15 Most Recent Controversial Archeological Discoveries

The study of the ancient and recent human past through material remains is known as archaeology. Archaeologists are constantly looking for the next big discovery. Join us, as we look at the 15 most recent controversial archeological discoveries made.

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Infant Buddha

Two West Australian men discovered a bronze Buddha figurine that could date back to the early Ming Dynasty while exploring the state's north coast with a metal detector. If the infant Buddha is authenticated, it will be of high value and potentially historically significant if its arrival on the coast can be shown to predate the first European visits to Australia's western coast. The two filmmakers, who had recently done practice runs with metal detectors on beach areas in preparation for filming, had not expected to find even Napoleonic treasure, let alone potentially ancient Chinese treasure.

They were only looking in areas where they knew they could operate, not where they knew the crew would go. They were simply marking the least likely locations. They'd been digging up beer cans for a long time and were about to give up when one of them received a strong signal on his metal detector about something large and close to the surface. So they set up the cameras and GPS tracking to document it. At first, what they were unearthing resembled a gold Lindt Easter bunny.

When it became clear that they weren't digging up a rabbit, they paused and took more photos. It was a lovely pair of buttocks. They laughed as they brushed the sand away, thinking it was a 1950s Art Deco candelabra or something. But after another minute of digging, they discovered a baby Buddha. Despite its small size, the figurine appears to be made of gilded bronze and weighs more than a kilogram. The most intriguing possible explanation for its presence in Western Australia is that it is from a 1421 "Ming treasure voyage." This could imply that the Chinese visited the area nearly 200 years before Dutchman Dirk Hartog arrived in 1616.

The Cretan Footprints

The oldest human-like footprints discovered may be even older than previously thought. According to new research, the controversial fossilized imprints discovered in 2002 on the Greek island of Crete are around 6.05 million years old. The 50 footprints, which were originally dated to 5.7 million years ago, may have predated this estimate—proposed by scholars in 2017—by more than 300,000 years.

The footprints, which are thought to have been left by hominins, could change scientists' understanding of how early humans evolved, shifting the group's starting point from Africa to the Mediterranean Sea. Researchers believe the bipedal creature who left the marks belonged to Graecopithecus Freyberg, an early human ancestor discovered in 1944 and dubbed "El Graeco." The tracks are nearly 2.5 million years older than Australopithecus afarensis tracks from Laetoli, Tanzania. If the team's findings are correct, they could complicate the widely held belief that humans originated in Africa.

The famous "Lucy" fossils, discovered in Tanzania in 1974 and identified as Australopithecus afarensis and dated to around 3.2 million years ago, are the oldest widely accepted pre-human footprints. However, older body fossils attributed to early hominins have been discovered in Africa, indicating that the human lineage extends far beyond Lucy's species. Scientists believe that modern humans, also known as Homo sapiens, evolved around 300,000 years ago. The species contains genes from the now-extinct Homo neanderthalensis line of hominins, which first appeared around 430,000 years ago.

Видео 15 Most Recent Controversial Archeological Discoveries канала The Brilliant