10 "ancient" artifacts, the value of which scientists clearly overestimated

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

An inappropriate artifact is an archaeological discovery that does not fit into the historical period to which it belongs. They are often considered evidence (often unfounded) of ancient civilizations, aliens, and other paranormal activity. In this review, there are 10 similar objects, and strangely fascinating stories associated with them.

1. Artifact from Koso

When, in 1961, three men were looking for valuable stones on a mountain near the California town of Olancha, they came across a mysterious ancient artifact. They originally mistook it for a geode (a hollow stone containing crystals inside). But something much stranger was lurking inside: a cylinder of porcelain-like material and a thin rod of light metal, encased in a hexagonal shell of oxidized copper and other unidentified material. It was clearly a man-made object, but the problem was that the rock was at least 500,000 years old. Therefore, it is impossible that the "Artifact from Koso" was created by man.

Mainstream science or archeology never took the artifact seriously. Nevertheless, it immediately became the subject of many pseudoscientific and alternative archaeological speculations and remained so for decades. Some said it was an item from ancient Atlantis. Others thought he was abandoned by aliens or even time travelers. Finally, in 1999, a group of skeptics took several photographs and X-rays of the alleged "ancient artifact" (or rather copies, because the original was likely lost in the 1960s).

They noticed that the Coso artifact was very similar to an old spark plug and showed the images to various collectors. They immediately recognized the artifact: it was a really old, battered spark plug from the 1920s, with rusty metal parts.

2. Fossils of Beringer

At the beginning of the 18th century, Johann Beringer, a professor of medicine at the University of Würzburg, was a respected physician and natural scientist. He was very interested in the debate about the origin of fossils that raged in scientific circles of that era. Behringer was also a very purposeful person who believed in his infallibility.

One day, Beringer's students decided to play a trick on him. On Mount Eibelstadt, where he often went in search of fossils, they planted artificial fossils, which in fact were nothing more than frogs, spiders, birds, lizards, carefully carved on stones, etc. Beringer completely believed that these forgeries are real fossils. The students decided to see how far the professor would go in his faith, so they made even more fossils. The new ones had inscriptions in Hebrew, Syriac, and Babylonian. One of them even had the name "Jehovah" on it. Once again, Beringer completely believed his eyes. He began to develop the theory that the fossils are "divine providence." And then, as soon as Boehringer published the book, he found another “Boehringer fossil” … which had his name on it. It was then that the realization of the terrible truth came.

Some versions of this story say that the humiliated Beringer spent his fortune trying to buy every copy of his ridiculous book and died in poverty. In fact, his fate was less tragic: Beringer learned that the prank was organized by two colleagues, and immediately filed a lawsuit against them. They were disgraced, and Beringer continued a brilliant career and wrote several more books.

3. Finger of the Yeti from Pangboche

In the vaults of the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in London there is a mysterious item labeled "Yeti's Finger". The adventurer who brought it there claimed to have discovered it in 1958 when he visited Pangboche Monastery in Nepal as part of a group. During their stay, they saw a valuable relic of the monastery: a large, human-like hand, with sharp claws and rough black skin. The adventurer was intrigued and made an agreement with the keepers of the temple: in exchange for a suitable replacement and donation to the monastery, he would receive one finger from this yeti hand. So the finger ended up in the museum's depositories.

When tests were conducted on a clawed, semi-decomposed finger in 2008, it turned out that it was almost certainly human. While the condition of the finger almost certainly explained this "almost", the scientists were intrigued and wanted to try to get more samples from Pangboche. Unfortunately, someone stole the original hand, so researchers never had a chance to fully expose (or confirm) the theory.

The WETA Workshop (creators of the costumes for The Lord of the Rings films) later donated carefully crafted copies of the hand and another stolen relic, an alleged Yeti skullcap, to the monastery. Thus, the monks could continue to show people strange objects for a small fee.

4. Kensington runestone

The Kensington Runestone is an ancient Viking runestone that was found in Minnesota. In 1898, farmer Olaf Oman unearthed this 90-kilogram gray slab with ancient runic writing, after which controversy raged over the next century about its true origin. Amateur archaeologists have invested a lot of money to collect evidence of the stone's authenticity. Academics believe that the Vikings probably did not appear near Lake Superior, and have spent decades trying to prove that the Kensington runestone is a fake.

In 2011, Swedish researchers found some evidence that the stone was indeed a fake. They found and deciphered a digital code carved into the stone. It read: “Found by Oman. We collected and stored firewood from this stone."

5. Tamil bell

The secret of the Tamil bell is not who made it or when. It bears clear inscriptions and markings of Tamil culture and is estimated by experts to have been made sometime between 1400 and 1540 AD. The question, however, is how did the bell end up in a remote Maori village in New Zealand, where the natives used it as a saucepan. There is no other indication that the area was ever visited by other cultures until 1840, when the European William Colenso arrived in the village. Even stranger, the villagers told Colenso that they had found the bell in the roots of a large tree that had been uprooted in a storm many years ago.

How exactly the bell got to the village has never been conclusively proven. However, many people have been curious about its history, and careful research has provided some insight into one very likely reason, which experts call the "abandoned theory." There are no ancient aliens or paranormal forces visiting New Zealand. According to the "abandoned theory", the original owner of the bell was a man named a Muslim Tamil who probably belonged to one of the famous ship-owning families based at the port of Nagapattinam in southeastern India. One of the Tamil ships was captured by the sea and abandoned by the crew, but its wooden hull remained intact enough to keep it afloat for years. Over time, currents brought the empty ship to New Zealand, where it was washed ashore. Centuries passed, and nature took its toll, destroying the ship, from which only a metal bell remained.

6. Bird from Sakkara

The Bird of Saqqara is a small wooden figurine in the shape of a bird that was excavated in 1898 in one of the burial grounds in Saqqara, Egypt. The artifact is estimated to be about 2,000 years old, and mostly researchers say it was a child's toy, a boomerang, or perhaps an early weather vane. However, other, more mystical-minded people have noticed that the figurine has certain aerodynamic properties that make it look like a scale model of an extremely efficient airplane such as a glider.

Some speculate that the "Saqqara bird" once had a tail. Models created like this balsa figurine to test a similar theory have shown mixed results.

Probably, scientists will never know what the Bird really was.

7. Dendera Light

The ancient temple of Hathor in Egyptian Dendera has several underground caves and corridors. On one of the walls of this complex is a Dendera light bulb: a strange hieroglyphic image, similar to the Crookes tube, an early version of the light bulb. Many argue that the image is proof of mysterious ancient technologies: the wavy snake represents a filament, the lotus flower represents a bulb, and the "Jed Column" represents an insulator. There is also a picture of a baboon, which von Daniken says is a warning that the device could be dangerous to people who cannot use it correctly.

This is a very fantastic theory. But if this is correct, it will completely change everything people know about the ancient Egyptians.

8. Dorchester Pot

The Dorchester Pot was a strange, ornate metal object that was found ripped in half at the site of an explosion in the 19th century. It was reportedly trapped inside a rock about 500 million years old, which clearly meant that it was not created by man. It is not surprising that many are interested in the find.

Of course, the real story is much more down to earth. The artifact is almost certainly just a Victorian-era Indian pipe holder, and therefore only a few years old when it was discovered in 1852. Why didn't they immediately recognize this thing for what it really is? It is likely that the seekers were simply not aware of the quirky designs of pipe holders, or maybe they really wanted to believe that ancient cultures hundreds of millions of years ago had very similar aesthetics to their own.

But how did an Indian pipe holder or the Dorchester Pot artifact get inside a 500 million year old stone? The answer is depressingly simple: he never got there. The broken item was found in the debris after the explosion, so there is absolutely no evidence that it ever was inside the rock. Most likely, someone just threw out the pipe holder near this place, and he found himself at the scene of the explosion.

9. Abydos helicopter

The Abydos helicopter is another hieroglyphic mystery around which discussions continue. This is an Egyptian bas-relief that is completely unassuming, except for one strange fact: one part of this ancient artifact depicts a completely modern helicopter. Pictures of this artifact appeared in all articles on the paranormal in the 1990s. Some people even thought that the image was not just a "helicopter", but also several planes, a submarine, and even a UFO.

However, real Egyptologists are very familiar with this "helicopter" and explain what it really is. First of all, the images that appeared in the press were often faked to make them look even more mysterious than the real one. While the actual glyphs do resemble a helicopter in some way, this is just a coincidence caused by the erosion of the masonry. Over time, workers re-carved and filled the cracks with stone to replace some of the glyphs, and when the "filling" eventually fell out, parts of the glyphs began to intersect and merge, forming "mysterious new characters." There's even a technical term for that: palimpsest.

10. Baigun pipes

Baigun pipes are one of the most mysterious artifacts. It is a vast, intricate series of rusty metal pipes embedded in the rock of the mountain. Baigongshan in a particularly rugged region of China's Qinghai province. These pipes ranging from 2 to 40 centimeters in diameter, which connect the strange mountain cave and the nearby salt lake, almost certainly predate well-known human history.

It is almost impossible for the Baigun pipes to be fake. It is almost guaranteed that they are very ancient. It was once thought that they could be a byproduct of volcanic activity, forcing high-iron magnesium to pass through cracks in the rock, but this is unlikely because there is an oil field nearby and oil fields take a long time to form, and their connection to volcanic the activity tends to be quite "flammable".

Recent research suggests that the mysterious pipes are actually fossilized "casts" of ancient tree roots. Once these roots were transferred to their current dormancy due to the overflow of a long-dried lake, and over time they underwent the forces of pedogenesis (the process of soil formation) and diagenesis (the transformation of soil into rock).