In 2018, a Greek trading vessel was discovered in the Black Sea that provided previously unknown information to historians. The amazing part is that despite its age, the 2,400-year-old ship was almost entirely intact. How is that possible?
A 75-foot vessel, dated to approximately 400 BCE, was discovered resting laterally at a depth of nearly one mile beneath the surface of the Black Sea. Remarkably, the ship’s mast, rudders, and rowing benches remained intact and exhibited exceptional preservation. This state of conservation is attributed to the anoxic conditions of the Black Sea’s deeper waters—characterized by the absence of oxygen—which inhibit the microbial activity responsible for the decomposition of organic materials such as wood. Beyond a depth of approximately 500 feet from the shoreline, oxygen levels diminish to zero, creating an environment conducive to long-term preservation. To date, over 60 additional shipwrecks have been identified within this archaeologically rich region.
Prior to this discovery, vessels of this type had only been documented through ancient Greek iconography, notably in artifacts such as the Siren Vase, which portrays the ship of the mythological figure Odysseus. According to the archaeological team responsible for the find, the ship represents a significant contribution to the understanding of ancient maritime technology, offering tangible evidence that complements and substantiates previously theoretical models of ship construction and seafaring practices.
Uncovered Pompeii with Mount Vesuvius in the background
It was long believed that August 24 in the year 79 was when Mount Vesuvius erupted. The eruption destroyed the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. (The latter city is often left out of the story.)
Pompeii was about five miles away from the mountain. The cities are in what is now Ercolano, Campania, Italy. Pompeii was a popular resort town for Rome's wealthy and the population was about 20,000. Pompeii and Herculaneum are two of the few ancient cities to be preserved nearly intact. The ash and debris that covered the area was up to 23 feet thick in places and that protected it from looting and the elements.
Most of the residents were able to escape when noises from the volcano were heard that morning. At noon, the plume of ash, pumice rock, and debris shot up into the air and began falling on the surrounding area. Pompeii was about 5 miles from the volcano. About 5,000 people died, probably more from a blast of blistering hot, poisonous gas, rather than debris or lava. After debris fell from the initial eruption, there was already about 9 feet of ash in the streets of Pompeii but the rain of ash continued.
Herculaneum lay west of Vesuvius and it was only mildly affected by the first phase of the eruption. While roofs in Pompeii were collapsing under the weight of falling debris, only a few centimeters of ash fell on Herculaneum but it prompted most inhabitants to flee.
Pliny the Younger witnessed the eruption of Vesuvius from across the Bay of Naples, and noted that the billowing soot, rocks, and gas looked like an enormous pine tree eclipsing the sun. He wrote, "Darkness fell, not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had been put out in a dark room."
Though he was safe across the bay, he wrote that "I believed I was perishing with the world, and the world with me."
It is said that the modern science of archaeology was born with the excavations of the two cities which were rediscovered in the 18th century. They were almost completely intact. About one-third of Pompeii is still buried and excavations continue today.
The date of the eruption is now thought to be on or after October 17 based on the excavation clues. For example, people buried in the ash were wearing heavier clothing than the light summer clothes typical of August. The fresh fruit and vegetables in the shops are typical of October and the summer fruit typical of August was already being sold in dried, or conserved form. Wine fermenting jars had been sealed, which would have happened around the second half of October. Coins found in the purse of a woman buried in the ash include one with a 15th imperatorial acclamation among the emperor's titles and could not have been minted before the second week of September.
The 1980–82 excavations in Herculaneum found many skeletons on the ancient beach in front of the city walls in what are called "boat sheds." It had been believed that the majority of the town's inhabitants had managed to flee because so few skeletons had been unearthed. This discovery led to a shift in perspective theorizing that the last inhabitants waiting for rescue by sea were probably killed instantly by the intense heat.
Could it happen again? Mount Vesuvius is still active. It last erupted in 1944, and experts believe it could erupt again at any time. But today, about 3 million people live within a few miles of the crater. About 600,000 of them live close enough to the volcano that they would not survive an eruption today. But our technology allows scientists to monitor the volcano continuously and there are plans to evacuate the area well in advance of any detected eruption.
In 1912, the Piltdown Man was presented to the Geological Society of London. Near the village of Piltdown in southern England, a laborer was digging in a gravel pit when he found a piece of what appeared to be a skull. He gave it to local archaeology hobbyist Charles Dawson, who thought it looked like some ancient human remains.
Dawson brought the skull fragment and other bones from the site, to the Natural History Museum in London. Along with Arthur Smith Woodward, the museum’s Keeper of Geology, the pair believed they had skeletal evidence of the missing evolutionary link between apes and humans.
Smith Woodward reconstructed the skull fragments and hypothesized that they belonged to a human ancestor from 500,000 years ago. The discovery was announced at a Geological Society meeting and was given the Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni ("Dawson's dawn-man").
It got a lot of attention from the public, but there were scientists that said the skull was not authentic. Still, it received more attention and the idea that such a discovery had been made in England was very appealing.
It wasn't until 1953 that new tests on the skull revealed the Piltdown Man to be an elaborate hoax.
Who perpetrated the hoax? That is still not certain but Dawson and Woodward are the leading suspects. The skull was constructed in part from orangutan bones, and it was done well enough to fool archaeologists for more than 40 years.
The fossil was introduced as evidence by Clarence Darrow in defense of John Scopes during the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. Darrow died in 1938, fifteen years before Piltdown Man was exposed as a fraud.
The Piltdown hoax is still talked about because (in a good way) it generated a lot of attention around the subject of human evolution and because it remained accepted for such a long time before it was debunked.
On a sloping hill on England’s Salisbury plain about 4500 years ago some people placed a very large stone. They continued to add stones to create a "henge." These “sarsen trilithons” towered over the humans who brought them there.
Archaeologists have studied this place that came to be known as Stonehenge for a few hundred years and believe it was visited for religious or spiritual reasons. But the question of where these bluestones originated and how they were brought to that plain has not been answered.
As of now, the Preseli Hills of Wales has been identified as the source of the henge’s smaller bluestones, which form a ring and a central horseshoe shape inside the larger henge structure. But where did the bigger sarsen rocks (duricrust silcrete) get quarried and how were these huge stones transported to Salisbury.
The most recent study proposes that 50 of the 52 megaliths came from Wiltshire which is only about 15 miles north of Stonehenge. They determined this using a stone core that was extracted in 1958 for restoration but has been lost since then to researchers.
How these huge stones were brought and set in place is still a mystery. The weight of the largest sarsen stones (the uprights of the Great Trilithon) are 35 tonnes and the estimated weight of the heel stone is 40 tonnes.
This mystery reminds me of the many theories about how the Great Pyramids were built. They just don't seem doable for the ancients - which is why aliens have often been unscientifically suggested as helpers.
A Greek sailing vessel as depicted on an ancient vase.
Last week I wrote about the marooned Alexander Selkirk and the shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe. This week I read an article about what may be the oldest intact shipwreck which was found in the depths of the Black Sea.
It was found more than a mile down, and in water that deep there is little oxygen and that slows down decomposition, so it is well preserved.
It was the Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project that found the ship which as been confirmed as the oldest intact shipwreck known to mankind. It has been radiocarbon-dated to roughly 400 B.C. That dating means that this trading vessel was sailing in the days of Plato and Sophocles. The city-states of ancient Greece had colonies all around the Black Sea.
It was discovered along with dozens of other shipwrecks during an 800-square-mile survey of the seabed.
Pottery depicting Odysseus tied to the mast so that he is not tempted by the siren Parthenope
Ships of the same design have been found on ancient pottery, such as the Siren Vase, which is dated several decades earlier than the ship.
The same group has discovered more than 60 sunken ships in the Black Sea from different eras.
The kind of migration illustration that was in books showing the land bridge theory.
How did the first people arrive in the Americas? When I was in school the book showed some people in furs making their way out of the frozen tundra and across a land bridge from Siberia. The land bridge is gone, well, it is submerged. But those people made it over it at the end of the last ice age when the glaciers retreated and gave them a corridor to North America.
But were they the first? The Americas covers a lot of land. There’ is evidence in Chile of a human presence on that coast at least by 14-18,000 years ago. In Florida, researchers found evidence of a mastodon butchering site that’s about 14,550 years old.
But a new look at a theory from the 20th century that looks at archaeological and genetic evidence that the first humans to arrive in the Americas may have followed the north Pacific coast from Asia to North America. This path is being called the "kelp highway" and if this theory holds true those people traveled the route well before glaciers retreated and other people came over the land bridge.
About 16,000 years ago, if people were traveling south on the coastline they would have had a clear route at sea level. There would have been fish, shellfish and other resources. There was no dangerous ocean crossing to make.
The new look at this theory supposes that these earliest of Americans moved south into Central America.
The old land bridge theory has a few cracks. Studies of pollen, fossils and DNA that the Siberia ice route wouldn't have opened until about 12,600 years ago. Oh, the came, but they were not first.
There is more searching to be done for places they stopped along the kelp highway. Maybe those first people followed the coastline in skin boats. Maybe.
We know a lot. We keep finding out more. We have so much more to discover.
Photo of moai by Ian Sewell - IanAndWendy.com - Easter Island, CC BY 2.5, commons.wikimedia.org
I learned, like many of you, about the iconic stone heads on Easter Island in school when I was a child. You've at least seen photographs of these heads sitting on the island and if you know anything about Easter Island, it is probably the statues, called moai, that were created by the early Rapa Nui people.
Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is a Chilean island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian Triangle. The name "Easter Island" was given by the island's first recorded European visitor, the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who encountered it on Easter Sunday (5 April) in 1722, while searching for Davis or David's island. Roggeveen named it Paasch-Eyland (18th-century Dutch for "Easter Island") and the island's official Spanish name, Isla de Pascua, also means "Easter Island".
But in recent years, the Easter Island Statue Project (EISP) has undertaken efforts to excavate and study some of the Moai, and revealed previously hidden portions of the statues.
Because they were set deep into the ground, their bodies have been obscured over time. The archeologists dug around the statues and discovered that the torsos of the statues are covered in undecipherable ancient writings. And there are more statues than just the famous heads - more than 900 monolithic human figures carved from rock.
The production and transportation of the moai are remarkable creative and physical feats. The tallest moai erected, called Paro, was almost 10 metres (33 ft) high and weighed 82 tons. The heaviest erected was a shorter but squatter moai at Ahu Tongariki, weighing 86 tons.
Many of the moai toppled after European contact when islander traditions radically changed. Though moai are whole-body statues, they are often erroneously referred to as "Easter Island heads." This is partly because of the disproportionate size of most moai heads and partly because, many of the iconic images for the island showing upright moai on the island are the statues on the slopes of Rano Raraku, many of which are buried to their shoulders. Some of the "heads" at Rano Raraku have been excavated and their bodies seen, and observed to have markings that had been protected from erosion by their burial.
All but 53 of the more than 900 moai known to date were carved from tuff (a compressed volcanic ash). There are also 13 moai carved from basalt, 22 from trachyte and 17 from fragile red scoria. At the end of carving, the builders would rub the statue with pumice.
Rano Raraku is a volcanic crater located on the lower slopes of Terevaka in the Rapa Nui National Park on Easter Island. It was a quarry for about 500 years until the early eighteenth century, and supplied the stone from which about 95% of the island's moai were carved.
Many archaeologists suggest that "[the] statues were thus symbols of authority and power, both religious and political. But they were not only symbols. To the people who erected and used them, they were actual repositories of sacred spirit. Carved stone and wooden objects in ancient Polynesian religions, when properly fashioned and ritually prepared, were believed to be charged by a magical spiritual essence called mana." Archaeologists believe that the statues were a representation of the ancient Polynesians' ancestors. The moai statues face away from the ocean and towards the villages as if to watch over the people. The exception is the seven Ahu Akivi which face out to sea to help travelers find the island. There is a legend that says there were seven men who waited for their king to arrive.
The Rano Raraku area is in the protected World Heritage Site of Rapa Nui National Park.
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