Speaker 1: I want you to picture something for a second. It's
a mundane tuesday. Maybe you're out walking your dog in
the woods behind your house, or maybe you're in your
backyard finally getting around to digging that hole for the
new apple tree you bought. Or maybe you're just standing
on a beach skipping a stone across the water. You
are completely zoned out thinking about what to make for dinner,
or that email you forgot to send, and then clink
your shovel hit something hard, or your dog falls into
a hole that wasn't there yesterday, and in that split second,
you haven't just found a rock or a root. You
found a thread that, once pulled, unravels thousands of years
of human history.
Speaker 2: It is a terrifying and exhilarating thought, isn't it.
Speaker 1: It really is.
Speaker 2: We like to think of history as this carefully curated
library where we know where all the books are and
they are alphabetized. Yeah, But the reality is we are
walking on top of a massive, silent, chaotic archive. And
sometimes the librarian isn't a PhD with a brush and
a trowel. Sometimes the librarian is a goat or storm
or sheer dumb. Look.
Speaker 1: I love the idea of a goat as a librarian.
Welcome to thrilling threads. We are pulling on those loose
strings of history to see what unravels. I like that
today isn't about the planned expeditions or the dusty academic
papers where everyone knows what they are looking for. It
is about the sheer blind luck that has given us
some of our greatest treasures.
Speaker 2: Serendipity is the word of the day. We are looking
at how accidents pure chants have shaped our understanding of
the human story.
Speaker 1: I honestly love this topic because it makes you wonder
what we're missing. If these massive discoveries were accidents, what
are we walking past every day?
Speaker 2: I mean, what is currently under a parking lot in
Ohio exactly? That is the question that keeps archaeologists up
at night. We are going to explore ten specific ancient
discoveries found entirely by.
Speaker 1: Accident, and our mission here isn't just a list cool
stuff found in the dirt. We want to understand how
these accidents forced us to rewrite the textbooks on religon,
technology and daily life in the ancient world. We are
going to look at the chemistry, the mechanics, and the
sociology behind these fines.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're getting into the weeds on this.
Speaker 1: And just so everyone knows, we are pulling this directly
from a collection of historical accounts, forensic reports, and archaeological
records regarding accidental finds. We have got the facts, we
have got the dates, but we are going to read
between the lines a bit.
Speaker 2: Shall we start digging?
Speaker 1: Let's do it so. Our first section involves the people
who are arguably most intimate with the land, farmers. You're
tilling the soil looking for a crop, and you find
an empire.
Speaker 2: This brings us to nineteen seventy four in China's a
shunk Se.
Speaker 1: Province, right, and the setting is crucial here. It's not
a glamorous treasure hunt.
Speaker 2: It is a drought, a really bad one.
Speaker 1: These farmers are desperate. They aren't looking for gold, They
are looking for water. They are digging a well near
the city of Sheen.
Speaker 2: It is a survival situation. And as they are digging,
their shovels strike hardened earth. Now, if you are a farmer,
you know the difference between a rock and something else,
something manufactured exactly. They start pulling up fragments.
Speaker 1: At first, they think it's just broken pottery, right, like, oh, great.
Speaker 2: Old trash exactly. But then they look closer. These aren't
just pot shods. These are pieces of sculpted human faces. Wow, torsos,
and bronze weapons.
Speaker 1: I want to pause on the moment of discovery. Farmers
digging a well, we usually picture them pulling up a
clay pot, but you mentioned weapons. Bronze weapons buried for
two millennia usually come out looking like green lumps of corrosion,
but these didn't.
Speaker 2: That is the detail that baffled scientists for decades. When
they pulled out the swords and arrowheads, specifically the Kin swords,
they were.
Speaker 1: Pristine, pristine, how shiny.
Speaker 2: Sharp enough to split a hair for roughly forty years.
The prevailing theory was that the Kin dynasty had figured
out a form of anti rest technology that we didn't
reinvent until the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 1: You're talking about chrome plating exactly.
Speaker 2: Chrome plating tests and then I teen seventies showed traces
of chromium on the blades, So the narrative became ancient
Chinese metallurgists invented chrome.
Speaker 1: Plating, which is a huge story.
Speaker 2: It was a huge story. It fit perfectly with the
narrative of the Kin as technological savants. But and here
is where modern science ruins a good story. A study
in twenty nineteen completely flipped this.
Speaker 1: How do you disprove chrome plating that is physically.
Speaker 2: There by looking at where the chromium was. It wasn't
evenly distributed on the blades like a plating process would be.
It was clumpy, and crucially, it was found mostly near
the handles where the wooden fittings used to be.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't on the tip of the sword.
Speaker 2: Right. It turns out that chromium wasn't technology, it was contamination.
The Kin used a specific lacquer to treat the wooden handles,
which was rich in chromium. As the wood rotted over
two thousand years, it leached onto the metal.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't a high tech rustproofing recipe.
Speaker 2: No, the preservation was actually due to something much more
mundane but equally lucky, the soil chemistry. The pH level
of the she and soil is exceptionally high and is
very dense. It essentially vacuum sealed the bronze, preventing oxidation.
Geological accident, not a technological miracle that.
Speaker 1: Actually makes it more impressive to me. It means the
miracle was the earth itself. But let's go back to
the faces. You mentioned individuality.
Speaker 2: Yes, thousands of them, and no two are alike.
Speaker 1: I've read that some historians think they weren't just modeled
on real people, but that there was a quota system involved.
Speaker 2: Right, this is the logistics of eternity. You don't build
eight thousand unique statues without a supply chain. That would
make Amazon jealous. I mean, the scale is just it's staggering.
We have found inscriptions on the backs of the statues,
essentially made by stamps. They tracked output by workshop. If
a batch of soldiers was substandard, the emperor's overseers knew
exactly which artisan to execute.
Speaker 1: So the variety in the faces, the different earshapes, the hairstyles.
That wasn't just art for art's sake. It was quality control.
Speaker 2: In a way. Yes, it was a method of accountability.
It also suggests that every single soldier in the real
army was considered a distinct asset to the emperor. Historians
estimate hundreds of thousands of workers spent decades constructing this.
Speaker 1: You just rewrote our understanding of ancient Chinese craftsmanship and
the absolute control of the emperor held totally. And here
is where it gets really interesting or maybe really scary.
The emperor's main tomb is still sealed. Right, We've only
seen the army.
Speaker 2: That's correct, The main event the central tomb mound. We
haven't opened it.
Speaker 1: Why not?
Speaker 2: Well, historical records from a historian named Sima Kian mentioned
rivers of mercury flowing beneath the tomb, simulating the Great
Rivers of China.
Speaker 1: Rivers of mercury. That sounds like a myth, like something
out of a fantasy novel.
Speaker 2: People thought so for centuries, but then they did soil
tests and they found unusually high levels of mercury in
the area directly above the tomb, sometimes one hundred times
the normal rate.
Speaker 1: Hit nop.
Speaker 2: It suggests the legends might be true. So the terra
cotta army, as massive as it is, might just be
the foyer.
Speaker 1: And to think, if those farmers hadn't been thirsty in
nineteen seventy four, we might still be walking over their
heads today.
Speaker 2: One careless shovel strike changed history.
Speaker 1: Let's move to another group of farmers, this time in
Turkey in nineteen ninety four. This one really flips the
timeline of civilization on its head.
Speaker 2: You were talking about go Beckley Teppe.
Speaker 1: Yes, so similar setup in a way. Farmers in southeastern
Turkey are plowing their fields, they keep hitting these large
carved stones. Now, for decades, people just thought this was
medieval rubble, right.
Speaker 2: Right, It was just some old rocks, broken gravestones. Maybe
until archaeologist Klaus Schmidt examined the site in nineteen ninety.
Speaker 1: Four, and he knew right away.
Speaker 2: He took one look and realized, this is not medieval,
and this is certainly not rubble.
Speaker 1: What made and so sure? What was the giveaway?
Speaker 2: The shape in the style? These were massive T shaped
limestone pillars, some weighing up to fifty tons, and they
were buried deliberately.
Speaker 1: What do you mean deliberately?
Speaker 2: This wasn't a destroyed building that collapsed. It was a
site that had been carefully filled in with dirt by
the people who built it, presuming it.
Speaker 1: What did he find when they started digging properly?
Speaker 2: He found what is now considered the oldest known temple
in the world. But the significance here isn't just the age,
which is staggering it's the implication.
Speaker 1: Break that down for us. Why does this place matter
so much?
Speaker 2: Okay, so the conventional timeline of human history went like this. First,
we invented farming the Neolithic revolution. Because we had farming,
we could settle down in one place. Because we settled down,
we developed religion in complex society. So farming leads to civilization.
Speaker 1: Here you get the bread, then you get the church exactly.
Speaker 2: But Goubicle Tepi throws a grenade into that timeline. These
massive pillars arranged in circles with intricate carvings of animals.
They were built by hunter gatherers. Hunter gatherers people who
did not have agriculture yet.
Speaker 1: So they built the temple before they built the farm.
Speaker 2: Yes, and the theory now is that the need to
feed the massive workforce required to build this temple actually
drove the invention of farming.
Speaker 1: That is a huge shift. So religion didn't come from civilization.
Religion might have created.
Speaker 2: Civilization precisely organized religion and ritual. The desired to congregate
may have been the spark that forced us to settle
down and domesticate wheat. Wow, and get this. Genetic studies
show that the closest wild relative of modern domestic wheat
grows right near gubiicly Tepe.
Speaker 1: The evidence is right there.
Speaker 2: It's all pointing in the same direction.
Speaker 1: There's also a darker theory emerging about this place. I
read something about skulls.
Speaker 2: Ah, Yes, the skull cult. It's not all peaceful spiritual gatherings.
Recent excavations found human skull fragments with deep grooves carved
into them.
Speaker 1: Grooves for what.
Speaker 2: The thinking is. They suggest the skulls were suspended, maybe
with ropes or displayed. So while we call it a temple,
which sounds peaceful, it might have been a place of intense,
perhaps terrifying ritual.
Speaker 1: So not a church, more like a site for ancestor worship.
Speaker 2: Or a necropolis. Yeah, a place involving defleshed bones. It
really complicates the picture.
Speaker 1: It makes you look at a pile of rocks and
a feel a little differently. It completely overturned established history,
and again it was hiding in plain sight, annoying farmers
who just wanted to plow their fields.
Speaker 2: It certainly does all right.
Speaker 1: Let's move from farmers to our next category of accidental archaeologists.
This one is my favorite category. Animals.
Speaker 2: Animals have a knack for finding things we overlook. They
don't care about history. They care about smells and holes exactly.
Speaker 1: Let's go to France nineteen forty. World War two is raging,
but in the French countryside, four teenage boys are just
hanging out.
Speaker 2: With their dog, a very famous dog named.
Speaker 1: Robot, Robot the Dog. So the dog falls down a hole.
The boys, being good dog owners, try to widen the hole.
Speaker 2: To rescue him, and in doing so, they slip into
a vast underground cave system.
Speaker 1: And they aren't met with bats and damp walls. Well
maybe damp walls, but the walls are covered in art.
Speaker 2: This is the discovery of the Alasco Cave paintings. We
are talking about walls and ceilings covered in more than
six hundred painted animals and thousands of engraved figures.
Speaker 1: Well kind of.
Speaker 2: Animals, bulls, horses, deer, bison, huge powerful animals and also
abstract symbols that we still don't fully understand.
Speaker 1: And this wasn't just doodles, far from it.
Speaker 2: That's the key. These paintings are dated to roughly seventeen
thousand years ago, during the Upper Paleolithic period, but the
quality it's stunned the world.
Speaker 1: The source mentions they used techniques that people thought were
impossible for that time.
Speaker 2: Yes, they used mineral pigment's iron oxide for red, manganese
oxide for black. But they also used shading, perspective and contouring.
They used the natural curves of the cave wall to
make the animals look three dimensional.
Speaker 1: It's sophisticated, incredibly. I've heard about the animation theory.
Speaker 2: Can you explain that this is fascinating? In the flickering
light of a torch or a grease s lamp, the
images appear to move. What do you mean The multiple
legs drawn on some of the animals create a strobing
effect when the light source moves. It's essentially proto cinema.
Speaker 1: No way.
Speaker 2: They weren't just painting pictures. They were creating an immersive,
moving experience, a ritual.
Speaker 1: That is incredible. I think we have this stereotype of
the caveman as this grunting blute who hits things.
Speaker 2: With clubs, and Lasco shattered that myth. It proved that
prehistoric people possessed complex symbolic thinking, ritual behavior, and artistic mastery.
They weren't just surviving. They were observing and creating beauty.
Speaker 1: There's a tragic irony to this story, though there is
a very sad one.
Speaker 2: The discovery was so exciting that thousands of people flocked
to see it after the war. But human breath creates
moisture and carbon dioxide. The artificial lights introduced heat and
encouraged algae growth. And then came the white sickness, a
calcite fungus bred by the bacteria on visitors shoes.
Speaker 1: We loved it to death.
Speaker 2: We did our presence began destroying the paintings rapidly. Authorities
had to close the cave to the public in nineteen
sixty three to save it.
Speaker 1: It's a heavy lesson. We found it, but our curiosity
almost erased it.
Speaker 2: Luckily they've built exact replicas Lasco the Fafth, so we
can still experience what those boys found, but the original
is now sealed away, protected by silence.
Speaker 1: Again, from a dog in Franz to a goat in
the Judean desert, this is arguably one of the most
famous accidental discoveries of all time.
Speaker 2: The Dead Sea Scrolls nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 1: Set the scene for us.
Speaker 2: A Bedouin shepherd Mohammed ed deeb. He is searching the
cliffs near the Dead Sea for a lost goat classic
he sees a small cave opening. Now he doesn't want
to climb down there if the goat isn't there, So
he does what anyone would do. He throws a rock
into the.
Speaker 1: Dark, hoping to hear a bleat right.
Speaker 2: But instead of a bleat, he hears the unmistakable sound
of pottery shattering.
Speaker 1: That sound must have stopped him cold. That's not a
goat sound.
Speaker 2: Curiosity took over. He climbs in and finds tall clay jars,
some still sealed inside our ancient scrolls wrapped in linen.
Speaker 1: Did he know he had just found the archaeological equivalent
of winning the lottery?
Speaker 2: Not at all. He had no idea. The scrolls were
eventually sold to antiquity dealers for a pittance before scholars realized.
Speaker 1: What they actually were and what were they exactly.
Speaker 2: Over nine hundred documents, they date from roughly three hundred
BCE to one hundred CE. They include texts from the
Hebrew Bible, religious rules, hymns, and writings from a Jewish
sect believed to be the a.
Speaker 1: Scenes and the significance here is the age right.
Speaker 2: It is a time jump. Before this discovery, the oldest
complete biblical manuscripts we had were the Aleppo Codex or
the Leningrad Codex from the tenth century AD.
Speaker 1: Tenth century eighty and these are from three hundred BCE.
Speaker 2: Exactly. We jumped back over one thousand years in a
single moment. And the shocking thing was.
Speaker 1: The accuracy right, Because for centuries people assumed that the
Bible had changed like a game of telephone, you know,
monks making mistakes, changing words.
Speaker 2: That was the assumption, a reasonable one. But when they
compared the Great Isaiah scroll found in the cave with
the version we have today from a thousand years later,
they were nearly identical.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: We were talking about minor spelling variations or grammatical shifts,
but the core text was preserved with astonishing fidelity, that.
Speaker 1: Is mind boggling. The Lost Goat led to a revolution
in biblical scholarship.
Speaker 2: It deepened our understanding of early Judaism and provided critical
context for the origins of Christianity. It showed us the
apocalyptic mindset of the time. These scenes were expecting the
end of the world, which is why they hid the.
Speaker 1: Scrolls and the simple act of throwing a rock started
it all.
Speaker 2: A very lucky throw, okay.
Speaker 1: Section three Hidden in plain sight. These are discoveries that
were right there, but we either didn't see them or
we were looking for something else. Entirely, we've got war, weather,
and vegetation playing the role of the archaeologist here.
Speaker 2: Let's start with War seventeen ninety nine Egypt.
Speaker 1: Napoleon is on the move.
Speaker 2: Yes, Napoleon Bonaparte's came campaign. French soldiers are reinforcing Fort
Julian near the town of Rosetta, so it's.
Speaker 1: A military operation totally.
Speaker 2: They aren't looking for art. They are digging in to
build defenses against the British and the Ottomans.
Speaker 1: They are looking for rocks to build a wall.
Speaker 2: And they find one, a black stone slab grenadier rite
to be specific, embedded in an old wall. But this
one is covered.
Speaker 1: In inscriptions, the Rosetta Stone.
Speaker 2: The soldiers, to their credit, realized it looked important. The
stone featured the same text written in three different scripts,
Ancient Greek, Demotic, Egyptian, and hieroglyphics.
Speaker 1: And this was the key, right because nobody could read
hieroglyphics anymore.
Speaker 2: Exactly hieroglyphics had been unreadable for over fourteen hundred years.
It was a dead language in the truest sense, but
scholars could still read Ancient.
Speaker 1: Greek, so it was a translation cheat sheet. But it
was an instant right. It took a long time to crack.
Speaker 2: It took decades. A lot of very smart people worked
on it. The breakthrough came from Jean Francois Champoleon. He
was the one who had the key insight. He realized
that the hieroglyphs weren't just pictures ediograms, which is what
everyone assumed, like a.
Speaker 1: Picture of a bird means bird, right.
Speaker 2: He realized they were also phonetic. They represented sounds like
an alphabet.
Speaker 1: Wait explain that.
Speaker 2: So a picture of a bird wasn't necessarily the word bird,
It might just represent the sound uh or ooh. Once
he figured that out, using the names of kings like
Ptolemy and Cleopatra that were circled in Cartouch's as the key,
the whole language unlocked.
Speaker 1: I feel like we take this for granted now, but
imagine the moment that clicked. Suddenly, every temple wall, every tomb,
every monument in Egypt went from being pretty pictures to history.
Speaker 2: It literally gave a voice back to a civilization that
had been silent. It transformed Egyptology overnight. We went from
guessing to reading.
Speaker 1: And it was found because soldiers needed to patch a wall.
Speaker 2: Incredible.
Speaker 1: Now, let's go from the desert to the jungle. Nineteen eleven.
Speaker 2: Peru Hiram Bingham. He's an American historian and he is
on a mission. He is looking for the lost stronghold
of the Inca, a place called Vilca Bumba.
Speaker 1: So he is looking for a specific city.
Speaker 2: He has a goal, yes, a very specific one. He
is searching for the last place the Incas held out
against the Spanish. He is climbing through the Andes and
local farmers guide him up a steep ridge.
Speaker 1: And again, the locals knew it.
Speaker 2: Was there, They absolutely did, they were farming on the terraces.
But to the outside world, to the scientific community, it
was unknown.
Speaker 1: So Bingham climbs up, pushes through thick jungle vegetation, and finds.
Speaker 2: Machu Pichu, a perfectly preserved city in the clouds.
Speaker 1: It had been abandoned centuries earlier, likely.
Speaker 2: Due to smallpox, before the Spanish even got there, which
is why It wasn't destroyed by the conquistadors. They never
found it.
Speaker 1: That's the key. It wasn't plundered. But let's talk about
the engineering. I was reading about how they built this
on a fault line. Why build a stone city on
a knife edge ridge in an earthquake zone.
Speaker 2: It seems insane, doesn't it. But the Incas were master engineers.
They used a technique called ashlarmi. The stones are cut
so perfectly that they fit together without mortar. No mortar,
but crucially, they aren't glued tight. When an earthquake hits,
the stones dance, They vibrate and shake, and then settle
back into place. If they had used mortar, the walls
would have cracked and fallen.
Speaker 1: So the lack of mortar is actually a seismic safety
feature exactly.
Speaker 2: It's genius. And the drainage that ridge gets massive rainfall.
If they hadn't built a sophisticated underground drainage system to
channel water away, the whole mountain slope would have slid
off into the valley.
Speaker 1: So the real magic is underground.
Speaker 2: The engineering below the ground is just as impressive as
the walls above.
Speaker 1: But Bingham wasn't looking for it. He was looking for
something else. He stumbled upon the jewel of the Inca Empire.
Speaker 2: By mistake, he actually thought for a long time that
Machu Pichu was bilk Obama. He died believing that.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, So he found one of the wonders of
the world and thought it was something else.
Speaker 2: It makes you wonder how many other lost cities are
just sitting. They're known to the locals, but unknown to
the history books.
Speaker 1: I suspect quite a few. Moving on to section four,
the sea and the soil, This is where we see
how accidents rewrote our understanding of technology and culture. Let's
head to the ocean first.
Speaker 2: Nineteen oh one, the island of Antikythera, Greece.
Speaker 1: Sponge divers. I love that this is a profession.
Speaker 2: A dangerous one. They were returning from a dive, but
a storm hit a bad one. They took shelter off
the coast of Antiquethrier, and.
Speaker 1: Since they were stuck there waiting out the storm, they
decided to do a little diving.
Speaker 2: Might as well work while we weigh exactly.
Speaker 1: They dive down and find a shipwreck. It's loaded with
statues and pottery, but among the art they recovered these
corroded bronze.
Speaker 2: Fragments, just green, clumpy lumps of metal.
Speaker 1: Initially they seemed insignificant compared to the beautiful statues, but
closer examination and later X ray imaging revealed something shocking.
Inside the corrosion were gears, dozens of them.
Speaker 2: We throw around the word computer loosely has a chip
in it. We call that a computer when we say
the anti Cathera mechanism was an analog computer. What are
we actually describing because I assume it didn't have a screen.
Think of it as a gearbox, a gearbox of frightening complexity.
The core of the mystery and the thing that shouldn't
have existed in one hundred BC is a specific component
called a differential gear.
Speaker 1: Define that for the non engineers listening.
Speaker 2: A differential allows two shafts to rotate at different speeds
while powering a third shaft that represents the difference or
some of those speeds. In your car, a differential allows
your left and right wheels to spin at different speeds
when you turn a corner.
Speaker 1: Okay, I get it.
Speaker 2: We didn't think humans invented this mechanical concept until the
sixteenth or seventeenth century, yet here it was sitting in
a bronze box from ancient Greece.
Speaker 1: So they use this car axle technology to do what
drive the universe.
Speaker 2: In a way, Yes, they needed to reconcile the cycles
of the Moon with the cycles of the sun. The
mechanism had a dial for the metonic cycle, a period
of nineteen years where the lunar and solar calendars aligne
but it also tracked the Sorrows cycle.
Speaker 1: The Sorrow cycle.
Speaker 2: It's an eighteen year cycle used to predict eclipses. But
here is the kicker. The device didn't just tell you
when an eclipse would happen. It told you what time
of day I get this, what color the eclipse would be.
Speaker 1: It predicted the color.
Speaker 2: No yes, based on astrological winds and atmospheric refraction theories
of the time. It had glyphs indicating if the moon
would look red or black.
Speaker 1: That is insane.
Speaker 2: It was essentially a mechanical smartphone app for the cosmos,
and the miniaturization is what scares archaeologists. The teeth on
these gears are millimeter perfect triangles hand filed. If you
mess up one tooth, the math of the universe.
Speaker 1: Breaks It's like finding a jet engine in a medieval castle.
Speaker 2: It's forced a total rethink of Greek technological sophistication. It
proved that they weren't just philosophers and sculptors, they were
master engineers. And it was sitting at the bottom of
the ocean waiting for a storm to blow some sponge
divers off.
Speaker 1: Course from the bottom of the sea of the English
Countryside nineteen thirty nine, Sutton who This.
Speaker 2: Is a great story because it starts with a hunch.
Edith Pretty a landowner in Suffolk. She has these large
mounds of earth on her estate.
Speaker 1: Right, just these big lumps in the ground, and she's curious.
Speaker 2: It's not a professional university dig She just hires a
local amateur archaeologist named Basil Brown.
Speaker 1: I think there's something in my backyard. Can you take
a look?
Speaker 2: Basically, And what Basil Brown uncovered was the ghostly imprint
of a ship.
Speaker 1: I want to visualize this ghost ship properly, you said,
the wood rotted away. So if I'm Basil Brown digging
with a trowel, what am I actually seeing?
Speaker 2: You are seeing a shadow. The acidic soil of Suffolk
is incredibly aggressive toward organic matter, over thirteen hundred years,
it ate every splinter of the oak timber okay, but
as the wood turned to dust, it was replaced by
sand that had been stained dark by the organic decay. Furthermore,
the iron rivets the nail holding the ship together stayed
exactly where.
Speaker 1: They were, so it was like a connect the dots
puzzle made.
Speaker 2: Of rust precisely. Brown had to gingerly brush away the
light sand to reveal the dark sand. If he had
dug too hard, he would have shoveled right through the ship.
He wasentually sculpting the negative space of a vessel that
wasn't there anymore.
Speaker 1: And inside this shadow ship.
Speaker 2: A treasure that forced us to retire the term dark ages.
Speaker 1: We always hear dark ages and think of people in
mud huts forgetting how to read.
Speaker 2: That was the Victorian bias. They looked at the fall
of Rome and assumed civilization collapsed until the Renaissance. But
Sutton revealed a globalized economy in six hundred AD. How So,
we found garnets red gemstones that were chemically traced to
Sri Lanka.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: We found silverware from Byzantium, which is modern day Istanbul.
We found bitwomen on the helmet that came from the
Middle East.
Speaker 1: So this primitive chieftain in England was wearing Sri Lankan
gems and eating off Turkish plates.
Speaker 2: Exactly. It wasn't a time of darkness, It was a
time of transition and vast trade network works. The craftsmanship
of the gold shoulder clasps, using a technique called clisina,
is so precise that modern jewelers struggle to replicate it
without magnification.
Speaker 1: And Edith Pritty just had a hunch.
Speaker 2: A hunch and some spiritualism. She allegedly had dreams of
warriors marching on the mounds. Whether you believe in ghosts
or not, her intuition rewrote the history of early medieval Europe.
Speaker 1: We're coming into the final stretch here Section five. Frozen Moments.
These are discoveries born from catastrophe where time just stop.
Speaker 2: And you cannot talk about frozen moments without talking about
Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Speaker 1: The ultimate time capsules seventy nine AD Mault Vesuvius erupts.
Speaker 2: It buries these Roman cities under layers of ash and pummics.
But the discovery story is actually really interesting because it
happened twice right.
Speaker 1: The first time was in fifteen ninety nine.
Speaker 2: Workers were digging an underground water channel. They hit walls
covered in frescoes and Latin inscriptions.
Speaker 1: And what did they do?
Speaker 2: They didn't understand it, or perhaps the content. Remember Pompeii
had a lot of erotic art was considered too scandalous
for the time, so they reburied it.
Speaker 1: They put it back. Nope, nothing to see here.
Speaker 2: It hit snooze on the discovery for another one hundred
and fifty years. It wasn't until seventeen forty eight that
systematic excavations began under the Kingdom of Naples.
Speaker 1: And once they started, they realized this wasn't just ruined.
Speaker 2: No, it was a frozen city because of the ash.
Everything was preserved exactly as it was. Bakeries with bread
still in the ovens, braid was still there, carbonized. But yes,
graffiti on the walls, political slogans, caverns.
Speaker 1: It's the intimacy of it that gets me. Usually archaeology
is about kings and temples. Pompeii is about life and death.
Speaker 2: We have to mention the plaster casts, the ash hardened
around the bodies of the victims. The bodies decomposed, leaving
hollow voids. Archaeologists poured plaster into those voids and got
perfect casts of the people in their final moments. Horrifying
families huddled together, people shielding their faces to.
Speaker 1: Ask about herculanium, specifically because it's different from Pompei. Right,
Pompei was ash, but Herculaneum was.
Speaker 2: Worse, much worse in a way. Pompei was buried by ashfall,
which suffocated people. Herculaneum was hit by the pyroclastic flow,
a superheated avalanche of gas and rock moving at one
hundred miles an hour. The heat was so intense it
vaporized soft tissue instantly. Recent studies on victims found in
the boathouses of Herculaneum found something horrifying. Vitrified brain tissue vitrified.
The heat turns their brains into glass. Good Lord, it's gruesome,
but scientific. It tells us exactly how they died instantly.
They didn't suffer like the people in Pompeii might have,
but that heat also carbonized wood, food, and even scrolls,
preserving them in a way that ash didn't.
Speaker 1: A different kind of preservation aw much more violent one
and finally we have perhaps the most famous discovery of
them all, King Tut's Tomb nineteen twenty two.
Speaker 2: Now you might say, wait, Howard hard was looking for this.
Speaker 1: He was. He spent years searching, so it's not a
pure accident, right.
Speaker 2: But the actual find was an accident born of persistence.
Explain that he was on the verge of giving up,
his funding was running out. He was in the valley
of the King's an area that had been dug up
one hundred times. Everyone said it was empty.
Speaker 1: So how did they find it?
Speaker 2: They were clearing away rubble left by ancient.
Speaker 1: Workers, ancient construction trash.
Speaker 2: Essentially the huts of the workers who built the tomb
of Rameses. The sixth had been built over the entrance
to Tut's tomb.
Speaker 1: So the later kings literally built on top of him,
burying him deeper exactly.
Speaker 2: The debris hid the tomb so well that grave robbers
missed it for thousands of years. Carter's team, while clearing
this rubble, found a stone step, and that step led.
Speaker 1: To the only nearly intact royal tomb ever found in
the valley.
Speaker 2: It offered an unprecedented look at royal burial practices, the
gold mask, the chariots, the shrines. It sparked egypnomania across
the globe, and.
Speaker 1: The irony is just chef's kick. The trash from ancient
workers is what saved the king's treasure.
Speaker 2: Sometimes being forgotten is the best way to be preserved.
Speaker 1: Wow, so let's unpack this. We've got a lost goat,
a thirsty farmer, a storm, a lost dog, and some
ancient trash.
Speaker 2: It really highlights how fragile our knowledge of history is.
We think we know the story of humanity, but so
much of it relies on these random, chaotic moments of discovery.
Speaker 1: It makes you think, if we found all of this
by accident, what are we currently walking over right now?
Speaker 2: That is the provocative thought. What is sitting just one
foot beneath the surface of a construction site in New
York or London or Beijing or your own backyard.
Speaker 1: Waiting for a shovel ah or a heavy rain or badger? Exactly? So,
I have to ask you, and I want the listener
to think about this too, which of these accidental discoveries
shocked you the most?
Speaker 2: For me, it has to be go Bickley Tepe. The
idea that religion predates farming. That changes the fundamental understanding
of human psychology and society. It rewrites the software of civilization.
Speaker 1: That's a good one. I'm stuck in the anti Keithra mechanism,
the idea that they had that level of tech differential
gears and then lost it right, It just feels so
sci fi. It scares me a little. It reminds me
that progress isn't a straight line. We can go backward.
Speaker 2: It is humbling listeners.
Speaker 1: We want to hear from you. Which discovery blew your mind?
Is it the complexity of the gears, the sheer scale
of the terra Cotta army, or maybe the tragedy of Pompeii.
Leave a comment if you can, or just annoy your
friends with these facts at your next dinner party.
Speaker 2: Please do. History is meant to be shared.
Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us on thrilling threads. Keep your
eyes on the ground. You never know what you might
stumble over.
Speaker 2: Until next time.