The Oldest Discoveries of Their Kind
There exists an elite club within the world of old discoveries—those special finds that are the oldest of their kind. They are the record breakers that rewrite the history books or completely change our understanding about something we thought we knew. Sometimes, they don’t carry much historical or archaeological value, but they still amaze us with their ability to survive.
10 Bottled Message – 102 Years Old
In 1913, 20-year-old Richard Platz stuffed a postcard with his address into a beer bottle and threw it into the Baltic Sea. The message urged the finder to return it to him. But instead of returning to the young German that cast it adrift, the beer bottle bobbed through both World Wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War.
More than 100 years later, a fisherman in the Baltic Sea captured the weather-beaten time capsule. By then, Platz was no longer alive. He had died in 1946 at age 54, most likely unaware that the bottle he had thrown into the sea three decades before would break a record and reach a yet-unborn grandchild.
The previous oldest message in a bottle was seabound for 98 years after it was released into the water around Scotland as part of a project to monitor currents. The Platz bottle was eventually presented to Richard’s 62-year-old granddaughter Angela Erdmann.
9 Marijuana Stash – 2,700 Years Old
About 1 kilogram (2 lb) of cannabis reeked among the discoveries from a 2,700-year-old Chinese grave of a blue-eyed Caucasian man. At first, researchers thought the still-green plant matter was coriander. But a closer examination revealed that it was the world’s oldest weed.
Researchers believe the society that buried the man in the Gobi Desert knew how to get stoned. All the male parts of the plants—which have less tripping ability—were missing from the buried stash. Although the remainder still had strong psychoactive properties, scientists were most surprised to find that the marijuana wasn’t wild but from a cultivated strain that’s similar to cannabis grown today.
It’s unknown how and why the natural drug was ingested. But other items in the tomb hinted at the man’s high status: musical instruments, riding equipment, and weapons. Perhaps weed was a status symbol, or he was a shaman who used it for spiritual and medicinal purposes. Or maybe they just found the world’s oldest grass dealer.
8 Weather Report – 3,500 Years Old
Egyptologists believe they’ve found the first known example of a weather report. The broken, man-sized stone describes a graphic event that may have been the most terrible volcanic explosion in history. The Greek volcano Thera erupted around 3,500 years ago with unimaginable power. The destruction was unprecedented, destroying the advanced Minoan culture on nearby Crete. Countries as far away as China felt the effects.
Egypt was also severely impacted, with the 40 lines of the Tempest Stela describing how the Nile was afloat with dead bodies during a violent and ceaseless storm that caused darkness. If the stela was an eyewitness account of Thera’s fallout, it also changes our understanding of one pharaoh’s reign.
Historically, Pharaoh Ahmose ruled as the first king of the 18th Dynasty, a time when Egypt’s power was at its height. The Tempest Stela dates to his rule. If the event described on the stela really was the killer volcano, then it’s possible that Ahmose ruled up to 50 years earlier than previously thought.
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