rock crystal brought from North Wales.

01:06:16And a special volcanic stone from a distant Scottish island.

01:06:19That's hundreds of kilometers of travel.

01:06:21On foot, without wheels, without roads, without forests or rivers.

01:06:256,000 years ago,

01:06:27someone deliberately dragged beautiful rare stones across half the island to place them here.

01:06:32So the giant really has nothing to do with it.

01:06:34But what really happened turned out to be much more interesting than any legend about knights.

01:06:40The desert before the pharaohs.

01:06:42Now imagine a desert.

01:06:44No pyramids.

01:06:45No temples.

01:06:46Not the familiar Egypt from textbooks.

01:06:49Just vast dry expanses of eastern Sudan.

01:06:51Where today almost nothing suggests people once lived there.

01:06:55Sand.

01:06:55Stones.

01:06:56Occasional hills.

01:06:57And traces of old riverbeds that have long since dried up.

01:07:00And it was there that scientists began to notice strange circles.

01:07:03They weren't discovered during regular excavations, but from a satellite.

01:07:07For years, archaeologists studied satellite images of the Adbai Desert east of the Nile.

01:07:11And gradually it became clear that these weren't random spots on the ground.

01:07:15They were ancient burial structures.

01:07:17Large circular burial sites, sometimes up to 80 meters in diameter.

01:07:21In total, 260 of these structures have been found.

01:07:24And no one knew about them before.

01:07:26When similar monuments were excavated in other places, inside they found the bones of people and animals.

01:07:31Cows, sheep and goats.

01:07:33Moreover, the remains were often arranged not chaotically, but around a central figure.

01:07:37Scientists suggest that a chief or an important person might have been buried in the center.

01:07:42And the others were placed around him.

01:07:44And the most interesting thing here is the age.

01:07:46These burials date back to around the 4th or 3rd millennium BC.

01:07:51That is, they appeared even before Egypt became the Pharaonic Egypt that we know from the pyramids, mummies and golden

01:07:57masks.

01:07:58But they were not built by the Egyptians.

01:08:01These were the nomads of the Sahara.

01:08:03People who lived in the desert, raised herds and moved between places that still had water.

01:08:08Because the Sahara was not always like it is now.

01:08:10Once there was much more greenery here, with rivers, lakes and pastures.

01:08:14But then the climate started to change.

01:08:16The water disappeared.

01:08:18The land dried up.

01:08:18The familiar world of these people was vanishing right before their eyes.

01:08:22Perhaps that is why many burial sites are located near places that once served chieftains and offered watering holes.

01:08:28It creates a strange picture.

01:08:30Today, we see a desert where it seems like nothing could have ever happened.

01:08:33But from a satellite, a whole system of ancient monuments suddenly becomes visible,

01:08:38scattered over almost a thousand square kilometers.

01:08:40And this means that what we see was not just a random group of people,

01:08:43but a large culture with its own rules, rituals and possibly already a division between common people and the elite.

01:08:50No one knows for sure what happened to these nomads.

01:08:52Most likely, their world simply couldn't withstand the climate changes.

01:08:56The green Sahara dried up.

01:08:58The people left.

01:08:59But their burial circles remained in the desert as a trace of a civilization about which we still know too

01:09:05little.

01:09:06And a 15-million-year-old fossil.

01:09:09Emily Bezdik, a volunteer at the Calvert Marine Museum, discovered a unique fossil of a dolphin-like creature on a

01:09:16beach in Maryland, USA, that lived about 15 million years ago.

01:09:20The discovery was made during a walk on the beach, where the woman found a part of a skull measuring

01:09:2576 centimeters long and weighing about 23 kilograms.

01:09:29Steven Groff, a museum staff member, studied the fossil and identified it as belonging to an extinct species of marine

01:09:37animals similar to dolphins,

01:09:38which lived in the sea that covered Maryland millions of years ago.

01:09:42These creatures had an extended rostrum for hunting and reached lengths from 3.5 to 4.5 meters.

01:09:48They lived during the Miocene epoch, 12 to 20 million years ago.

01:09:52The reasons for their extinction remain unknown.

01:09:55And a fossilized skull will be displayed at the Calvert Marine Museum, where scientists will continue to study it.

01:10:01100. Iron Age Artifacts

01:10:06Archaeologists in Denmark have made an incredible discovery.

01:10:08More than 100 types of weapons including spears, swords, knives and a rare suit of chainmail.

01:10:12All of this was found under the house of an Iron Age chieftain.

01:10:15This collection is about 1.5 thousand years old, and it may have been part of a ritual offering following

01:10:20a triumph in the aftermath of a war.

01:10:22The weapons were found under two 5th century houses, which likely belonged to an influential chieftain capable of raising an

01:10:28army.

01:10:28Among the items are 119 spears, 8 swords, 5 knives and axe, and a chainmail shirt that is believed to

01:10:34have belonged to the chieftain himself.

01:10:36Such armor was expensive and difficult to make, which highlights its importance.

01:10:40In addition to the weapons, archaeologists found bronze neck rings known as oath rings, which were symbols of power in

01:10:46the Iron Age.

01:10:48Fragments of harness, a bronze horn and other metal objects that still need to be studied were also found.

01:10:54In the first to fourth centuries, Denmark was on the outskirts of the Roman Empire and was part of Greater

01:10:59Germania.

01:11:00The local people were mostly farmers, but Romans such as Julius Caesar mentioned the fierce Germanic Wars.

01:11:06Some scholars suggest that the Romans might have supplied local tribes with weapons to maintain order on the borders.

01:11:13Traces in stone

01:11:15In 1952 in Texas, in the bed of the Paloxi River, workers were clearing stone and came across a chain

01:11:21of clear footprints.

01:11:22These were dinosaur tracks, large, elongated, in some places almost a meter long.

01:11:27There were many of them.

01:11:29It seemed that ancient reptiles really did pass through this place, one after another, leaving a trail of footprints in

01:11:34the stone behind them.

01:11:35But nearby they noticed something strange, prints that looked like human footprints, long with outlines of toes.

01:11:39Some of them overlapped the dinosaur tracks.

01:11:42That's exactly why this place became a subject of debate.

01:11:46Some people saw the discovery as a sensation.

01:11:48Allegedly, it's proof that humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time.

01:11:51Scientists, however, were more cautious.

01:11:53Some explained the shape of the tracks by erosion, others by forgeries.

01:11:57There are known cases when similar human footprints were carved directly into the limestone to later sell them to tourists.

01:12:03There is still no definitive explanation.

01:12:04But regardless of the debates, the fact remains that these are traces of movement left 100 million years ago.

01:12:11And that alone is already quite astonishing.

01:12:14The sunken port of Cleopatra

01:12:16Off the coast near Taposiris Magna, west of Alexandria, archaeologists discover the submerged area with signs of an ancient harbor.

01:12:23Kathleen Martinez's team, together with marine archaeologist Bob Ballard, describes rows of massive foundations estimated to be over 6 meters

01:12:32high.

01:12:32Cemented blocks, fragments of columns, storage and transport amphorae.

01:12:37Most importantly, numerous anchors dating back to the era of Cleopatra 7th.

01:12:41Such a set of items usually accompanies a working port, keys, storage areas, navigational equipment.

01:12:48In 2022, an underground tunnel 1,227 meters long was discovered here, stretching toward the Mediterranean Sea.

01:12:56Its fill contained ceramics and objects from the Ptolemaic period.

01:12:59The harbor could have served the city complex and the temple of Toposiris Magna, and during the reign of Cleopatra,

01:13:05her fleet as well.

01:13:06This is indicated by the dating and the maritime nature of the finds.

01:13:09But test pits, dating based on sediment layers, and linking the structures to ancient shorelines are needed.

01:13:15If confirmed, we will get rare evidence of what the coastal network near the Ptolemaic capital looked like and how

01:13:20it worked.

01:13:21Not in texts, but in stone, wood and iron.

01:13:24A stone tower.

01:13:25In Barumini, Sardinia, there stands a strange structure.

01:13:29A three-story tower made of huge stone blocks, without cement, without arches, without metal.

01:13:35Everything holds together by weight and precision.

01:13:38This is Sunuraxi, the heart of the ancient Nuragic culture that lived here more than 3,000 years ago.

01:13:44The tower is surrounded by a ring of smaller towers, connected by walls, and inside there's a well carved right

01:13:48into the rock.

01:13:49It's 15 meters deep, and there's still water in it to this day.

01:13:52Scientists believe that the Nuragis served as a fortress, a symbol of power, and possibly a place for rituals at

01:13:58the same time.

01:13:59The unique thing about Sunuraxi is that it has been preserved almost completely.

01:14:03You can go up the stairs, walk through the inner corridors, and see how people of the Bronze Age build

01:14:08things.

01:14:09Each slab weighs several tons, but they are laid so precisely that you can't fit a knife blade between them.

01:14:13Explorations have shown that this place was used for centuries.

01:14:16First as a fortification, then as a settlement, later as a storage area, and even as a burial site.

01:14:21In the 20th century, archaeologist Giovanni Liliu excavated the complex and proved that it was not just a single tower,

01:14:27but an entire city made of stone.

01:14:29The Nuragis are a reminder that Bronze Age Europe was not dark.

01:14:32Here, people knew how to design, build, and create monuments that have stood for millennia.

01:14:38Another labyrinth beneath the city.

01:14:40Now, let's move to Scotland, on the southern outskirts of Edinburgh.

01:14:44There is a former mining village called Gilmerton.

01:14:47On the outside, it's an ordinary place.

01:14:49Houses, streets, cars, people go about their business.

01:14:53But just a few meters underground, there is a man-made labyrinth, the origin of which still cannot be properly

01:14:59explained.

01:14:59This is the Gilmerton Cave. Inside, there are corridors, halls, stone benches, tables, niches, and drainage channels.

01:15:07And a deep vertical well. All of this was carved directly into the sandstone by hand.

01:15:12No explosions, no modern equipment, no machines.

01:15:15Someone spent a very long time and worked very carefully to carve out an entire system of rooms underground.

01:15:21The official story was quite simple.

01:15:23It was believed that the cave was created by a local blacksmith, George Patterson.

01:15:26Allegedly, he worked almost alone for five years, and by 1724, he had made himself an underground dwelling.

01:15:33Later, he used this place as a secret tavern.

01:15:36On weekends, local gentlemen would guide down there to have a drink away from prying eyes.

01:15:39It sounds strange, but it's still believable.

01:15:42A blacksmith, an underground beer hall, stone tables, secret gatherings.

01:15:46It seems like a pretty plausible story.

01:15:48The problem is, later researchers began to notice that the cave might be much older than Patterson himself.

01:15:54Maybe he didn't carve it out from scratch, but simply found already existing passages.

01:15:59He expanded them and adapted them for himself.

01:16:02And that's when things get much more interesting.

01:16:04If the blacksmith wasn't the real creator, then who made this labyrinth?

01:16:08There are many theories.

01:16:10Some talk about the Templars, who might have hidden here after the persecutions.

01:16:14Others mention the Freemasons.

01:16:16Because the layout seems too well thought out for an ordinary cellar.

01:16:19Some see a connection with ancient Celtic rituals.

01:16:23Especially because of the deep vertical well.

01:16:25And a more down-to-earth version talks about smugglers who needed a place to secretly store whiskey and goods

01:16:30to avoid taxes.

01:16:32And the most frustrating thing for historians is that it's almost impossible to verify for sure now.

01:16:37The cave was used, altered, rebuilt, dirtied, cleaned, and changed again for centuries.

01:16:42Too many people left their traces there.

01:16:45And the earliest evidence could have simply disappeared.

01:16:47Gilmartin Cove is remarkable not because it's huge or older than the pyramids.

01:16:51It's strange because it's located right under an ordinary residential area.

01:16:56Yet no one knows for sure who created it or why.

01:16:58Sometimes a mystery isn't hidden in the desert or at the bottom of the sea.

01:17:02But literally right under the feet of people who walk above it every day.

01:17:06Not even thinking that there's an entire underground world below.

01:17:11X-rays of ancient mummies.

01:17:13The year is 2015, the Pechacamac archaeological site in Peru.

01:17:18200 mummified remains were discovered.

01:17:20Most of them were wrapped in several layers of cloth.

01:17:23And in order to prevent the mummies from being destroyed when trying to unwrap them,

01:17:27modern technology had to be used.

01:17:29Canadian scientists from the University of Western Ontario

01:17:32scanned the ancient mummies using a mobile X-ray unit.

01:17:36They were dated to 111470 AD.

01:17:40In six days, anthropologists took about 900 X-ray images

01:17:44and performed more than 30 CT scans.

01:17:47Later, using specialized computer programs,

01:17:50all the photographs were combined into a digital image.

01:17:53This made it possible to understand

01:17:55that not all the mummies were well preserved.

01:17:57And in some images, there was a surprise.

01:18:00Inside the mummy's heads, there were mysterious objects

01:18:02whose purpose is still unknown.

01:18:04One of the artifacts looked like a bent disc.

01:18:07Archaeologists nicknamed it TACO.

01:18:09In one mummy's eye socket, they saw a sharp object.

01:18:12And in another, they noticed a tattoo on the arm.

01:18:14One mummy was completely covered in cotton seeds.

01:18:17Scientists have not yet been able to explain the reason for this.

01:18:20They suggested that it was done for ritual purposes.

01:18:23In the fabrics that wrapped the mummies,

01:18:25scientists found small shells, stones, and unidentified artifacts.

01:18:29Despite such a huge number of mummies in one place,

01:18:32archaeologists still have one main question.

01:18:35Was the mummification procedure done intentionally

01:18:37or is it the result of the dry climate and burial in the sands

01:18:40that helped the mummies survive to this day?

01:18:43Fire, fish, and driftwood. 780,000 years.

01:18:48In the north of modern Israel, in the Jordan River Valley,

01:18:52there is a place called the Daughters of Jacob Bridge.

01:18:55Here, on the shore of a long vanished lake 780,000 years ago,

01:18:59very ancient people stopped here.

01:19:01Not yet those whom we call modern humans,

01:19:03but already quite similar to us.

01:19:06Scientists found charcoal from campfires, 266 samples,

01:19:10and in most cases, they determined exactly which type of tree the wood came from.

01:19:14More than half of the charcoal turned out to be remnants of ash trees,

01:19:17almost a tenth olive trees.

01:19:19But these trees didn't necessarily grow near the campsite in such numbers.

01:19:22So where did all this firewood come from?

01:19:24From the lake.

01:19:25Trees fall into the water, the current carries trunks and branches,

01:19:29and the lake washes them ashore.

01:19:31This is called driftwood.

01:19:32And scientists concluded that this place was chosen for the campsite,

01:19:35partly because the lake itself delivered ready-to-use firewood here.

01:19:38No need to chop. No need to carry.

01:19:41The firewood floated to the shore by itself 780,000 years ago.

01:19:46On the surface of the stone tools they found food remains,

01:19:48acorns, wild grains, nuts, aquatic plants,

01:19:52and bones from fish caught right in this lake and cooked over a fire.

01:19:55There are no hearths in the usual sense at the site,

01:19:57only scattered traces of burning in different spots,

01:20:00which the researchers called ghost hearths.

01:20:01They probably didn't start a fire from scratch each time,

01:20:04but instead preserved the already burning fire,

01:20:07carried smoldering embers with them,

01:20:09and didn't let the fire go out.

01:20:10Even today in Africa there are tribes that do exactly this,

01:20:13because making fire by friction is long and difficult,

01:20:16while preserving an already burning fire is much easier.

01:20:19There is evidence that people used fire in this region even earlier,

01:20:23about a million years ago, at another site in Israel.

01:20:26The timeline keeps shifting further into the past every few years.

01:20:29But the site on the shore of this lake stands out because of its details.

01:20:33Here we see not just traces of fire, but a specific choice of location,

01:20:37a specific choice of fuel, a specific fish prepared in a specific way.

01:20:41780,000 years ago.

01:20:45Ruins of ancient civilizations.

01:20:47Captain Robert Scott and his team came face to face with an ancient civilization

01:20:51beyond the icy wall of Antarctica.

01:20:54They found traces from pre-flood times and even filmed,

01:20:57can you imagine what it's like to see the ruins of an ancient city,

01:21:01pyramids, columns and statues in the very center of Antarctica?

01:21:05This ancient civilization may even be older than those we learn about in school.

01:21:09The proof of this is a map from 1531, where Antarctica is shown without ice.

01:21:15It's strange, because according to our history,

01:21:17Antarctica was only discovered in 1820 by Russian explorers.

01:21:21Did you know that the North and South Poles have switched places 171 times

01:21:24over the last 76 million years?

01:21:27And, the last time this happened was about 12,000 years ago.

01:21:31This explains why all the secrets of Antarctica are now hidden under a kilometer thick layer of ice.

01:21:36According to the latest reports, there is a huge network of passages and tunnels under Antarctica,

01:21:42at a depth of 4 kilometers.

01:21:44Champagne at the bottom of the sea.

01:21:46A may-dive near the Polish Hell Peninsula in the Gulf of Gdańsk brought a double discovery.

01:21:51At a depth of 60 to 70 meters, specialists from Baltitech, instead of the sought-after World War II,

01:21:58submarine came across two 18th-century sailing ships lying 2 kilometers apart.

01:22:03The first ship was loaded with green glass bottles and stone jugs.

01:22:06The analysis of the liquid is still ahead, but based on previous finds,

01:22:10some of the bottles surely contained champagne and natural mineral water from seltzers.

01:22:14At that time, it was considered almost a medicine and was supplied to royal palaces, including St. Petersburg.

01:22:21The second ship was built a little later, at the end of the 18th century.

01:22:25The hull is well preserved.

01:22:26The low temperature and weak currents of the Baltic slow down the decomposition of the wood.

01:22:30Both objects are located right under the modern shipping route, so raising them to the surface is unlikely.

01:22:37Archaeologists will work with robots and photogrammetry.

01:22:39The find confirms the busy trade between the Baltic, Northern Europe and Russia.

01:22:44Russia long before steamships, and it shows that the bottom of the shallow sea remains an archive

01:22:48where commercial voyages turn into time capsules.

01:22:53China is drilling to the mantle from land.

01:22:56In 2026, the ship Mengxiang departed from the port of Guangzhou.

01:23:00The cost is $470 million.

01:23:02The goal is to drill through the Earth's crust and reach the mantle for the first time in history.

01:23:07Take a second to grasp the scale.

01:23:09We have launched probes beyond the solar system, photographed a black hole and set foot on the moon.

01:23:15But at the same time, no one, not a single person, has ever held a real piece of the mantle

01:23:19from Earth in their hands.

01:23:20All our knowledge about what lies deeper than a few kilometers down is mathematics.

01:23:25Seismic waves, models, indirect data.

01:23:27A simple comparison.

01:23:29An apple.

01:23:29The skin is the Earth's crust.

01:23:31The flesh is the mantle.

01:23:32The seeds are the core.

01:23:34In all of human history, we have never even bitten through the skin.

01:23:37Why on a ship and not on land?

01:23:39Under the continents the crust is 30 to 50 kilometers thick, unreachable.

01:23:42Under the ocean it's only 5 to 7.

01:23:44That's exactly where the Mohorovicic boundary is.

01:23:47The moho is the boundary between the crust and the mantle.

01:23:49Mengxiang is aiming for 11 kilometers beneath the ocean floor.

01:23:52At 300 degrees and a pressure of 2,000 atmospheres, the USSR already tried.

01:23:58The Kola Superdeep Borehole, 1970.

01:24:00The Kola Peninsula, 12,262 meters deep.

01:24:03Still a world record.

01:24:04But they didn't reach the mantle.

01:24:06At 7 kilometers they expected basalt.

01:24:09They found granite saturated with hot water, which shouldn't have been there.

01:24:12The temperature turned out to be twice as high as calculated.

01:24:15The drill bits were melting.

01:24:16The drill string, weighing 200 tons, broke under its own weight.

01:24:19In 1992 the whole project was mothballed.

01:24:21But the most unexpected lesson from Kola.

01:24:24At depths where life shouldn't have existed they found microorganisms alive.

01:24:28This turned all understanding of the boundaries of the biosphere upside down.

01:24:31Mengxiang is going where Kola didn't reach.

01:24:34Taking into account everything learned from the Kola borehole.

01:24:37180 meters long, 33 meters wide, 9 laboratories on board.

01:24:41The main innovation is the RMR system,

01:24:43which returns the drilling fluid back to the ship instead of dumping it to the bottom.

01:24:46Without it, the borehole walls would collapse at that depth.

01:24:50Why spend half a billion?

01:24:52First of all, to finally see, not just guess,

01:24:5499% of what we know about the Earth's interior is indirect data.

01:24:57A direct core sample from the mantle.

01:24:59A pristine, unchanged specimen.

01:25:00For the first time in history.

01:25:02Plus, core samples preserved the climate record for tens of millions of years.

01:25:06The longest weather diary on the planet.

01:25:07Secondly, life.

01:25:08The Kola borehole revealed microorganisms where they couldn't possibly exist.

01:25:12Many biologists today believe that life actually originated not in the surface ocean,

01:25:16but precisely in such conditions.

01:25:17In hydrothermal systems of the deep crust.

01:25:20If this is confirmed, it would answer the main question of biology.

01:25:23And at the same time, it's an argument in favor of life in the subsurface oceans of Europa,

01:25:28Jupiter's moon, or in the geysers of Enceladus.

01:25:30Third money.

01:25:31Mengxiang combines scientific drilling with the exploration of gas hydrates,

01:25:34flammable ice, frozen methane on the ocean floor.

01:25:36The world's reserves are 20,000 trillion cubic meters.

01:25:40In the South China Sea alone, there are 84 trillion.

01:25:42Plus, rare earth elements on the ocean floor,

01:25:45without which electric car batteries and military electronics won't work.

01:25:48The market is worth trillions of dollars.

01:25:50China wants to be first.

01:25:52And won't we pierce the Earth?

01:25:53Number rei-

01:25:54A well with a diameter of less than 30 centimeters

01:25:56won't destabilize a lithospheric plate that's thousands of kilometers wide.

01:26:00It's like a needle in a concrete wall.

01:26:02The plan is to finish by the year 2030.

01:26:04A Koloel once found water where it shouldn't have been.

01:26:07It found life where it shouldn't have been.

01:26:10Mengxiang is going three kilometers deeper than the basalt floor of the ocean.

01:26:13By the year 2030, we might have answers that could change several scientific disciplines at once.

01:26:19Or new questions.

01:26:20Which, honestly, is even more interesting.

01:26:22Suzanne's was richer than Tutankhamun.

01:26:24He just got unlucky with the date of discovery.

01:26:27How many stories like that do we still not know?

01:26:29Simply because something more important happened on that day.

01:26:32Write in the comments which story touched you the most.

01:26:35Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode.

01:26:38Goodbye everyone.

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