A few curiosities our ancestors left behind

Even though most of the world didn’t have a written language from earlier than the Roman Age, we have still been able to find out a good deal about them based on the findings from the thousands of archeological digs conducted around the world. We know the kinds of homes they used to live in and the clothes they wore, we have found temples, entire Viking longships buried in huge graves, and countless items of weapons and jewelry, giving us a relatively good understanding of their lives and capabilities. Now and then, what should have been a regular dig turns into finding something that makes historians question the very foundation of our understanding of the human race. Here are a few curiosities our ancestors left behind that still puzzle us after thousands of years.

Göbekli Tepe

The Neolithic age ranged between 10,000 and 4,500 BCE, ending at various times depending on the country and ending worldwide in some areas as late as 1900 BCE. During this time, the human race was still very much in the Stone Age and the invention of pottery was still a long way off for most people, which raises some pretty big questions about the temple known as Gobekli Tepe. Built during the pro-pottery neolithic A and B periods, this temple is considered to be the oldest stone building constructed by the human race, but the question is how?

For people who don’t even know what pottery is, to create such intricate detail and a selection of rooms made out of carved stone seems almost impossible for people of the age. So far, only four layers of the temple have been unearthed, but it is believed that the entire hill the temple is situated within was put there on purpose. It seems that whoever created this giant stone temple went through the trouble of gathering soil from miles around and burying the whole thing to disguise it as a hill. Who, how, and why people built it, and why it was buried afterward still remains a mystery to this day.

The London Hammer

This one is a strange find but could be nothing more than an unlikely case of geology. In 1936 a man was out walking with his wife along the Red Creek near the town of London in Texas when they saw a piece of rock that looked out of place and decided to take a closer look. They noticed that a lump of rock had formed around a piece of wood and decided to take it home, but it wasn’t until 10 years later that their son cracked it open and found a hammer inside.

The problem with this one is that it would take millions of years for rock to naturally form around an object, but humans have only been what we now recognize as “human” for about 50,000 years. Carbon dating on the rock is inconclusive, showing dates of only a few years old to 700 years old, leading to countless debates about its true origin. It is consistent in design with 1800s American tools, but how the rock managed to form around the piece, and how part of the handle has turned into coal is anyone’s guess.

Lake Michigan Stonehenge

Laying somewhere on the bottom of Lake Michigan is a small stone circle that appears to be some kind of religious structure, the only problem is that the lake has been flooded for thousands of years, and on one of the stone pillars is a carving of a type of elephant that went extinct 10,000 years ago. The circle was discovered by a professor from Northwest Michigan University in 2007 when he was looking for shipwrecks, but it also happens to be located within a native American reserve and its exact location is being kept a secret.

Most of the pillars are just under 2 meters tall and have been cut into a roughly circular shape, but the most interesting thing is the carving of the extinct elephant. The Mastodon is believed to have died out around 10,000 BCE at the end of the ice age, which would suggest that this structure is much older than that by possibly thousands of years, and it would have to be for the area of land it’s built on to be above ground. Unfortunately, because the site is located within a protected area, independent research and verification requests are always denied, suggesting it may just be an elaborate hoax, or it may be the oldest built structure on the American continent.

The worlds first murder scene

In northern Spain next to the town of Burgos lays the Atapuerca mountain range, home to an extensive network of caves and peaks. 30 Meters below the surface in one of the caves is a vertical shaft that falls for about 12 meters, and it has been named the Sima de los Huesos, which translates to the “pit of bones”. Within this pit were the remains of 28 people from an early ancestor of humans called Homo heidelbergensis, most of which appear to have been killed by some kind of weapon. There are blunt force wounds on many of the skulls and deep scratches from either bone or flint blades, which suggests that this pit was a dumping ground for anyone who was killed in their community. The biggest significance is the age of the bones which have been dated from between 500,000 and 400,000 BCE, though exact dates are hotly debated.

(One of the skulls recovered from the pit of bones showing a fatal blunt force wound)

Other finds in the mountain range date from between 630,000 and 1.2 million years ago and include a range of basic stone and flint tools and weapons. Since these bones are the oldest evidence of intentional killing and body disposal, it would technically be the world’s first murder scene. Another interesting fact about Homo heidelbergensis is that they were the first ancestors of humans to appear in Western Europe, but they didn’t breed with the other Human-like ancestors and appear to have died out where they first showed up, in the Atapuerca mountain range of northern Spain.