The Mystery Of Mexico’s Giant Stone Heads (S2) ｜ Mysteries Unearthed With Danny Trejo)

Strange finds come crawling out of places you'd never expect. In the jungles of southern Mexico, a routine swing of a machete is about to strike something unexpected. It's the early 1860s near the remote Mexican village of Tres Zapotes, and a farm worker is clearing away some brush so he can plant some crops there when he notices something unusual. His blade hits something in the soil, so he starts clearing away the earth to try and see what he's hit. What he finds is hard, smooth, and absolutely huge. As he clears more dirt, contours start to emerge. They look like lips, a nose, an eyelid. To his surprise, it's no ordinary stone. It's a nine foot tall head. Word spreads quickly and locals begin to gather around it, unsure of what exactly has been found. Some in the village think they've uncovered a god. Others worry that they've disturbed something, something that might even be cursed, and so advocate to leave this alone. The strange stone sits there untouched for the next 70 years until an American archaeologist named Matthew Sterling hears about the massive stone head and decides to investigate. Sterling locates the statue and then begins excavating around the area. Soon, he digs up more heads, many more, 17 in fact, the largest of which weighs around 40 tons. Not only that, they look unlike anything archaeologists have ever seen in this area, and they're not alone because alongside these statues, they find things like altars, thrones, and other items carved in the same style. Sterling thinks this could be evidence of an ancient civilization no one knew existed. He names this ancient people the Olmec, which means people from the land of rubber, a reference to the fact that this region is important in natural rubber production. Radiocarbon dating of materials located near these sculptures dates them back to anywhere between 1500 to 400 BCE, which suggests that it is possible that the Olmec people may have been the mother culture that would later give way to other civilizations like the Aztec and the Maya. If true, the Olmec's techniques would have been revolutionary for their time, with stone crafting as advanced as Stonehenge or the Pyramids of Giza. Geologists identified the stone that was used for the heads as basalt that comes from the Tuzla Mountains, which were about 50 miles away. So imagine these people were able to transport 40 ton pieces of stone 50 miles over thick jungles. Experts think that they might have used rafts, rollers, or ramps to move them, but nobody's entirely sure. Moving them is one challenge. Understanding them is another. Some experts believe that these are the faces of ancient gods. Others suggest that they're simply too lifelike to not refer to living people. And so maybe these were used to honor important leaders or to mark their territory. Today, some of these sculptures are housed in archaeological museums, but others remain in their original sites, just feet away from where they were really discovered. And honestly, maybe it's for the best that they stay where they were found, because 3,500 years ago, the Olmec moved these 40-ton stones, carved them, and then set them down in a very specific location for a very specific reason and purpose. What that purpose is, though, remains the big mystery. What's small has big feet and is featured in a Hollywood blockbuster. If you said hobbits, you'd be right. And you'd also believe they couldn't be real. But what if one unusual find makes you rethink that? It's 1950 on the Indonesian island of Flores, and Dutch Catholic missionary Father Theodore Verhoeven spends his day-to-day teaching classical languages to the residents. But in his free time, he's out there exploring the island. One day, while wandering the countryside, Verhoeven spots some strange objects scattered on the ground near the entrance to a cave. Curious, he starts digging. And soon, he finds a bunch of fossils. Eventually, Verhoeven stumbles on something much stranger. It is a small, fully formed, human-like skeleton that's barely three and a half feet tall. But because the skull is fully formed, Verhoeven realizes this little skeleton can't be from a child. Baffled, Verhoeven publishes his findings. But the mystery stays buried until decades later, when another archaeologist picks up the trail. In 2003, Septomo and his team are excavating deep in Liangboa, one of the caves that Verhoeven explored. And as they dig through layers of sediment, they also begin finding loads of smaller human-like bones. Before long, the team unearths an entire human skeleton. It's a fully adult woman, but she's only three and a half feet tall and only weighs 66 pounds. She comes to be known as the Little Lady of Floras, or Flo for short. Her bones show absolutely no signs of any kind of disease or disorder. They're completely normal, healthy bones. They are just smaller, with the exception of her strangely oversized feet. Eventually, scientists find 13 more skeletons, all of the same stature, all with unusually large feet. Carbon dating indicates that the bones date back about 50,000 years. That means that they're too recent and too small to be an early human ancestor known as Homo erectus, and Neanderthals never reached this part of the world. So who are these mysterious people, and why were they so small? Researchers determined that this is an entirely new species of an early human ancestor. They end up naming it Homo floresiensis, and paleoanthropologists consider it to be one of the most important finds in terms of human evolution in decades. Despite their small stature, they were just as capable as their larger human cousins, and researchers think geography might have played a role in their tiny physique. Scientists hypothesized that it was the pressures of island life that led to their small stature. Cut off from the mainland by a deep ocean, resources would have been scarce. Over the generations, Homo floresiensis evolved to need less food. In this limited environment, being small was an advantage. The discovery makes headlines around the globe, sparking an immediate comparison. At the time, the Lord of the Rings films are arguably some of the most popular films on planet Earth, and this sudden discovery of tiny humans that were small in stature with big feet gets a load of attention. But being that Tolkien wrote his books back in the 30s and 40s, it's pretty unlikely that he was inspired by Homo floresiensis when he conceived of the hobbits. Today, replicas of the Flores hobbit bones are on display at a museum in Australia, and a 3D model of Flo is on display at the Smithsonian. But anyone hoping to spot the One Ring will have to look elsewhere.