Otzi the Iceman is the modern nickname of a well-preserved natural mummy of a man from about 3300 BC, found in 1991 in a glacier of the Otztal Alps, near the border between Austria and Italy.
The nickname comes from the valley of discovery. He rivals the Egyptian “Ginger” as the oldest known human mummy, and has offered an unprecedented view on the habits of Chalcolithic (Copper Age) Europeans.
Ötzi was found by two German tourists, Helmut and Erika Simon, on September 19, 1991. The body was at first thought to be a modern corpse, like several others which had been recently found in the region. It was roughly recovered by the Austrian authorities and taken to Innsbruck, where its true age was finally discovered.
Subsequent surveys showed that the body had been located a few meters inside Italian territory. It is now on display at the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology in Bozen-Bolzano, Italy.
Understanding
of humans’ earliest past often comes from studying fossils. They tell us much
of what we know about the people who lived before us. There is one thing
fossils cannot tell us; at what point did we stop living day-to-day and start
to think symbolically, to represent ideas about our environment and how we
could change it? At a dig in South Africa the discovery of a small piece of
ochre pigment, 70,000 years old, has raised some very interesting questions.
Anatomically
modern humans (Homo sapiens)
emerged in Africa roughly 100,000 years ago. We know from fossil evidence thatHomo sapiens replaced other hominids around them and
moved out of Africa into Asia and the Middle East, reaching Europe 40,000 years
ago.
Prof
Richard Klein believes art is a landmark in human evolution. Unquestionable art
that’s widespread and common suggests you’re dealing with people just like us.
No other animals, after all, are able to define a painting as anything other
than a collection of colours and shapes. This ability is unique to humans.
Other
scientists agree. They believe art defines humans as behaviourally modern, and
its beginning must coincide with the ability to speak and use language. If
someone has the imagination to devise a shared way to describe their
environment using art then it seems inconceivable that they could not possess
language and speech. The search for the moment our ancestors became
behaviourally just like us is also the hunt for the first evidence of art.
Skulls are humanity’s foremost symbol of death, and a powerful icon in the visual vocabularies of cultures all over the globe. Thirteen crystal skulls of apparently ancient origin have been found in parts of Mexico, Central America and South America, comprising one of the most fascinating subjects of 20th Century archaeology.
This documentary takes a look at the history of all four known skulls and discover their age and origin. We discover how each was found, who it was owned by and passed to over the last hundred years.
The two most famous of these skulls, originally misidentified as Aztec, and for years shown in the British Museum and the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, have long been known to owe their provenance to nothing more exotic than a French antiquities dealer called Eugène Boban. But this has not stopped the gurus of nonsense from making preposterous claims for similar artefacts. There are, they will tell you, 13 of them and one day they will meet and reveal, talking head to talking head, the secrets of the Universe.
Egypt, land of the pyramids, mighty monuments constructed in the early days of history. Monuments that endure to this day attracting visitors across the world. Many visitors come to Egypt to see one pyramid in particular, the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the most celebrated man-made constructions of all time.
Of the seven, only the Great Pyramid of Cheops survives, but history and archaeology are able to tell us the stories of all seven, including the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Pharos of Alexandria.
For the first time in some 3,000 years, viewers see the Seven Wonders restored to their original glory.
This is the extraordinary story of how a small metal disc is rewriting the epic saga of how civilisation first came to Europe, 3600 years ago.
When grave robbers ransacked a Bronze Age tomb in Germany, they had no idea that they had unearthed the find of a lifetime. But they knew that it was worth selling. It was a small bronze disc of exquisite design. So they contacted the archaeologist Harald Meller, offering to sell it to him for £300,000.
Meller went deep into the criminal underworld and, after a police sting, he got his disc. It depicted the sun, the moon and the stars. This suggested an understanding of the heavens greater than that of the first great civilisations, like Egypt. Could it possibly be real?
After exhaustive tests, the disc was declared genuine. Then a team of crack scientists pieced together what it meant. What emerged is a true marvel.
This disc, it seems, is a Bronze Age Bible, combining an advanced understanding of the stars with some of the most sophisticated religious imagery of the age. In intellectual achievement and also age, it surpasses anything yet found in Egypt or Greece. It seems that civilisation had already dawned in Europe.
Excavations underneath the stones have revealed artifacts, like antler horns, carbon dated at 4000 years ago. Bodies found buried nearby are of the same age. This rules out the Druids, as well as the Romans who followed them. This even pre-dates immigrant settlers from Europe. That leaves a primative people known as Ancient Britons, who lived at the start of the bronze age. Great precision was used in assembling the 15,000 tons of rock into circles. Did they have the know-how?
Examining the stones, the large ones come from just 20 miles away and could have been dragged there by the Ancient Britons. But what of the smaller Bluestones? Investigation shows that they are found 200 miles away in S.W. Wales. Did they have the ability to carry these stones over water for that distance? The recent discovery of an ancient boat made from a log carrying quarried stones, points to the answer. Several of these boats lashed together and covered with a platform could transport the Bluestones. Investigators using manpower and simple wooden scaffolding have shown they had the technology at the time to erect Stonehenge.
The big remaining question is why did they build it? People who study architecture say it was probably a place of worship. Towering over the people as it did, it inspired a sense of something larger than themselves. The closing segment investigated a mass grave of skeletons found in the area. Using tests on the enamel of the teeth, scientists are able to determine where these people grew up. It was in Wales, the location of the Bluestones.
250 million years ago, long before dinosaurs roamed the Earth, the land and oceans teemed with life. This was the Permian, a golden era of biodiversity that was about to come to a crashing end. Within just a few thousand years, 95% of the lifeforms on the planet would be wiped out, in the biggest mass extinction Earth has ever known. What natural disaster could kill on such a massive scale? It is only in recent years that evidence has begun to emerge from rocks in Antarctica, Siberia and Greenland.
The demise of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago (at the so-called K/T boundary), was as nothing compared to the Permian mass extinction. The K/T event killed off 60% of life on Earth; the Permian event 95%. Geological data to explain the destruction have been hard to find, simply because the rocks are so old and therefore subject to all kinds of erosion processes. It seems plausible that some kind of catastrophic environmental change must have made life untenable across vast swathes of the planet.
In the early 1990s, the hunt for evidence headed for a region of Siberia known as the Traps. Today it’s a sub-Arctic wilderness but 250 million years ago, over 200,000km² of it was a blazing torrent of lava. The Siberian Traps were experiencing a ‘flood basalt eruption’, the biggest volcanic effect on Earth. Instead of isolated volcanoes spewing out lava, the crust split and curtains of lava were released. And the Siberian flood eruption lasted for millions of years. Could volcanic activity over such a long time alter the climate enough to kill off 95% of life on Earth?
An archaeologist searching for a Roman road is amazed to instead discover an entire Roman town that had been lost and forgotten for thousands of years.
Hitler’s Hidden City is a subterranean adventure under the streets of Berlin, following the work of a team of German archaeologists and historians exposing and exploring the last remaining structures of the Third Reich.
In August 2005, a History Channel expedition team made a shocking discovery more than two miles beneath the Atlantic Ocean: large missing pieces of Titanic’s bottom, more than 1,500 feet from the rest of the ship, so well preserved that even the original red paint is still clearly visible.
These pieces were little known and never examined for their role in the sinking, and they tell a new and potentially more terrifying story of Titanic’s final moments, rewriting the script that had previously been taken as fact. Relive the disaster, the history, and the deep-sea search for new clues in high-definition in Titanic’s Final Moments: Missing Pieces.
The Mystery of Chaco Canyon examines the deep enigmas presented by the massive prehistoric remains found in Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico. It is the summation of 20 years of research. The film reveals that between 850 and 1150 AD, the Chacoan people designed and constructed massive ceremonial buildings in a complex celestial pattern throughout a vast desert region. Aerial and time lapse footage, computer modeling, and interviews with scholars show how the Chacoan culture designed, oriented and located its major buildings in relationship to the sun and moon. Pueblo Indians, descendants of the Chacoan people, regard Chaco as a place where their ancestors lived in a sacred past. Pueblo leaders speak of the significance of Chaco to the Pueblo world today.
The film challenges the notion that Chaco Canyon was primarily a trade and redistribution center. Rather it argues that it was a center of astronomy and cosmology and that a primary purpose for the construction of the elaborate Chacoan buildings and certain roads was to express astronomical interests and to be integral parts of a celestial patterning.
While the Chacoans left no written text to help us to understand their culture, their thoughts are preserved in the language of their architecture, roads and light markings. Landscape, directions, sun and moon, and movement of shadow and light were the materials used by the Chacoan architects and builders to express their knowledge of an order in the universe.
Seven years ago, on his third trip to the Black Sea, Dr. Robert Ballard discovered a miraculously well-preserved Byzantine shipwreck, but his team could only take pictures. Now, Ballard returns with state-of-the-art technology and a revolutionary $1.5 million robot known as “Hercules” to excavate two shipwrecks for the first time ever, including one of the most pristine ancient vessels ever found. Ballard and his team have only two weeks, so they must work in perfect precision on their hunt for the Ghost Ships of the Black Sea.
History series which sees skeletons of everyday people from across the ages analyzed in staggering detail, opening new windows on the history of our forebears by literally revealing the person behind the skeleton.
The fascinating work of world-renowned Professor Sue Black OBE and her team at the Center for Human Anatomy and Identification at the University of Dundee comes under the spotlight as the team works on answering three big questions from the skeleton.
Who were they? Why did they die? What does their life story tell us that we didn’t know before? Using the full arsenal of modern forensic anthropology, remarkable stories emerge from long forgotten bones, along with the faces of people who haven’t been seen for hundreds of years.
Ipswich Man. An apparently African skeleton, unearthed near a medieval English monastery, pushes Professor Sue Black’s forensics team to its limits.
Mummified Child. This time the team heads back into a dark corner of the 19th century, to a time when corpses were turned into trophies and children were sold by the inch.
Stirling Man. Mysterious skeleton discovered by accident in a series of forgotten rooms in Scotland’s Stirling Castle.
Crossbones Girl. A skeleton unearthed in an archaeological dig in the historic borough of Southwark in London sparks a new cold case when it is found to be covered with disfiguring scars.
The Skeletons of Windy Pits. For decades experts have remained baffled by a jumble of human bones discovered in a unique series of caves on the North York Moors, known as the Windypits.
The York 113. In 2008, construction workers just beyond York’s city walls uncovered 113 bodies in a mass grave.
The Bodies in the Well. When the remains of 17 people – men, women and 11 children, one as young as two years old – were discovered in a dry well shaft in Norwich city centre, the local community were keen for answers about who these people were and what happened to them.
The Woman and Three Babies. In the sleepy commuter town of Baldock in Hertfordshire the History Cold Case team is called in to investigate the discovery of a skeleton dating from around 100AD, buried in a bizarre position, along with the remains of three babies.
The Pyramid Code is a documentary series of 5 parts that explores the pyramid fields and ancient temples in Egypt as well as ancient megalithic sites around the world looking for clues to matriarchal consciousness, ancient knowledge and sophisticated technology in a Golden Age. The series is based on the extensive research done in 23 trips to Egypt and 50 other countries around the world by Dr. Carmen Boulter in the Graduate Division of Educational Research at the University of Calgary.
The first episode titled “The Band of Peace” focuses on six different pyramid sites. They follow the Nile River and evidence points to the fact that the river itself was next to the pyramids at the time they were built than where it is today. Over time the Nile has migrated to the east, thus putting the river further from the pyramids than when they were built.
The Band of Peace is the area in which six different sites sit, among them the Great Pyramid at Giza. One scholar insists the pyramids were not built by slaves. So who actually built these structures? Although they are long gone, the three pyramids at Giza each had a top layer of smooth stones over the stones that we see today. One was red, one was black, and one was white.
The series changes the way the pyramids and the ancient past was taught in school. While a sarcophagus may be inside a pyramid, with no mummy ever discovered inside any pyramid the past conclusion that they were built to house the remains of pharaohs is discounted.
The pyramids might have been energy conductors that transmitted energy to affect human consciousness around the world. Sound like Science Fiction? Possibly. But the new scholars of today do not discount that theory. The five episodes bring up a new way of looking at the ancients, and completely discount our previous thoughts on the people of ancient times. It is a fascinating premise that today’s historians are checking into.
This time the team heads back into a dark corner of the 19th century, to a time when corpses were turned into trophies and children were sold by the inch.
Their subject is the bizarre mummified body of a child.
Sue and the team pick up the trail that leads to body snatching, serial murder and anatomical science in darkest Victorian Britain. Can they give our boy a home, a face, or a name?
