Inexplicable Items: 5 Mysterious Ancient Artifacts

Please don't say aliens. Please don't say aliens. Please don't say aliens.

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[ignitionfrn]

1:00 - Chapter 1 - Antikythera mechanism
3:35 - Chapter 2 - Shroud of turin
6:20 - Chapter 3 - London hammer
8:45 - Chapter 4 - Quimbaya aircraft
11:05 - Chapter 5 - Gabon nuclear reactor

[scurfdude]

I really enjoy that this video actually offers multiple theories for each mystery. Every video I’ve seen mentioning the Antikythera Mechanism up to this point has been extremely vague and overly theatrical about the mystery.

[MichaelMiller-tmos]

SIMON! If you ever do another video on mysteries, can you cover the St. Mark/Alexander the Great controversy? For those who don't know, there is significant evidence that the body of St. Mark that is in Venice is actually the body of Alexander the Great. The last known account of Alexander's tomb is in about 392AD. By 402AD, the tomb was missing. But oddly, the tomb of St. Mark makes its first appearance in Alexandria, Egypt that same year. The theory is that when the Pope made paganism illegal in about 395, those who worshipped Alexander as a god did a little rebranding to prevent the destruction of the tomb. Adding to this evidence is the door of the tomb had Alexander's family seal on it, as well as a Sarissa and Macedonian shield and greaves. Further, when the body was moved in the early 1900s, it was said to be intact, not just a skeleton, which implies the body was mummified. St. Mark would not have been mummified, because his corpse was incinerated. However, Alexander absolutely would have been mummified. It is a fascinating mystery, and you can learn more by just googling "Alexander the Great or St. Mark."

[christinearmington]

I imagine we have scores of fascinating ruins and artifacts yet to be found 3-400 feet under the seas.

[drsnova]

Even without the antikythera device, ENIAC is only the first computer if you disqualify earlier attempts by setting some arbitrary parameters (has to be electronic, has to be multi-purpose). It is preceded by the British COLOSSUS in 1943, and the German Z3 in 1941. As with most inventions in the modern era attributed to some single source, they are really just incremental improvements on previous ones.

[ks]

It's not true that there were no mentioning of devices such as the antikythera mechanism in ancient literature. Cicero described a device that resembles it very well but he was not able to give a description over how it worked since he wasn't versed in technology so much as he was in philosophy and history. Others also made remarks of similar devices but until we actually discovered one, modern historians didn't know what to make of these descriptions of ancient planetariums and mostly dismissed them as fantasy

[robertschubert]

The alien jam session sequence made my day.

[Omegatonboom]

As a child in Wisconsin in the 90's, I would have to go to the Menomonie Public Library and rent VHS tape from Nova or National Geographic to get information like this... And honestly this is way better and there's unlimited amounts of it! And it's free!

if I knew it was going to be like this in the future, I would have assumed everybody was going to be a genius. Lol

[rogerjacobs]

Concerning the "London Hammer", that looks like a spike maul. Years ago when I was a youngster I worked as a gandy dancer on the Burlington Northern railroad. This was in the early 1970's, we did have machines, but alot of work was still done by hand back then. The elongated head allowed us to drive spikes on either side of the rail without cracking the handle, where as a typical sledge hammer would have broken because of the height of the rail.

[Immortal-Headcase]

A lot of this reminds me of an episode of Buck Rogers I watched as a kid. In the episode, Buck who is now in the 25th century, goes to a museum where a professor of archeology is giving a lecture on a stained glass tiffany style lampshade that was popular in the 1970s, the professor had the shade upside down on a table giving his expert opinion on the late 20th century electric salad bowl. So you see, its all a matter of perspective, those "jet airplanes" for example, if you stand them on their tail, instead of delta wing aircraft you have a person in ceremonial clothing, like a flared cape or Condor wings mid dance like on native american totem poles. The mechanism may have been a one of a kind prototype royal treasure, which is why it was nicked to begin with, that silly hammer, if it was ancient the wooden handle would have rotted.

[michaellowe]

Reminds me of that time in 1984 I went to work at the metal smashing plant and found a robot arm laying next to the hydraulic press.

[rangerstl]

Simon, ENIAC is the first ELECTRONIC computer. Mechanical computers have been around for a long time. The most sophisticated of these include the Norden bomb sight, submarine torpedo targeting computers, and many others. They have been known almost as far back as gear ratios...

[acelaya]

I live in central Texas. We have so many minerals in even our treated water that we have to flush out water heaters to keep them from clogging. I don't doubt for a minute that putting a hammer under a waterfall here would encase it in limestone in short time.

[seanbrazell]

That Creationist Evidence museum building looks EXACTLY like I thought it would.

[John_Fugazzi]

Thank you for clearly showing the Antikythera device and what it did. Early on when it was referred to as a device which computed planetary motions, etc. the Ancient Astronaut crowd went wild saying "They found a COMPUTER from thousands of years ago and letting the public imagine a laptop or PC.

[zzuse]

Youtube channel “Click Spring” is in the process of rebuilding the Antikythera Mechanism with hand tools only.

[robertharper]

There are soooo many artifacts like this that this really needs to be a

[RoarOfWolverine]

The small gold airplanes are more likely an artistic stylized rendition of fish and insects. The vertical tail would certainly suggest a fish with oversized pectoral fins as the wings. One of the other small plane looking ones looks more like a beetle.

No mystery at all. Much of our aircraft have been designed based on certain birds, fish and insects, because when you think about it, fish are actually flying through the water, which is why some are more built for speed, like a jet, while others are better suited for hovering in a stable manner in one place, more like a helicopter or a Harrier Jump Jet.

Water moves across horizontal pectoral fins in the same way air flows across the top and bottom of airplane wings, creating different pressure zones thereby lift, while vertical wings add stability to the motion, which is why sharks and dolphin have dorsal fins. We do see two different designs for propulsion with sharks and all other fish using the vertical type tail, while whales and dolphins developed horizontal tails.

[domhuckle]

The Antikythera mechanism is the most important find in history - the craftsmanship required to manufacture such a thing implies whole industries of precision cog making and technical and astronomical know-how. The artifact itself sits at the top of a pyramid of behaviours and executions, all of which we know nothing about

[johanneskaiser]

When we discussed the Antikythera Mechanism in a history seminar, the agreed-upon theory between students and professor was that is had most likely been developed by a genius engineer in Alexandria and was en route to Rome, to be evaluated by a wealthy client. If that were to be true, spare a thought for the poor bloke of inventor who probably would have liked fame and money coming his way, but instead got the message "We are terribly sorry, but your package was misplaced. We hope you will continue to ship with Alexandria Postal Service." Or the ancient equivalent, obviously (which would have been a message from the presumably also sunk captain, but that's no fun, is it?).