Interesting bone armor from the Bronze Age found in Siberia

All right, this time I want to show you a piece of archaeology news. It's from the city of Omsk in Russia which is southwestern Siberia. They found a suit of armor which is between 3,900 and 3,500 years old and it's interesting for several reasons. For one, its age, its material and also how it was found. They just found it by itself. It was not in a burial. Usually finds like that are burials. In this case you have just the armor itself. So they're assuming that it might have been some kind of votive offering to the gods or some sort of ritual sacrifice because it's not the kind of material that lends itself to burying in the ground for later use. So that seems like the most plausible explanation. They don't know enough yet. They're puzzling it together right now. Which is going to take quite a while, several months. And some interesting thing is it's made of bone. I found a bit of information about similar armor worn by Inuit. It could be made of bone, wood or ivory and held together by walrus hide straps. It really looks like the same style of armor. So I suppose you could call that a lamellar armor. And I would imagine that this kind of protection is reasonably effective depending on the material. If it's made of wood, of course, it depends on the type of wood. Bone is reasonably dense and hard. Walrus tusks, I don't know. I would assume them to be pretty hard too. And padding underneath wouldn't be a problem because these are from cold geographical climates. So they would wear warm padded clothing underneath anyway. So that should be pretty effective. Against bronze weapons. The drawback I would imagine would be maintenance. Because those individual plates or lamellars would be damaged pretty regularly, I would think. They would break and then would have to be replaced. I don't know exactly how they were attached with the straps. If that allows for easy removal of just individual lamellars and replacement. Or if the entire thing has to be opened up and restrapped. That would be a lot of work. But either way, it's not the most durable but definitely an effective type of armor. And as soon as the archaeologists have pieced it all together and know more about it, they are also going to try to make a reproduction. Which again is going to be very interesting to look at. So I just figured you would find that interesting. It's not the type of armor that you very commonly see. In general, organic armor is rather rare because it just doesn't preserve very well in the ground. Which is also why leather armor, for example, is often debated because there's very limited evidence. At least archaeological evidence. Because organic materials like wood and leather need very specific conditions to even last for that long. But yeah, this is really interesting. Very old armor. Pretty interesting design. There you have it. Thanks for watching.