Amazing Earth

[Amazing Earth @AmazingOurEarth]

The Terracotta Army still carries its makers' fingerprints. 🏺🔍 A 2026 study of 79 prints on 36 figures suggests not just men built it: women and children may have too. What does the evidence prove?
https://t.co/7EGjsVp1JN
#TerracottaArmy #Archaeology

[Amazing Earth @AmazingOurEarth]

A 2026 Science study compared 1,000+ genomes. In it, Native Hawaiians' closest relatives are the people of Rapa Nui, about 7,000 km away. I explain how DNA shows this, and what it cannot tell us:
Full Video: https://t.co/VEq1ZgCT5y

[Amazing Earth @AmazingOurEarth]

Did the man who discovered ancient Troy actually destroy it? This investigation examines the evidence behind the legendary city. Heinrich Schliemann is famous for bringing the ruins of Troy to the world, but his excavation methods have long been a subject of intense historical scrutiny. This video analyzes the primary accounts and archaeological records to separate the myth of the golden armor from the reality of the site's preservation. We look at whether his aggressive digging techniques caused irreparable damage to the very layers he sought to uncover. By comparing his field notes with modern stratigraphy, we can see how the search for Priam's Treasure led to the destruction of critical historical layers. This analysis is for those interested in the history of archaeology and the complex legacy of Troy. Subscribe for weekly research breakdowns, and let me know in the comments if you think Schliemann's discoveries were worth the cost.

[Amazing Earth @AmazingOurEarth]

A drill bit broke four to five meters down inside a boat-shaped hill in eastern Türkiye that some people believe holds Noah's Ark.

The drilling team says the hard layer could be petrified wood. Nobody has shown what it is yet, and no laboratory result from the 2026 campaign has been published.

So what would the samples have to show before anyone could call them evidence of a ship? In the video, I go through the radar, soil carbon and drilling claims, and what earlier tests of this hill found.

Sources: Collins & Fasold 1996, J. Geoscience Education; US EPA; Sivas Cumhuriyet University release, 28 Aug 2026; Newsweek.

https://t.co/3Vn6K5ZP18

[Amazing Earth @AmazingOurEarth]

Five bones and teeth from a cave in southwest China are identified as Denisovan, using ancient proteins, not DNA. One of seven September discoveries in my new video.
Sources: Rao et al. and Ruan et al., Nature (2026).
Full video: https://t.co/56ilGRNQAj
#Archaeology #Denisovans #HumanEvolution

[Amazing Earth @AmazingOurEarth]

How old is Monte Verde? For almost thirty years, this camp in Chile has been the most widely accepted evidence that people reached the Americas before Clovis.

In March, a study in Science argued that it is no older than about 8,200 years, not 14,500. In May and August, the site's defenders published their replies.

The dispute is real. But the wider case does not rest on Monte Verde alone.

Sources: Surovell et al., Science 2026; Dillehay et al., PaleoAmerica 2026.

https://t.co/2aZTSgR2Mx

[Amazing Earth @AmazingOurEarth]

Two people on Sulawesi had rounded grooves worn around their teeth.

A study in Science Advances says the grooves come from habitually sucking whole betel nuts, and a tooth from each person carried traces of arecoline, the stimulant in betel nut. It calls this the earliest recorded evidence for the habitual use of a plant drug.

The sample is two people, and the authors say the habit may have been medicinal.
https://t.co/56ilGRNQAj

[Amazing Earth @AmazingOurEarth]

A new study may explain one of Göbekli Tepe's oldest puzzles.

For 30 years, excavators found 928 scattered pieces of human bone in the great stone enclosures, and almost no graves.

Now the first two Stone Age graves found intact there suggest many of those bones came from burials under houses higher up the hill, carried down by landslides.

Source: Gresky & Clare, PLOS ONE, Sept 2026.

Full Video : https://t.co/l4WzNfJnGb

[Amazing Earth @AmazingOurEarth]

Nearly four thousand years ago, in the Babylonian city of Sippar, two men took a woman to court.

Their charge: after the woman who had adopted her died, she had forged the tablet that left her a house.

The witnesses, men and women, said the dead woman, Amat-Šamaš, had given the house and, in historian Brigitte Lion's reading, written the tablet herself.

Both women were nadītu. At Sippar, these women were dedicated to the sun god Shamash and were forbidden to marry or have children. As late as 1966, a scholar could still describe women like them as "sacred prostitutes".

Their own tablets show them buying and selling fields, lending silver at interest and going to court. And in Katrien De Graef's study, every tavern in the Old Babylonian texts from Sippar can be linked to nadītu women.

New on Amazing Earth: Babylon's "Temple Prostitutes" Owned Land and Lent Silver

Full Episode:

https://t.co/WrG8CeDiKE

[Amazing Earth @AmazingOurEarth]

These soldiers were never meant to look alike. Not painted differently — sculpted differently.

For 50 years, the story of China's Terracotta Army has been told in myths: weapons supposedly chromium-plated so they would never corrode, a tomb "too dangerous" to open, faces supposedly all modeled on real soldiers.

We checked the actual papers.

The chromium claim? A 2019 study of 464 bronze weapon parts found the chromium is contamination from lacquered wooden fittings, not a coating — and found no correlation at all between chromium and preservation. The burial soil did the work.

The "dangerous tomb"? A real, measured mercury anomaly from 2020 — but not proof of rivers or traps. The actual reason it's sealed: a lesson learned the hard way when the site's paint flaked away in the 1970s.

The portraits? Genuinely still unresolved. We tell you that honestly, not as a solved mystery.

Four things fifty years of digging actually established, and three popular claims that turn out to be wrong.
https://t.co/ClH5qGNnpa

[Amazing Earth @AmazingOurEarth]

Kailasa Temple at Ellora isn't built. It's carved — one connected piece of basalt, cut down from the top of a cliff, with no way to undo a single cut.

The Archaeological Survey of India says the builders chose their rock deliberately and worked along its own natural joints.

Full breakdown: https://t.co/Q2ewPitbJ6

[Amazing Earth @AmazingOurEarth]

Persepolis was built to make imperial power visible. But the evidence survives at more than one scale.

At the Gate of All Nations, western bulls and eastern human-headed, winged guardians frame an entrance named by Xerxes. In the Hundred-Column Hall, a 10 × 10 plan reconnects the surviving bases without inventing a roof. And in a tablet published as PF1381, Hallock’s translation records Belitur receiving flour for a journey from Persepolis to Susa.

The new episode follows ten archaeological landmarks to ask what stone, inscriptions and administrative records can each tell us—and where they stop.

Watch: https://t.co/YcxwC24aX6

[Amazing Earth @AmazingOurEarth]

A single cave floor in Turkey holds 30,000 years of human history, from Neanderthals to us.

We examine the stone tools and hunting practices that remained consistent across millennia despite changing populations. Where researchers disagree on the transition between species, we present the evidence from the latest stratigraphic analysis.

Fulll video at:
https://t.co/O5T3ZCGBBR

[Amazing Earth @AmazingOurEarth]

Why Did They Build This Massive City To Leave It? #AncientHistory #Nazca #Discovery #cahuachi

Cahuachi features 40 monumental mud brick structures, yet it was never a permanent capital city.

Excavations reveal fine painted pottery and storage jars, suggesting this site hosted short stays rather than a resident population. We examine the desert geoglyphs and ceramic evidence to resolve these archaeological mysteries.
Full Documentary https://t.co/tOVctdDBoi

[Amazing Earth @AmazingOurEarth]

There is a hole in the driest desert on Earth that is still delivering water.

Somebody dug it about two thousand years ago. Farmers cleaned it out this year.

Everyone knows the Nazca lines. Almost nobody talks about the puquios — the subterranean filtration galleries that run under the same desert, tapping groundwater and walking it sideways until it reaches a field.

They are tunnels of river cobbles laid without mortar, mostly under a metre square, running as far as 372 metres. Access shafts every 10 to 30 metres, so a person can climb in and clear the silt out. Thirty-six were still working at the last published survey (Schreiber & Lancho Rojas, Latin American Antiquity, 1995).

One honest note, because it matters: the elegant spiral ramps you see in photographs of Cantalloc are reconstructions. We do not know the ancient shafts looked like that. The tunnel underneath is theirs.

Here is what reframed the whole thing for me.

The Quelccaya ice cap keeps a year-by-year record of rainfall on this coast, and it records three droughts: AD 524–540, AD 563–594, AD 636–645. The middle one lasted thirty years, arrived abruptly, and cut rainfall by about thirty percent (Shimada, Schaaf, Thompson & Mosley-Thompson, World Archaeology, 1991).

So the puquios are not a marvel. They are an emergency.

And that changes what the lines on the surface are for. A civilization does not spend five centuries solving one problem and then decorate the desert for unrelated reasons. The drawings and the tunnels are the same project, by the same people, in the same place, against the same opponent.

Which leaves the question I could not stop turning over while making this.

If they got that good at finding water — good enough that the system still runs — what actually finished them?

Ten landmarks. Full episode below.
https://t.co/tOVctdDBoi

[Amazing Earth @AmazingOurEarth]

Fifteen beads. One necklace. One grave in central Iraq, about 4,500 years old.

A study published this year traced the carnelian to Indian sources — which nobody found surprising. Mesopotamian elites had been importing exotic stone for centuries.

What was surprising was what happened when the team examined how the beads were actually made. The set didn't hold together. Same stone, two different hands at work.

The full explanation is in the video on the channel, along with what the first substantial ancient DNA from Mesopotamia says about who was living in these cities — and, just as importantly, what it doesn't say.
https://t.co/RV9S8w8XWa

Sources: Kenoyer, Law & Dussubieux, Archaeometry 2026 · Williams et al., Genome Biology 2026

#archaeology #induscivilization #mesopotamia #ancienthistory #harappa #sumerian #archaeologynews #ancienttrade #amazingearth

[Amazing Earth @AmazingOurEarth]

A foreign power installed a king at Tikal in AD 379. His tomb is full of central Mexican pottery.

In 2005, strontium isotopes from four people in that burial came back local.

The texts and the chemistry disagree.

New episode on the channel.
https://t.co/i1ObaM0ZKw

[Amazing Earth @AmazingOurEarth]

Between the two central pillars at Göbekli Tepe there is a block of soil that nobody has dug.

It was left there on purpose. Excavating a deposit destroys it, so the team kept part of this one back.

For twenty years the answer was that the builders filled these enclosures themselves — a closing ritual at the end of a temple's life. The two archaeologists running the excavation today don't agree about that, and they don't fully agree with each other.

Lee Clare's team at the German Archaeological Institute dated the walls and the fill separately. The mud-mortar of the walls gave a clean, consistent sequence. The fill gave scattered dates — from a single deposit, inside a single building — because it holds Pre-Pottery Neolithic A and B material mixed together. Debris separated by centuries, in the same enclosure. That is difficult to reconcile with a single closing event.

Fifty-five kilometres east at Karahantepe, Necmi Karul's excavation found six pillars with stones stacked deliberately on top of them, raised until they broke through the fill so the building could still be found. The capping slabs stop at the walls.

Both readings are published. Both come from active excavations. The two men cite each other's papers.

Full episode on the channel
https://t.co/2fXi7JslFH

#gobeklitepe #karahantepe #tastepeler #sanliurfa #neolithic #prepotteryneolithic #archaeology #anatolia #ancienthistory #excavation #amazingearth

[Amazing Earth @AmazingOurEarth]

A statue of a human seated on a leopard's back has been found at Karahantepe in Şanlıurfa, Türkiye — roughly 11,000 years old, about 70 cm tall, and set deliberately on a bench inside a small round building. It is the opposite arrangement to the site's famous statue of a man carrying a leopard. Excavations at Karahantepe, part of the Taş Tepeler project alongside Göbekli Tepe, are directed by Prof. Dr. Necmi Karul. Announced by the Türkiye Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 25 August 2026.

[Amazing Earth @AmazingOurEarth]

A 2,000-year-old photograph of the sky.

Carved on the west terrace of Mount Nemrut: a lion with nineteen stars across its body, a crescent at its throat, and three larger stars above its back, each labelled in Greek. Mars. Mercury. Jupiter.

It isn't decoration. It records one specific evening — three named planets in Leo with a new moon — which makes it a solvable problem.

In 1959 Neugebauer and van Hoesen computed 7 July 62 BC. In 1999 Crijns argued for 14 July 109 BC. Both readings are still in print. It still isn't settled.

It's widely described as the oldest known image of a horoscope.
Check Full Documentary at : https://t.co/tikL6cGt7w

.#MountNemrut #Commagene #horoscope #archaeoastronomy #ancienthistory #archaeology #Türkiye #ancientastronomy #hellenistic #AmazingEarth