The Out-of-Place Artifacts Iceberg | PART 1

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-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 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-Columbian 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 how people view history. But a lot of these ooparts 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-of-place 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 Antikythera Mechanism. In the year 1900, sponge divers discovered an ancient shipwreck 180 feet deep off of the small Greek island of Antikythera. 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 Antikythera 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 Antikythera, the first thing you're met with is the Mechanism, not the island. It's also the main MacGuffin 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-of-place 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 hand-cut system of gear wheels, making it the earliest geared device ever to be found. And it bears tiny, barely legible Greek inscriptions, which suggest 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 matonic 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 saros 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 doodad either way. And it was created 1400 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 Atlanteans 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 Rhodes in the 2nd 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 Cicero's villas or something like that. And over 120 years after its initial discovery, the Antikythera shipwreck is actually still being excavated. It was reinvestigated by Jacques Cousteau in the 50s and 70s, but starting in 2014, the Return to Antikythera 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 meters 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 Antikythera. And of course, the Antikythera mechanism could only be put in the genuine category. Roman Head in Mexico Okay, so this is basically the quintessential out-of-place artifact in terms of where it was found geographically, because it's a Roman statuette's 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 and 1510 at the site of Texoxic Calixtlahuaca, built by the Matlazinca people just 65 kilometers from what's now Mexico City. It also contained more standard tomb goods, like pottery from when the city was controlled by the Aztecs, 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 this tomb was found in was under three other intact levels, within a larger pyramidal structure called Mound 6, so the head couldn't have just been chucked in there afterwards. Unless, of course, the excavation 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 Moctezuma 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 Erich Boehringer and Bernard Andrier, have identified it as a Roman work made sometime in the 2nd or 3rd centuries AD, and apparently its hairstyle and the shape of its beard are specifically typical of works made under the Severan dynasty, ruling from 193 to 235 AD, which of course raises the question, why would a 2nd or 3rd 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 has confirmed that it can't just be a modern fake, and that it had to have been made sometime between the 9th century BC and the 13th century AD, conservatively, and between the 2nd 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-Columbian artifact, and it's way older than the tomb it was found in. We know that the Aztecs did deliberately keep around Olmec, Teotihuacano, and Toltec 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 catalogued as where it wound up. Mexico City's National Museum of Anthropology decides 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-Columbian voyage across the Atlantic is that the whole excavation at Calixtlahuaca 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 Calixtlahuaca 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 Calixtlahuaca 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 is 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 pottery analysis. There's also a rumor that a guy named Hugo Modano, who was a student helping to excavate Calixtlahuaca in the 30s, deliberately planted the head as some sort of prank, and that the site's lead excavator, Jose Garcia Payon, 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 Universidad de las 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 Modano had never even worked at the site. Plus, Paddock's very close associate, Ignacio 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 Christov and Santiago Genovese, but they investigated another supposedly old world artifact found in Mexico, a quote-unquote Venetian head from the village of Las Palacias 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's plenty more potential evidence further down. So ultimately, I'm leaning towards categorizing this head as 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 Baghdad Battery is a pretty strange object. Let me give you a description of it. It's a 15 centimeter high clay jar containing a copper cylinder topped with a crimped in copper disk. It's self-covered in layers of bitumen, 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 1st century AD, when the area around Baghdad where this was found was ruled by the Parthian Empire. But it also might be from the later Sassanid Persian Empire. One story goes that it was discovered next to magical bowls by Austrian painter and archaeologist Wilhelm König anywhere between 1936 and 1938. Accounts differ. And apparently this was happening while he was conducting excavations in Parthian lairs at a place called Khujut Rubua or Khujut Rabu, just southeast of Baghdad. It was once part of Seleucia, an ancient city on the Tigris, right next to Ctesiphon, the capital of the Parthians and the Sassanians. 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 to be any pictures of him online, even though he was the 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 Forschungen und Fortschritt, 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-of-place artifacts, since the first modern electric battery was only made in 1800 by Alessandro Volta, who has to have had one of the most on-the-nose names in history. But were they really batteries? It's been argued that instead, they were actually just special containers for sacred papyri, because those other batteries I mentioned also contained papyri. In an area of Seleucia on Tigris, now known as Tel Umar, similar jars containing copper tubes, but no iron, were found to be stuffed with papyri. They were associated with iron and bronze needles and discovered in what seemed to be a magician's house. At Ctesiphon, jugs containing sealed bronze cylinders filled with organic material that might have been papyri were also found. Pliny 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 Khujut Rabu battery did contain a papyrus 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, analysis 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 Koenig himself proposed. A former director at the Romer und Pelaseus Museum in Hildesheim, Arne Egebrecht, 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 gild anything. Plus, you need a metal solution of the stuff you want to plate with to actually electroplate stuff, and aqueous 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 gild stuff, including fire gilding with mercury. Another theory is that these were placed inside a god 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 Pliny 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 first century AD, physicians used electric fish to alleviate foot pain and to stimulate nerves. In the first half of the first century AD, Roman physician Scribonius Largus 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 first century polymath Heron 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 Tigris or the Euphrates, so the Parthians perhaps used weak wet 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 gotta 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 papyri 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 sorta be genuine. These jars definitely could theoretically produce some sort of electric current, but we don't know what exactly it would be used for. I'm gonna 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 gonna be from London in the UK, or maybe London, Ontario, but actually, this is from the London in Texas. In 1936, Mr. Max Hann 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 Baugh, 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 as 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 as the rock around the London Hammer, its age might not actually be important, which I'll get to later. Baugh also claims that the hammer is associated with the pre-flood Mesozoic humans that he claims made the infamous, and spoiler alert, fake Paluxy 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 miner's hammer from the 19th century. As it turns out, dissolved minerals and sediments from even ancient rocks, 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 Anne'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 Hammer's casing doesn't preclude it from being one. Carl Baugh 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 Baugh's supporters, of course, blamed on modern contamination. So all in all, the London Hammer is actually a pretty lame upart, 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 Lightbulb. Within the beautifully decorated crypts of the Grand Temple of Dendera in Upper Egypt, there are a number of rather strange reliefs that some people think depict lightbulbs 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 lightbulb. 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 and 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 Nefertum, itself rising from the primordial sea of chaos known as Nun. But calling this snake the sun god Ra, 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 Sematawi, Hellenized as Harsamtus, and the Sata snake. Harsamtus was a child god with solar connotations, so it makes sense to depict him as the sun being born. Especially since the walls of the quote-unquote lightbulb might potentially represent a placenta, but that's not set in stone if you catch my drift. 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 lightbulbs, situated right next to big depictions of falcons. And one of these scenes is literally right next to one of the so-called lightbulb scenes. Interestingly, a 3D mock-up of the boat and the lotus on it was probably brought out during festivals dedicated to Harsamtus at the beginning of the harvest season. And the labels surrounding these scenes seem to allude to that mock-up's material, copper and gold, as well as its measurements. So if it's really supposed to be a diagram of a lightbulb, it's odd that it doesn't instead refer to what's needed to make, you know, a lightbulb. As I mentioned before, this snake is also identified as the Sata snake. In Dendera, Sata was used as an epithet of Harsamtus, and Sata itself is called the Great Sata, who emerges from the lotus flower, and the Divine Sata, who comes from Heliopolis, the cult center of Ra, the sun god. Sata 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 worshipped and began being depicted in the New Kingdom. That's also when he started being associated with both Ra and Osiris, 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 TT359, the Theban tomb of a guy named Inhercui, Sata is described as coming out from the primordial sea. There's even a whole Book of the Dead spell dedicated to helping the deceased assume the form of Sata, 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 lightbulb, seems to be an amalgamation of Harsamtas and Ra and Sata, 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 lightbulb and that the Egyptians just didn't have lightbulbs 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 Khonsu in Thebes. 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 purer and to keep all that soot 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 them, but that's one of the biggest cop-outs I've ever heard. So we're gonna 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, may 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 Marquesas Islands as early as the late 13th century, and definitely by the late 15th century, as proven by the charred remnants of several of them. Carcoal fragments, probably from a piece of carbonized sweet potato, were found in 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 Lapahake 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-Columbian, 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 Kooko'olau Rock Shelter on Mauna Kea, and they have a 95.7% chance of dating to anywhere between 1400 and 1700. Other potential carbonized sweet potato remains were recovered from around an oven in a residential site in the Waimea area of South Kohala, right next to the Kohala 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 Marquesas 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 23 prehistoric shell tools that old from the small Anaho Valley on Nuku Hiva, the largest of the Marquesas Islands, led to the identification of sweet potato starch on some of them. And the list of pre-Columbian sweet potato specimens from Polynesia just goes on and on. More carbonized sweet potato remnants were found at a site called Tangatatau Rock Shelter on an island called Mangaia 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 some time in the 13th century. It's even possible that one of them might date to even earlier, between the year 1000 and 1100, but that's based on unpublished carbon dating. Regardless, this is the earliest direct evidence of sweet potatoes 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 soapberry plant, but the fact that they didn't bring back other excellent South American staples, like corn, is a bit odd. These pre-Columbian sweet potatoes might have even made their way to New Zealand, probably via Mangaia, and maybe as early as 1250, when it was originally settled by Polynesians. Micro-fossils of sweet potatoes have been recovered from three human, or dog, coprolites, i.e. fossilized pieces of s**t, from around Harataunga Bay on Great Barrier Island off New Zealand's Northern Island. A carbonized twig found in a layer 20 centimeters above these pieces of s**t was carbon dated to 467 years ago, plus or minus 60 years. So this s**t is potentially from as far back as 1473. So that's some pretty old s**t. But along with the physical presence of these potatoes, one of the most convincing clues pointing to Polynesian contact with pre-Columbian South America is that the proto-Polynesian word for sweet potato, kumala, and the modern variants of it in various Polynesian languages, like Rapa Nui Kumara, Hawaiian uala, 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 Kuzco Quechua, and kumal by the Kanyari 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 100,000 years ago. There is also a single species of Ipomoea, which is the family that sweet potatoes belong to, that isn't found in the Americas. And it's a seashore species named Ipomoea littoralis. 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-Columbian chicken bones were discovered at the El Arenal 1 site in south-central Chile in 2002, and they were first published five 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-Columbian. 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 1000 to the Spanish conquest. Plus, besides the fact that they're 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 haplogroup E with chicken bones found at sites in Samoa and Tonga. I didn't know chickens had their own haplogroups, 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 Moka Island, just 30 kilometers off Chile and just 100 kilometers south of the El Arenal site, because of their distinct cranial morphology and general robusticity, and other boxes of remains in the museum they were rediscovered in, the Concepcion Museum. They haven't actually been firmly dated to pre-Columbian times, though, so who knows. But their discovery would be in line with surprisingly recent DNA studies, which suggest 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 Rapa Nui, 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 1280 and 1425. A more comprehensive 2020 study got similar results. It analyzed genetic data from a whopping 807 individuals from 17 different Polynesian islands and 15 Pacific Coast Native American groups, plus even some pre-Columbian 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 1150 on Fatuhiva in the South Marquesas Islands, whose inhabitants coincidentally have legends of their forefathers coming from the east. These admixture events continued on into the 1200s and beyond elsewhere. 166 of the study's participants were from Rapa Nui, and the researchers determined that admixture happened there around 1380, but all that's complicated by the fact that there was a lot of admixture between Polynesians, Native Americans, and Europeans on Rapa Nui after contact with Europeans had been made. Oddly 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 Zinu. 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 Heyerdahl 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 three-and-a-half-month-long voyage from Peru all the way to French Polynesia on a raft named the Kontiki, which was actually less sophisticated than a Polynesian double-hulled canoe. It was just made out of balsa logs straight from Peru, and by using the Humboldt Current, they were able to cross 4,300 miles of ocean and sighted land after 92 days. Several others have successfully pulled off similar expeditions in the decades 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 Agey occult powers people have ascribed to them, so we're gonna go over them pretty quickly. So how do I know they're all forgeries? Well, they only started appearing in the late 19th century when there was a booming trade in 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 Aztecs, Maya, Toltecs, and Mixtecs, 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 Henry 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 Universelle by a guy named Eugene Boban, the chief archaeologist of the ill-fated Habsburg emperor of Mexico, Maximilian. And this Boban 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 middles, 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 Musée de Cuey-Branly, 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 Cuey-Branly 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 had penetrated its surface, which was way less than what was in a piece of chandelier from Sans Souci Palace in Potsdam, known to have been cut in 1740. The first example of the second, larger generation of life-size skulls appeared in 1881 in Bobin's Antiquities 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 Bobin as a fraud, but it still eventually made its way into the British Museum. These somewhat newer skulls are probably just completely European and have 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 in the fact that it has a detachable mandible. It first showed up in 1933 when a London art dealer named Sidney Burney bought it, but after it was consigned to a SoftB's 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 Lubantun, southern Belize, 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. Ooh, so scary, is what I would say if I wanted to get cursed, but I'm gonna play it safe. In 2008, Ann's widower brought the skull into the Smithsonian 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 it left behind were under a millimeter thick, suggesting that the tool that made it was either iron or steel. And for reference, the pre-Columbian civilizations of Mesoamerica 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 Nuss 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-Hedges skull was probably just a 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 Atlanteans, 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 Mesoamerica, like a 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 set 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. The next video is probably going to be Part 5 of the Forgotten Ancient Civilizations Iceberg, so thank you, and see you then.