The Out-of-Place Artifacts Iceberg | PART 1

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There’s no doubt that the Forgotten Ancient Civilizations iceberg has made this channel what it is today, and I’m betting that you’re watching this because you’ve seen my videos diving into it. I assure you, I’m still working on it, but I have a pretty short attention span so I’m the sorta guy that gets tired of working on only one thing pretty quickly. And I always want to explore new things, so a couple months ago I forged a new, jam-packed iceberg devoted to a fresh, dare I say exotic subject – OUT OF PLACE ARTIFACTS, also known as OOPARTS, as suggested by a few commenters. As you can probably guess, Out of Place Artifacts are artifacts that have been found where they shouldn’t hahyve been found, where you’d least expect them. That can be either geographically or temporally. Examples include a computer found on an ancient Greek shipwreck, a Roman sculpture from pre-Columbain Mexico, a human-made hammer embedded in rock from the Cretaceous, a Viking penny found in Maine and tons, tons more. So generally, they’re finds that are so extraordinary that their mere existence could dramatically alter how people view history/rewrite history. But a lot of these OOPARTs aren’t actually what they might appear to be or what they’ve been presented as.

0:00 – Intro
1:51 – Antikythera Mechanism
6:29 – Roman Head in Mexico
12:47 – Baghdad Batteries
19:36 – London Hammer
23:18 – Dendera Lightbulb
28:50 – Polynesian Sweet Potatoes
39:05- Crystal Skulls
44:45 – Outro

#ancienthistory #ancient #icebergchart #iceberg #history #historydocumentary #historydocumentaries #ancientcivilizations #artifacts #outofplaceartifacts #ooparts #ancientmysteries #mysteries #ancientart #ancientartifacts #antikytheramechanism #denderalightbulb #baghdadbatteries #crystalskull #crystalskulls #polynesian #easterisland #roman #ancientrome #ancientegyp #ancientegypt

there’s no doubt that the Forgotten ancient civilizations Iceberg has made this channel what it is today and I’m betting that you’re watching this because you’ve seen my videos diving into it I assure you I’m still working on it but I have a pretty short attention span so I’m the sort of guy that gets tired of working on only one thing pretty quickly and I always want to explore new things so a couple months ago I forged a new jam-packed Iceberg devoted to a fresh dare I say exotic subject out ofpl artifacts also known as Arts as suggested by a few commenters as you can probably guess out ofpl artifacts are artifacts that have been found where they shouldn’t have been found where you’d least expect them that can be either geographically or temporally examples include a computer found on an ancient Greek shipwreck a Roman sculpture from pre-c Columban Mexico a human-made hammer embedded in Rock from the Cretaceous or a viking penny found in Maine and tons tons more so generally they’re finds that are so extraordinary that their mere existence could dramatically alter people view history but a lot of these Zoo Parts aren’t actually what they might appear to be or what they’ve been presented as after looking into all 100 plus entries I included in this Iceberg I’ve divided them into three different categories number one misinterpretations of what real artifacts actually are or misinterpretations of something natural as something artificial number two outright forgeries which I’d say includes artifacts that have been deliberately planted somewhere where they’re out of place number three real genuine out ofpl artifacts with genuine historical significance usually these are the products of limited contact between different far removed cultures and extraordinary but relatively reasonable examples of ancient technological Ingenuity so I’ll be cataloging every one of these entries into one of these three categories so let’s begin our journey down this Iceberg the antic athera mechanism in the year 1900 sponge divers discovered an ancient shipwreck 100 80 ft deep off of the small Greek island of antitha it was the very first ancient shipwreck to be discovered in Modern Times And amazingly it’s even still surrounded by the bodies of its crew under the supervision of a warship some truly astonishing Treasures were dredged up from it like amazing bronze and marble statues beautiful glass and silver vessels and a strange lump of corroded bronze and decayed wooden fragments this lump once formed a machine now dubbed the antia mechanism and along with the rest of the ship’s contents it’s now housed in the National archaeological Museum of Athens the mechanism is so perplexing and so famous now that if you search up antia Thea the first thing you’re met with is the mechanism not the island it’s also the main McGuffin of that new Indiana Jones movie so that’s why I put it up here at the very top of the iceberg and the reason why it’s sometimes called an out ofpl artifact is because it’s just such an incredibly Advanced device that there’s nothing else like it from the ancient world so it’s one of those artifacts that just seems a bit too advanced for how old it is the lump which split off into 82 different fragments and probably only represents a third of the original device contains a highly highly complex handcut system of Gear wheels making it the earliest geared device ever to be found and it Bears tiny barely legible Greek inscriptions which suggests that it was once some sort of astronomical device and that it was kept in a wooden case and there’s way more to it than what you can see with the naked eye on its corroded surface in all it consists of 30 gears with between 15 and 223 teeth each the full rotation of the largest gear probably once controlled by a knob on the side of the device is thought to have represented one year other gears represented the Sun the moon and the Motions of the five planets known to the Greeks at the time and it’s thought to have been capable of predicting the times of solar and lunar eclipses within a 12-hour window so not right on the money but close enough on one side it was divided into upper and lower parts represented by spirals the upper one was used to measure the metonic cycle of around 19 years or 235 months which Mark when the moon’s phases recur on the same days of the solar year while the lower spiral measures the seros cycle of 223 months or 18 or so years which is when the cycle of lunar and solar eclipses repeats itself it’s so Advanced that it’s often called the world’s first computer which it was first identified as in 1959 but others have called it a calculator because apparently you could use it to add subtract and divide but you probably couldn’t actually program it meaning that it wasn’t technically a computer but whatever it’s a cool old dudad either way and it was created 1,400 years before anything similar was produced when astronomical clocks first started being made in the 1300s so it’s really extraordinary but it isn’t the work of aliens or atlantans or anything because its creation was possible with what was understood about astronomy in the early 1st Century BC when it was made and when the ship it was on sunk for example the planetary positions it displays follow the teachings of a guy called hipparchus who established a school of astronomy on roads in the 2 Century BC and was able to identify that the moon has an elliptical orbit which I didn’t even know until I heard about him so kudos to him for figuring it out 2200 years ago but the mechanism’s actual purpose remains unknown maybe it was just purely scientific or maybe it was meant to serve as a fancy navigational Aid and the ship it was on was likely in the process of taking trendy Greek artwork back to the rich and Powerful of Rome so that they could show off to their friends so maybe this was destined to end up as a conversation starter in one of cisero’s Villas or something like that and over 120 years after its initial Discovery the antitha ship wreck is actually still being excavated it was reinvestigated by Jack custo in the 50s and 7s but starting in 2014 the return to Antica project has been Excavating it they’ve discovered more stunning sculpture fragments and even one more of its crew in 2016 and they’ve discovered another wreck 400 m south of it so there’s always a chance that more fragments of the mechanism or even something just as stunning as it is still lying somewhere on the seabed off anti athera and of course the antia mechanism could only be put in the genuine category Roman head in Mexico okay so this is basically the quintessential out ofpl artifact in terms of where it was found geographically because it’s a Roman statuette head that was dug up smack bang in the middle of Mexico in layers that predate the Spanish Conquest albeit just barely it was discovered in late 1933 within a burial deposit dating to between 1476 in 1510 at the site of teic Kix laaka built by the matl up people just 65 km from what’s now Mexico City it also contained more standard tomb Goods like pottery from when the city was controlled by the Aztec which is why the tomb is dated to when it is and various objects made of gold copper turquoise rock crystal jet bone and shell the layer of this tomb was found in was under three other intact levels within a larger pyramidal structure called Mound six so the head couldn’t have just been chucked in there afterwards unless of course the excavation team team tampered with it but let’s not jump to conclusions just yet plus the city happened to have been destroyed by the Aztec ruler moaz Zuma II in 1510 after it rebelled against him and the city was abandoned after that so that’s the latest date at which the head could have been placed where it was found asides from the fact that it doesn’t really look anything like most other pieces of Mesoamerican art at least two real experts on Roman art namely Irish boinger and Bernard Andrea have identified it as a Roman work made sometime in the second under 3rd centuries ad and apparently its hairstyle and the shape of its beard are specifically typical of Works made under the Severn Dynasty ruling from 193 to 235 ad which of course raises the question why would a second or third Century Roman statuette be in any 15th century tomb let alone one all the way in the middle of Mexico thermoluminescence dating conducted in Germany in 1995 is confirmed that it can’t just be a modern fake and that it had to have been made sometime between the Century BC and the 13th century ad conservatively and between the 2 Century BC to the 7th Century ad more liberally so regardless of how it got to Mexico it’s a genuine ancient or medieval or pre-colombian artifact and it’s way older than the tomb it was found in we know that the Aztecs did deliberately keep around OMC to wakano and toltech artifacts that were made way way before their time so it’s not totally unfeasible that this head became a special heirloom after somehow winding up in the Americas in Antiquity but is it at all feasible that the Romans could have gotten all the way to Mexico the answer is maybe the furthest west that we know the Romans got to is the island of Lanzarote in the canaries because a Roman trading colony was found there pretty recently in 1987 so maybe some Galley that happened to contain the Terracotta statuette that this head belongs to was Milling around over there and just got swept way off course one day never to be seen again but the main argument against the head being a Roman import is of course that it was just part of some random possibly medieval European figurine that the Conquistadors took to Mexico during the Spanish conquest and that’s what it was initially cataloged as where it wound up Mexico CI is national museum of anthropology besides the fact that its identification as a piece of specifically Roman art is based on pretty subjective stylistic analysis the main problem with for sure determining that it’s the product of a pre-colombian voyage across the Atlantic is that the whole excavation at K laaka that resulted in its Discovery was pretty poorly documented there are no photographs of the object in situ or of the actual place where it was found as it was being excavated or even just diagrams of them there’s also the fact that Kik laaka wasn’t actually totally abandoned after 1510 and some houses there were actually occupied for up to a few decades after the Spanish conquest and Clay figurines depicting Spaniards in Spanish dress have been found in them strangely this is pretty much the only aspect of Spanish culture that the remaining residents of Kix laaka ever adopted the dating of the Tomb that the head was found in seems like it’s just based on Pottery analysis so I think that there’s definitely a chance that even if it was just filled with traditional burial offerings the tomb could have instead been built shortly after the Spanish Conquest which happened in 1521 just 11 years after 1510 the latest date currently assigned to the tomb based on analysis there’s also a rumor that a guy named Hugo madano who is a student helping to excavate Kik laaka in the 30s deliberately planted the head as some sort of prank and that the site’s lead excavator Jose Garcia Pon was so excited by it that no one was willing to tell him how it actually got there or at least that’s what an esteemed Professor named Dr John Paddock supposedly used to tell his students at the University deas Americas in Mexico City but according to payon’s son his father was routinely asked about this and would always insist that he was on site during the excavation and that madano had never even worked at the site plus paddock’s very close associate ignasio Bernal personally took the head all the way to Vienna to show it off at the 35th annual Congress of americanists held there in 1960 so it’s hard to believe that Paddock wouldn’t tell his close colleague about the object’s true Origins so generally there’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding all this some have also criticized the very credibility of the main proponents of the head being Roman Romeo kristo and Santiago hoves but they investigated another supposedly old world artifact found in Mexico a quote unquote phenician head from the village of Las basas in Guerrero and they concluded that it was a 19th century fake so I’m pretty sure they’re being sincere despite the multiple arguments against it in my personal opinion this head is some of the most compelling evidence for ancient transatlantic Journeys on the iceberg but there is plenty more potential evidence further down so ultimately I’m leaning towards categorizing in this head is genuine but there’s still a lot of uncertainty surrounding it and there’s still definitely a chance that it’s been very misinterpreted and if it was actually planted it would be an outright forgery but let’s just leave it in the genuine category for now Baghdad battery the Bagdad battery is a pretty strange object let me give you a description of it it’s a 15 cm High clay jar containing a copper cylinder topped with a crimped in Copper disc itself covered in layers of also referred to as Asphalt in the middle of the jar suspended from this asphalt plug there is an iron Rod which possibly protruded through the plug the jar also apparently showed signs of acid corrosion it’s dated to between the 1st Century BC and the 1 century ad. when the area around Baghdad where this was found was ruled by the parthan Empire but it also might be from the later assassinate Persian Empire one story goes that it was discovered next to magical bows by a aan painter and archaeologist Wilhelm kig anywhere between 1936 and 1938 accounts differ and apparently this was happening while he was conducting excavations in parthan layers at a place called kuud Rua or kuud rabu just southeast of Baghdad it was once part of Salia an ancient city on the Tigris right next to kapon the capital of the parthians and the cenans another story goes that he just happened to stumble across it just waiting for him in the Baghdad Museum’s basement oddly there don’t seem seem to be any pictures of him online even though he was a director of the Baghdad Museum and baghdad’s Antiquities Administration but we know he really did exist though because he published a paper in 1938 in the German journal for or research and progress in which he identified what he’d found as a galvanic cell I.E a battery similar objects had been found in around the same area in the early 30s so Koenig dubbed them all the batteries of Babylon if these really were used as batteries then they’d be incredibly out ofpl artifacts since the first modern electric battery was only made in 1800 by alesandro Volta who has to have had one of the most on the- noos names in history but were they really batteries it’s been argued that instead they were actually just special containers for sacred Papi because those other batteries I mentioned also contained papy in an area of Salia on Tigris now known as Tel Umar similar jars containing copper coer tubes but no iron were found to be stuffed with papy they were associated with iron and bronze needles and discovered in what seemed to be a magician’s house at kapon jugs containing sealed bronze cylinders filled with organic material that might have been papy were also found plyy the Elder recorded that in his time around the mid 1st Century ad Papyrus had just recently started being used as paper by the parthians so it’s possible that the Kut rabu battery did contain a papy a scroll that had been wrapped around its iron rod and then encased in its copper cylinder before just disintegrating over time but the MythBusters and multiple academic projects have used replicas of varying accuracy to show that these jars can actually function as batteries if you add electrolytes to them meaning that they would be a type of wet cell battery in which two different Metals plunged in some sort of electrolyte produce electricity and an example of that would be car batteries apparently Anis of the corrosion on the original jar suggests that it once may have contained something like vinegar or wine and the asphalt plug on it was probably meant to keep some sort of liquid in experiments with replicas using vinegar and lemon juice have demonstrated that it could have produced a charge between half a volt and a volt but that’s so weak that even Lemons with electrodes hooked into them generate more power than that the most widespread theory about their use is that they were used to electroplate Silver onto copper vessels which is what kig himself proposed a former director at the RoR un pelus Museum in hildesheim ARA agre was supposedly able to successfully use replicas of the jars containing grape juice to cover something in silver sometime in 1978 but no actual evidence of this supposed experiment actually exists plus the output of these batteries just isn’t really enough to plate or Guild anything plus you need a metal solution of the stuff you want to plate with to actually electroplate stuff and aquous Solutions of gold and silver just didn’t exist in Antiquity and were only invented way later in the Middle Ages and the people of Mesopotamia already had a number of other ways to Guild stuff including fire gilding with Mercury another theory is that these were placed inside a God’s statue so it would have had a magical Buzz to it to terrify anyone who touched it but I don’t know if the parthians really did create the first batteries it’s odd that their Arch Rivals the Romans never bothered writing anything down about it especially during the first century ad at the height of the Empire when people like plenty were making Huge encyclopedic works like his natural history but I have to admit that my favorite theory about these jars proposed by Paul T Kaiser in 1993 is that they were used to replicate the perceived healing properties of electric fish because Roman writings do tell us that in the 1st Century ad Physicians used electric fish to alleviate foot pain and to stimulate nerves in the first half of the first century ad Roman Physicians scribonius Lar Fus recorded how people could have their gout treated by being plopped down on a wet beach with an electric fish the electricity of which would numb their feet iron and copper had also already been identified as conductors of electrical discharges by the later 1 Century polymath hon of Alexandria that guy who almost invented the steam engine electric fish are found in the Nile and the Mediterranean but they aren’t present in the Persian Gulf for The Tigress or the Euphrates so the parthians perhaps used weak cells with metal acupuncture needles like the metal needles found near the jar in the magician’s house I mentioned earlier to create the same effect that explains why the batteries are often found with magical items because you got to keep in mind that Physicians of the time dealt more with magic than actual medicine maybe the fact that some were found with potentially sacred papy in them doesn’t preclude their use as these electric fish substitutes and unfortunately The Saga of the Baghdad batteries has a rather sad ending regardless of what you think they were because they were looted from the Iraqi national museum in 2003 during the chaos of the invasion of Iraq and their current whereabouts remain unknown these can’t be forgeries but they could still be misinterpretations but they could also maybe sort of be genuine these jars definitely could theoretically produce some sort of electric current but we don’t know what exactly would be used for I’m going to go with the electric fish substitute Theory so I’ll put it in the genuine category but as with pretty much every entry on this Iceberg that’s subject to change the London Hammer I thought this was going to be from London in the UK or maybe London Ontario but actually this is from the London in Texas in 1936 Mr Max Han and his wife were hiking along red Creek near London Texas when they spotted a strange rock with some wood sticking out of it just sitting on some sort of Rock Ledge near an as yet unidentified waterfall they brought it home with them and around a decade later in either 1946 or 1947 their son George broke the Rock open and to his astonishment found that it contained an entire iron Hammer a Hardline creationist named Carl B who runs his own creation evidence Museum and acquired The Rock in 1983 claims that it’s evidence that human beings existed as far back is anywhere between around 100 and 500 million years ago the dates he’s assigned to the Rock haven’t been very consistent The Rock encasing The Hammer is presumably from the lower Cretaceous Hensel sand formation around Red Creek which formed 110 to 115 million years ago but the Rock’s host formation still hasn’t been conclusively identified and even if it is the same rock is the rock around the London Hammer its age might not actually be important which I’ll get to later ba also claims that the hammer is associated with the pre flood Mesozoic humans that he claims made the infamous and spoiler alert fake py River tracks with Dinosaurs in Glen Rose Texas where his Museum happens to be that’s obviously a pretty wacky claim but it’s still strange that there’s a human-made hammer in rocks possibly hundreds of millions of years old right well not really there are way more cases of modern artifacts being covered in rocks than you might think as you can clearly see the London Hammer is a modern hammer and it’s probably a standard miners Hammer from the 19th century as it turns out dissolved minerals and sediment from even ancient rock as well as organic material can form what are called concretions around intrusive iron objects left in water for a while for example the majority of stuff found around the wreck of the queen an’s Revenge Blackbeard’s Flagship lying just off North Carolina is covered in concretions they can also form within just a matter of decades as shown by various World War II era artifacts that are covered in them here’s one around an object from the USS Arizona meaning that the London Hammer doesn’t have to be that much older than the 30s to have gotten into its current state concretions can also be between an inch and several feet thick meaning that the admittedly impressive girth of the London hammmer casing doesn’t preclude it from being one Carl ball claims that this big shell on the London Hammer comes from some unidentified prehistoric species but as you can see other concretions around other modern artifacts also have shells mixed up in them so there isn’t really any reason to believe that the shell in the London Hammer is a fossil one final clue suggesting that what’s around the London Hammer is just a limey concretion is the fact that it wasn’t found attached to other rocks and it was just sitting loose on some sort of Rock Ledge near a waterfall it wasn’t like it was anywhere where humans haven’t been before apparently the handle of the hammer was carbon dated in the late 1990s too but the results showed inconclusive dates ranging from the present to 700 years ago which boss supporters of course blamed on Modern contamination so all in all the London Hammer is actually a pretty lame art and even a lot of creationists steer clear of it it isn’t a forgery but it’s a prime example of a cool and maybe somewhat obscure natural phenomenon being misinterpreted so it’s our first solid misinterpretation of the day the dendera light bulb within the beautifully decorated CPS of the grand Temple of dendera in Upper Egypt there are a number of rather strange reliefs that some people think depict light bulbs and prove that the ancient Egyptians lit up their monuments with electricity as cool as that would be it’s complete crap because this isn’t a light bulb first of all you can clearly see that instead of a filament inside of it there’s a clear depiction of a snake and the base is a lotus flower and you can’t expect to get an electric circuit by throwing together a flower bulb in a snake alternative theories claim that it depicts a cathode ray tube or energized gas in a tube but again it’s a snake and a flower and they’re on a boat so then what is this well the text surrounding these scenes labels what it is but as with everything about Egyptian mythology it’s weird and complicated ultimately it’s a depiction of a variant of the Egyptian creation story which involves the sun god rising out of a blue lotus personified by the god nephrom itself rising from the primordial sea of chaos known as noon but calling this snake the sun god raw or the Creator God atum or any one God for that matter which I’ve seen it being called by various different sources online is a bit of an oversimplification the labels that come with these scenes actually identify the snake as two different things simultaneously Horus sewi heniz as harus and the SAT snake aramus was a child god with solar connotation so it makes sense to depict him as the son being born especially since the walls of the quote unquote light bulb might potentially represent a placenta but that’s not set in stone if you catch my DFT sorry he was also portrayed as the son of the two other main Gods of dendera Horus of edfu and hathor and he had his own dedicated Chapel there too he was mostly depicted as a little kid or a falcon or as a guy with a Falcon’s head so that’s why there are other depictions of this snake Lotus scene at dendera that don’t at all resemble light bulbs situated right next to Big depictions of Falcons and one of these scenes is literally right next to one of the so-called light bulb scenes interestingly a 3D mockup of the boat and the Lotus on it was probably brought out during festivals dedicated to hantus at the beginning of the harvest season and the labels surrounding these scenes seem to allude to that mockups material copper and gold as well as its measurements so if it’s really supposed to be a diagram of a light bulb it’s odd that it doesn’t instead refer to what’s needed to make you know a light bulb as I mentioned before this snake is also identified as the SAT snake in dandera sat was used as an epithet of homus and sat itself is called the Great sat who emerges from the lotus flower and the Divine sat who comes from heliopoulos the cult Center of raw the sun god sat is an interesting and rather obscure God but his association with the sun and even lotuses is fairly ancient in the old and middle kingdoms he was treated as an underworld demon and various spells for the underworld but he was deified and started being worshiped and began being depicted in the New Kingdom that’s also when he started being associated with both raw and oziris who had sort of become Amalgamated with each other and as such he was also associated with their sort of intertwined stories of them being continuously resurrected and reborn SATA also began being associated with the creation of the world at this point and in TT 359 the thian tomb of a guy named iner kui sat is described as coming out from the primordial sea there’s even a whole book of the Dead spell dedicated to helping the deceased to assume the form of sat spell 87 which is the reason why he was depicted a lot as a vignette illustrating The Book of the Dead in these little Book of the Dead vignettes He’s often shown right next to a Lotus with a disembodied human head which represented another Book of the Dead spell spell 81 which was about transforming into a Lotus for whatever reason which sounds odd of course but there’s an interesting reason behind it in the Brooklyn medical Papyrus snakes are likened to lotuses because the flaring of their hoods is sort of like how a Lotus opens up in the morning which the Egyptians saw as being a really potent symbol of rebirth so anyways this snake which is at the center of this supposed light bulb seems to be an amalgamation of homus and raw and sat all wrapped up in the myth of the sun rising out of the lotus at the beginning of time but the most obvious evidence that this isn’t a light bulb and that the Egyptians just didn’t have light bulbs is that until recently a thick layer of soot left behind by the smoke from people’s torches completely covered dendera’s ceiling and lots of other Egyptian monuments in dendera’s case removing all that soot or at least part of it actually revealed the ceiling’s stunning original color scheme and similar discoveries have occurred elsewhere like at the Temple of konu and thieves in reality the Egyptians probably just lit up the dark corners of their monuments using oil lamps maybe with a pinch of salt thrown in to make their Flames burn pure and to keep all that so to a minimum there’s also a theory that they lit up their monuments using sequences of big mirrors like in that one scene in The Mummy but probably not Ancient Aliens claims that the reason that there’s no other evidence of electricity in ancient Egypt is because the high Priests of dendera kept it as a secret and feel free to trust him but that’s one of the biggest cop-outs I’ve ever heard so we’re going to Chuck this in the misinterpretation category Polynesian sweet potatoes so I’ve already gone over potential evidence of Europeans arriving in the Americas prior to 1492 but there’s also a bit of evidence which suggests that Polynesians who are of course renowned for their seafaring abilities make have reached the Americas by crossing the Pacific centuries before Columbus crossed the Atlantic and what I think is the best evidence for this comes in the humble form of sweet potatoes sweet potatoes are native to South America and were originally domesticated there but there are actual tangible examples of sweet potatoes found across Polynesia that date to as early as the 12th century sweet potatoes potentially reached Hawaii probably through the Marquis Islands as early as the late 13 century and definitely by the late 15th century as proven by the charred remnants of several of them charcoal fragments probably from a piece of carbonized sweet potato were found at the remains of a fireplace within what was once a field shelter in the Kohala field system a really photogenic site used from the late 13th to early 19th centuries in what’s now lapah hoaki State Historical Park on the Northern edge of Hawaii Island it was published in 1971 and it’s been radiocarbon dated to as far back as the 14th century with a 65.7% Chance of dating to between 1470 and 1670 ad so there’s a chance that it’s pre-colombian and there’s a chance that it isn’t two more charred sweet potato fragments were discovered in two different trenches at the same site during more recent excavations and they were published in 2005 one just dates to between 1640 and 1960 so it isn’t that special but the one from trench 50 dates to between 1290 and 1430 so it definitely is and there are two more possible sweet potato specimens from Hawaii which could date to as far back as 1400 the possible charred remains of a sweet potato were recovered from the coool Lao Rock shelter on monia and they have a 95.7% chance of dating to anywhere between 1,400 and, 1700 other potential carbonized sweet potato remains were recovered from around an oven in a residential site in the WEA area of South goala right next to the goala field system charcoal from that oven has a 92.1% chance of dating to anywhere between, 1400 and 1850 so these examples aren’t exactly as convincing as the ones from the Kohala field system but they’re still pretty interesting but the introduction of sweet potatoes to the marqueses islands which I mentioned earlier as being where the sweet potatoes in Hawaii probably came from has been pinned to much earlier between 1200 and 1400 a 2012 analysis of of 23 prehistoric shell tools that old from the small anaho Valley on Nuku hea the largest of the Marquis Islands led to the identification of sweet potato starch on some of them and the list of pre-colombian sweet potato specimens from Polinesia just goes on and on more carbonized sweet potato remnants were found at a site called tangata Rock shelter on an island called mangaya in the southern Cook Islands of central East Polynesia they were found in two different excavation units and based on the age of the radiocarbon dated charcoal samples and the layers immediately below and above them they have to respectively date to between 1150 and 1409 and 1280 to 1327 so they’re both likely from sometime in the 13th century it’s even possible that one of them might date to even earlier between the year 1,000 and 1100 but that’s based on unpublished carbon dating regardless this is the earliest direct evidence of sweet potato in central East Polynesia which was probably one of the first places in Polynesia to get them the especially adventurous Polynesians who brought back these sweet potatoes also potentially brought back two other plants the handy bottle gourd and the soap Berry plant but the fact that they didn’t bring back other excellent South American Staples like corn is a bit odd these pre-colombian sweet potatoes might have even made their way to New Zealand probably via mangaya and maybe as early as 12:50 when it was originally settled by Polynesians microfossils of sweet potatoes have been recovered from three human or dog Copper lights I.E fossilized pieces of sh from around harat taonga Bay on Great Barrier island off New Zealand’s Northern Island a carbonized twig found in a layer 20 cm above these pieces of was carbonated to 467 years ago plus or minus 60 years so this sh is potentially from as far back as 1473 so that’s some that’s some pretty old but along with the physical presence of these potatoes one of the most convincing Clues pointing to Polynesian contact with pre-colombian South America is that the protop Polynesian word for sweet potato kumala and the modern variants of it in various Polynesian languages like rapanui kumara Hawaiian UA and Maori kumara seem to be intimately connected with the sweet potato’s name in various indigenous South American languages it’s called kumara in kusco Keta and kumal by the Kari people of Ecuador and that’s the reason why I don’t really buy the argument that sweet potatoes were just carried to Polynesia by seabirds or that they just floated there on mats of vegetation but a 2018 study of sweet potato DNA did find evidence that the most recent common ancestor between the South American sweet potato and the Polynesian sweet potato represented by a specimen collected by Cook’s expedition to the society Islands in 1769 lived as far back as a 100,000 years ago there is also a single species of amea which is the family that sweet potatoes belong to that isn’t found in the Americas and it’s a seashore species named amea literales it’s found in Polynesia which it likely evolved in after its ancestor crossed the Pacific naturally so there is also a little bit of evidence to suggest that sweet potatoes were in Oceania before humans even got there despite my Irish blood I’m getting a bit tired of talking about all these potatoes so let’s look at even more potential evidence of Polynesian contact with the Americas that doesn’t have anything to do with them a total of three pre-colombian chicken bones were discovered at the lnal one site in South Central Chile in 2002 and they were first published 5 years later in 2007 becoming touted as the first conclusive evidence that Polynesians reached South America which they actually sort of seem to be I mean they’re definitely pre-colombian ironically they were sent to a lab in New Zealand for radiocarbon dating and that determined that they date to between approximately 1300 to 1450 plus the strata they were in is associated with the El vergel culture which existed from around the year th000 to the Spanish Conquest plus besides the fact that they chickens which just aren’t native to the new world they also have a mitochondrial DNA sequence identical to what’s been found in ancient chicken bones found in the Pacific and share chicken Hao group E with chicken bones found at sites in Samoa and Tonga I didn’t know chickens had their own half groups but I guess they do but it’s possible that some of the very Polynesians that reached South America are still there or at least their bones are a 2010 study hypothesized that six skulls recovered from mocha Island just 30 kilomet off Chile and just 100 km south of the lnal site because of their distinct cranial morphology in general robusticity and other boxes of remains in the museum they were rediscovered in the conception Museum they haven’t actually been firmly dated to pre-colombian times though so who knows but their Discovery would be in line with surprisingly recent DNA studies which suggests that there is actually a slight genetic link between Polynesia and South America not with chickens but with humans a 2014 study of 27 people from rapanui I.E Easter Island determined that roughly 8% of their DNA came from Native Americans and this same study determined that the admixture that led to that happened between 12 in 1425 a more comprehensive 2020 study got similar results it analyzed genetic data from a whopping 87 individuals from 17 different Polynesian Islands and 15 Pacific Coast Native American groups plus even some pre-colombian remains and it found that the people on five eastern Polynesian Islands have Native American DNA in them it suggests that South Americans and Polynesians made contact in more ways than one if you know what I mean beginning in 115 50 on fatua in the South Marquis Islands whose inhabitants coincidentally have Legends of their forefathers coming from the East these ad mixture events continued on into the 1200s and Beyond elsewhere 166 of the stud’s participants were from rapanui and the researchers determined that ad mixture happened there around 1380 but all that’s Complicated by the fact that there was a lot of AD mixture between Polynesians Native Americans and Europeans on rapanui after contact with Europeans had been made OD ly enough the study suggests that the Native Americans who mixed with these Polynesians were most closely related to the indigenous people of Ecuador and Colombia specifically the zenu just before we move along I can’t not mention how people have actually successfully gone from South America to Eastern Polynesia on wooden rafts most famously in 1947 Thor hll and five companions proved that the Polynesians were definitely technologically capable of reaching South America even though they were trying to prove the reverse by successfully completing a 3 and 1/2 month long Voyage from Peru all the way to French Polynesia on a raft named the contiki which was actually less sophisticated than a Polynesian double hul canoe it was just made out of Bala log straight from Peru and by using the humbled current they were able to cross 4,300 Mi of ocean and sighted land after 92 days several others have successfully pulled off similar Expeditions in the decade since but unlike the more tangible stuff we went over I guess that’s all just circumstantial evidence and ultimately despite the arguments against it I don’t see why I shouldn’t chuck all that tangible evidence in the genuine category especially those delicious delicious potatoes crystal skulls I’m sorry to say it but all of these crystal skulls are just straight up forgeries which I don’t have time for and I especially don’t have time for all the weird new Agy occult Powers people have ascribed to them so we’re going to go over them pretty quickly so how do I know they’re all forgeries well they only started appearing in the late 19 century when there was a booming trade and forged Mesoamerican artifacts many of which made their way into Museum collections worldwide they’re not attached to any one specific Mesoamerican culture and they’ve been labeled as being from the Aztec Maya toltech and mixc even though they don’t really bear much actual stylistic resemblance to what any of them produced and finally none come from documented archaeological excavations they just all first appeared on the Art Market the first one to appear which is just an inch high was acquired by an English Banker named Christie in 1856 and later given to the British museum the next two to appear were exhibited in Paris in 1867 as part of the exposition Universal by a guy named Eugene ban the chief archaeologist of the ill- fated hapsburg emperor of Mexico Maximillion and this ban guy just happens to be connected to the origins of at least five of these crystal skulls small skulls like these which appeared in the late 19th century and have holes down their middle have been dubbed the first generation of skulls and they were probably produced by a single Artisan or Workshop in Mexico and possibly crafted out of beads this includes one in the Muse de Quay brownley which like all of the other crystal skulls that have been closely analyzed shows very obvious traces of having been made with modern machinery by looking at the Quay brandley skull under a microscope and using scanning electron microscopy or sem a 2008 study demonstrated that it was made using steel Machinery the researchers were also able to date it to the last couple of Centuries by using an interesting new technique called quartz hydration dating it involved using an ion beam to measure hydrogen concentrations in the Crystal Skull to determine how much water it penetrated its surface which was way less than what was in a piece of Chandelier from Sansui Palace in pot Stam known to have been cut in 1740 the first example of the second larger generation of Life-Size skulls appeared in 1881 in Ban’s Antiquity shop in Paris when he tried to sell it off to Mexico’s national museum the Mexican authorities identified it as a fake and denounced ban as a fraud but it still eventually made its way into the British museum these somewhat newer skulls are probably just completely European and of no actual ties to Mexico the most famous of them is the Mitchell Hedges skull which is almost identical in its proportions to the British museum skull and is only different in that it’s a bit more detailed and the fact that it has a detachable mandible it first showed up in 1933 when a London art dealer named Sydney Bernie bought it but after it was consigned to a soft bees auction in 1943 it was bought up by English Explorer Frederick Arthur Mitchell Hedges his adopted Ontarian daughter Anna kept it for 60 years until she died at the age of 100 and in that time she showed it to visitors in exchange for a little cash Anna told a different fictional story about its Origins and claimed to have found it herself under an ancient stone altar at the real classic period Maya site of lanton Southern bise on New Year’s Day of 1924 while her father was in the process of Excavating the site hoping to find Clues pointing him to Atlantis he of course never mentioned finding it there though because he bought it at auction almost two decades later the skull reportedly emits blue light from its eyes and has the power to crash computer hard drives oo so scary is what I would say if I wanted to get cursed but I’m going to play it safe in 2008 ANS widower brought the skull into this masonian for analysis under a high-powered microscope ultraviolet light and even a CT scan plus two sets of silicone molds of the surface were made for sem this all revealed that the skull was a modern forgery made using a high-speed rotary cutting tool the marks that left behind were under a millimeter thick suggesting that the tool that made it was either iron or steel and for reference the pre-colombian civilizations of mesomer only had access to tools made of stone wood and maybe copper there were also deeply cut parallel ridges left behind by Diamond abrasives now permanently embedded into the skull showing that whatever tool was used on it was also tipped with diamond there’s also a chance that it was modeled off of a real human skull forensic artist Gloria nus used facial reconstruction techniques on a replica of the skull and what came out seems to suggest that it was modeled off of the skull of some poor European woman but ultimately the Mitchell hedge’s skull was probably just a c copy of the British museum skull made right before it was brought onto the Art Market in the 30s the British museum skull has also been shown to be a fake made by modern lapidary tools but I mean even if you’re a crystal skull truther you could also just take this as evidence that they were actually just created by some ancient advanced technology or by atlantans or by aliens you do you but ultimately if these skulls have any significance it’s that they’re part of the story of how modern people have interacted with ancient meso America like Diego Rivera mural and it also inspired Kingdom of the Crystal Skull which I thought was actually pretty fun to watch as a kid so there’s that too even though it was said in Peru and I mean even if these are just fakes they’re better than like 99% of what’s in modern art museums nowadays and they’d make for pretty tasteful decoration at an upscale Mexican restaurant so they’re not that bad and that’s the end of the video thank you so much for watching originally this video was supposed to be somewhat longer but it’s just taken so long to make that I have to get it out now so thank you so much for watching and thank you so much for all of your kindness and support it’s what allowed us to surpass 50,000 subscribers just recently so thank you so much for helping me reach such an amazing Milestone I honestly thought I’d never get here it’s sort of surreal and now of course it’s time to thank my patrons Dro singal boa 420 bajun Julia Erikson Harrison temply doc Bossman Kevin Ryan anami yamami bom tadil Danny banan Rose kleene James Kirk Hugh deay Alysa P Mark Elliot Cullen gemik we bitsky jack Lester Sage oziri myth rades Jake The Snake Liv Buller and our newest Patron Tyler ducet the next video is probably going to be part five of The Forgotten ancient civilizations Iceberg so thank you and see you then