It is impossible to determine exactly when a person first got fire, when he wrapped himself in the skin of an animal, fleeing the cold, or when he first took a piece of charcoal and began to paint on the walls of a cave. Some of the most realistic early drawings of wild animals were painted in color on cave walls in France and Spain during the late Stone Age, however, in the late 1950s, carvings were found in Germany that are twice as old as this famous cave painting.
Professor Walter Mattes, head of the College of Ancient and Early History in Hamburg, found objects on the steep rocky bank of the Elbe. Professor Mattes claims that the carvings represent “the oldest human-made images ever discovered,” and believes that the objects are at least 200,000 years old.
Most of the carvings do not exceed the size of a matchbox, and they depict human heads and animals from the Ice Age. According to Professor Mattes, in human heads there is very little (if any) ape resemblance, which has already become an indispensable attribute of the Neanderthals.
The fact that the discovered things are hundreds of thousands of years old can greatly shake the usual order of things established by some scientists. It is convenient for them to believe that the Neanderthal was an insensitive and stupid bumpkin, a primitive "homo", completely incapable of perceiving the aesthetic aspects of life around him, and certainly not having the slightest spark of creativity, from which the serious flame required to create drawings should have ignited and carved products.
However, a few scientists seriously dispute that Neanderthals lived in Europe more than 100,000 years ago. This, in particular, happened when objects of art were discovered in North America, much older than the supposed existence of man as a species - it was believed that man appeared on the American continent no earlier than 20,000 years ago. Here already the boundaries of orthodox science with all its prohibitive orientation are stretched so that it already goes beyond all the limits of tolerance.
In March 1891, JH Hooper noticed what appeared to be a headstone on a grave on a wooded ridge near his farm in Bradley County, Tennessee. Curious by nature, Hooper dug up the perimeter rock, expecting to find a name, the standard rest in peace, and dates of birth and death. Instead, he discovered a bizarre pattern of unknown characters in an unknown language.
In a paper for the New York Academy of Sciences, Transactions (Transactions, 11: 26-29, 1891) A. L. Rawson gives the following details:
He dug deeper and found other stones forming a wall in three rows, about 60 cm thick, 2.5 m high and about 5 m long from the north end. The wall was covered with writings forming wavy, almost parallel and diagonal lines. Then the wall was traced and surveyed in many places at a distance of almost 300 m. The course of the wall was marked on the surface by stones similar to stone No. 1, and rising several centimeters above the soil surface. They were 7.5-9 m apart from each other. Sections of the wall 25 m long at its southern end were inclined 15-20 degrees to the east. The wall ended in a depression on the hill.
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In March 1891, the Cleveland Express printed a short report of the discovery, written by Mr. Carson from the same location who had personally seen the wall. I posted a short message about the find in the Sunday Sun (New York) on June 7th with engravings from my own sketches made on site on May 21st …
The stone is dark red sandstone; the wall runs along the ridge of the same stone to the north and south; to the east and west, it is surrounded by limestone and runs from the Hiawassee River north of Chattanooga to the south, where it goes under the bed of the Tennessee River.
The surface of the western side of the inner part of the wall is cut into rounded protrusions with voids between them, and the marks extend to the upper ridge of the protrusion; they are 5 to 7.5 cm thick and form several large groups. Mr. J. Humpden Porter writes in a letter from Chathata on October 21: “This is not a wall, but a ridge of red sandstone with red, bluish-gray, and yellow clumps of clay reaching an unknown depth. No traces or signs of previous excavations were found. The surfaces of the other row of stones are even and not cut by furrows. Between the rows is a dark red cement, which is probably formed by red clay and salts brought in by the water.
Mr. Porter says: "As a rule, the inscriptions are considered real … I do not remember a single case of finding anything similar to this artificial secret refuge."
The architect of the Lighthouse of Alexandria in Egypt carved his name on the stone, covered it with plaster and sculpted the name of the pharaoh on it. Time erased the plaster and revealed the name of the builder. Such a secret hideout in Tennessee could have been created during an invasion or other great social catastrophe. Eight hundred and seventy-two symbols were examined, many of which duplicated each other, as well as several images of animals, the moon and other objects. Random imitations of oriental alphabets are numerous.
The stone was deliberately worked in the form of a letter, hard cement worked inside and rose above the surface. Cement covered everything, to which the outer row of stones tightly adjoined. A piece of this cement coating is engraved here with a letterform on the surface. A bird or other animal is the largest figure on the wall. Some of these forms are reminiscent of Dayton Rock and may be from the same age. How many more secret inscriptions there may be on this geologically old continent is impossible to say, but it is pleasant to think about it …
Yes this is true. It is interesting, not to say delightful, to think about how many more inscriptions there can be on this continent. Although there is no exact way of dating the walls of Hooper with mysterious inscriptions, but … when someone finds an object in a coal vein, he knows that it is about 300 million years old.
On April 2, 1897, a very interesting piece of stone was recovered from the Lehigh coal mine in Webster City, Iowa. He was found under the sandstone, which was located 40 m underground.
The stone tiles were approximately 60 cm long, 30 cm wide, and were about 2.5 cm thick. Diamond-shaped cells were carved into the surface, and in each of them was the face of an old man. Two images from the available ones looked to the right. The features in each image were identical, and there was a strange tooth-shaped mark on the forehead of each portrait.
We can better understand why, as a layman, we rarely hear of such remarkable 300 million-year-old artifacts if we consider the difficulties that Dr. John S. Kraft, head of the Department of Geology, University of Delaware, faced when he tried to prove the authenticity of the pendant he found, which, in his opinion, was made on the North American continent from 12,000 to 10,000 years ago.
On a 14 cm long piece of gastropod shell, there is a distinctly carved image of a mammoth covered with wool. The shell was excavated in 1864 from a peat bog in Holy Oak, a Delaware town north of Wilmington, which most archaeologists have always believed to be a fake.
Dr Kraft took sediment samples from the swamp area where the item was found (today two highways and a railroad cross the site). Two modern dating methods have shown the samples to be 80,000-100,000 years old. Dr. Kraft believes that a normal earth surface existed at the site of the swamp 10,000–12,000 years ago and believes that the object he sees as a pendant or pendant may be from this time period.
Although it is generally accepted that mammoths in the United States became extinct about 8,000 years ago, there is currently no evidence of a human-giant connection with tusks in the Northwest United States. Mammoth bones were dug up in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, but not in Delaware.
Dr. Kraft explained in June 1976 in Science Digest that the main mistrust surrounding the pendant, he believes, stems from the overly controversial identity of the person who found the artifact. However, the same man, Dr. Hillbourne T. Crison, who taught at Yale, found more than 1,000 Indian artifacts in addition to the ill-fated pendant, and no one doubted their authenticity. The reluctance to recognize the authenticity of the artifact, in fact, lies in the asinine stubbornness of the "establishment" and reluctance to accept the fact that intelligent people lived on the North American continent earlier than 30,000 years ago.
The carved shell is currently at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Dr. Kraft would very much like to conduct a radiocarbon analysis to date the artifact in order to somehow support those who are sure of its authenticity, but it takes a hundred grams of substance to carry out the test.
“This is almost the entire sink,” explains Dr. Kraft. The Smithsonian thinks it's a fake, but what can we do? If we prove the authenticity of the shell, we will destroy it."
Not without some interest is the following idea: why it is acceptable for some scientists to assume that primitive people gathered in a crowd around a mammoth stuck in the mud and pelted it with stones in order to quickly kill and provide themselves with food. At the same time, the same scientists completely deny that the same people can have both creativity and the instinct for survival. Science agrees that they can cook bone soup, but for some reason denies the desire of at least one member of the entire tribe to carve an image of their prey on a bone or a piece of shell. In general, it could even be not "art" in our understanding, but some kind of magic. For example, the wearer of this pendant could be bestowed with the power of a mammoth, or the ability to track and kill it.
Another area of continuous human endeavor to control the environment, which a large number of modern men and women consider to be exclusively in the field of the new era, is medicine. A person imagines the healing of 3000 years ago something like this: beating drums, singing songs and spells, and inventing the most painful ways to exorcise evil spirits from a sick tooth, brain tumor or gangrenous limb. However, recent discoveries give us a completely different picture of ancient medicine.
In 1972, Professor Andronic Jagaryan, head of the Department of General Surgery at the Yerevan Medical Institute in Armenia, stated that he had examined the skulls found at the bottom of a lake near Yerevan and found that two of them bear traces of complex and very delicate craniocerebral operations. Further examination of the skulls showed that their age is 3500 years.
The skulls were found during the construction of dams around Lake Sevan, during which the water level dropped, and the ruins of an ancient city appeared. Scholars have identified the city as Ishtikuni, a settlement in which a people who called themselves the Khurits lived.
According to Professor Jagaryan, the first skull he examined belonged to a 35-year-old woman. At an earlier age, she clearly received a severe head injury, after which a gap remained in the skull. Although the wound did not damage the brain, such an injury likely caused severe blood loss and created the risk of easily injuring the brain.
“And surgeons who lived 3,500 years ago made an insert from an animal bone and closed the hole for it,” Professor Jagarian told reporters William Dick and Henry Gris. - The subtle operation was carried out quite successfully. After examining the skull, I concluded that after such tamponation, she lived for several more years, since her own bone grew around the insert.
The second skull, which was examined by Professor Jagaryan, also belonged to a woman and bore traces of an even more complex and delicate operation. The anthropological surgeon found that some blunt object had been driven into the woman's skull.
“Such an injury is extremely difficult to heal, since the skull consists of three bony layers,” Professor Jagaryan explained to reporters. - A sharp blow to the head causes splitting of the inner layers, with the diameter of the inner hole being wider than the size of the damage to the outer layer. Therefore, in order to remove the debris, a wider opening must be cut from the outside in the skull in order to get close to the extensive internal damage."
Professor Jagaryan said that even today such an operation is considered very difficult and risky, but “these wonderful surgeons performed it successfully 3500 years ago! By the growth of the bone, I can say that after the operation the woman lived for about 15 more years."
Russian scientists have found evidence that surgeons of those distant and foggy times performed operations with all the skill of modern medicine, including the use of anesthesia. They used the scent of certain flowers to put a person to sleep. This was done as effectively as it is today with general anesthesia.
Professor Jagaryan said that they found the remains of nearly 50 flowers and herbs that the ancients used for general anesthesia.
“Considering that ancient doctors had to work with stone instruments,” the scientist said to Dick and Gris, “I would say that in terms of technology, they are stronger than modern surgeons. These ancient physicians used forceps made from obsidian, a black stone that could be sharpened to a sharp state, as surgical instruments. We found 4000-year-old obsidian razors on Lake Sevan, which are so sharp that you can shave with them even now."
Don Crabtree of Kimberley, Idaho, a specialist in surgical instruments used by ancient Indian physicians, allowed a local physician to perform major surgery in October 1975 with hand-made obsidian instruments.
The "extreme experiment," as Crabtree called it, involved the use of obsidian scalpels to make an incision three-quarters of the torso's circumference needed to remove a tumor in the lungs. Crabtree, who has recreated primitive tools and utensils for the past 25 years, is one of the world's foremost authorities on stone technology. He says obsidian volcanic glass is a thousand times sharper than the platinum blades used in various types of surgery. In his opinion, as a specialist, the method of making such instruments is at least 10,000 years old.
The cutting surface of obsidian is so sharp that it doesn't crush cells, Crabtree says. Accordingly, the wound heals faster and leaves a smaller scar. Crabtree argues that ultimately, obsidian instruments will revolutionize surgery and will be especially useful for cosmetic and plastic surgery.
Obsidian instruments were used by Mayan surgeons to perform caesarean sections. According to Crabtree, women from the crowned families of this culture were not allowed to give birth naturally.
For three or four centuries, the technique of making instruments from volcanic glass has been lost, but now Crabtree has resurrected it for the modern world, and he hopes that more surgeons will now have an incentive to experiment with obsidian scalpels.
The Egyptians used a contraceptive gel that was applied to a fiber swab and inserted deep into the vagina. The gel was a mixture of honey, dates, and acacia thorns that were ground together to a very fine consistency. The Western world has not learned these lessons of family planning and has not known about it for several thousand years. Only recently has it been discovered that acacia thorns contain sperm-damaging resin. If this resin is dissolved in a liquid, then its active component is released - lactic acid, an ingredient that we are familiar with from many contraceptive gels.
Modern medicine "invented" the pregnancy test using urine only in 1926. In ancient Egypt, women could carry out such a test at the earliest stages of pregnancy and simultaneously determine the sex of the unborn child. Egyptian laboratory techniques were carried out as follows: a urine sample was taken from a woman and sacks of wheat and barley were moistened with her. According to their observations, if the unborn child was a boy, wheat growth accelerated. If a girl was to be born, barley grew faster. In 1933, the correctness of tests with wheat and barley was confirmed by modern scientists.
Even in countries with hot climates, there are people who cannot stay in the sun for a long time. Egyptians who drove caravans through the Sahara Desert found that they could have additional sun protection if they chewed on a root called ami-majos. Modern research has shown that this root enhances skin pigmentation as it contains an active organic component called 8-methoxypsorate.
In the Indian collection of medical knowledge, which was written in the 1st century AD. e. by the palace physician Charakoy, there is a section of the pharmacopoeia containing recipes for more than 500 herbal medicines. Among these herbs is Rauwolfia serpentina, whose Latin name comes from the 16th century German physician and botanist Leonhard Rauwolf, who identified this plant as a sedative and pain reliever.
In his work Lost Discoveries, Colin Ronan writes that Indian doctors used this plant for 1500 years earlier "for colic, headaches and, above all, as an antidepressant - it was called" the medicine of the sad man. " Chemical analysis carried out in modern laboratories showed that the plant contains "some powerful alkaloids, including reserpine, a tranquilizer that Western psychiatry began to use only in the 1950s."
Ronan also points out that the ancient Indians practiced plastic surgery and made stitches to tighten the edges of the wound after surgery.
Susruta Samhita is a medical book compiled in the 5th century AD. BC, describes how to use the skin from the cheek or forehead to restore a nose that is lost in an accident or due to illness. The same book tells how to sew up surgical incisions with crooked needles made of bronze or bone. It was not until the 19th century that such needles came into use in Western medicine.
Ronan talks about one peculiar method of suturing that was not used at all in the Western world - the use of large black Bengal ants to heal intestinal wounds. “Ants were placed on the sides of the wound, and they clamped its edges with their jaws; then they were decapitated and their bodies were removed, and the heads were left. After a while, the heads resolved and the wound healed. Then the intestines with this terrible suture were put in place and the stomach was sutured."
Back in the 6th century BC. e. a doctor named Susruta performed cataract removal. In Bisgia Batika, an Indian doctor, who historians called the "Indian Hippocrates" after the ancient Greek "father of medicine", gives the exact details of the operation to remove the cataract, and in such a way that it looks like a normal operation (note that Western doctors took another 2000 years just to just to try to carry out a similar procedure).
The patient - fed, washed and neatly tied - is laid on the ground.
The doctor must first warm the patient's eye with his breath … Then, gently stroking with his thumb, he determines the contamination formed in the pupil.
The doctor orders the patient to look down at the nose.
Having firmly fixed the patient's head, the doctor holds the needle with his index, middle and thumb. He carefully introduces it into the sore eye - from the side, towards the pupil. Then he gently moves the needle forward, backward and upward, gently pressing on the patient's eye. If the probing is correct, a sound is heard and a drop of fluid flows painlessly from the eye. The doctor should moisturize the eye with fresh breast milk. By scratching the pupil with the tip of the needle, it should gradually squeeze out the dirt towards the nose …
In the 3rd century A. D. e. two remarkable Arab surgeons, known as magicians of medicine, performed a leg transplant. According to the official documents of the Roman Catholic Church, Kozma and Damian, newly converted Christians and excellent doctors, known for their success in treatment, successively removed the leg of a Roman aristocrat and then replaced it with a healthy leg taken from a black slave.
The journalist Ron Keylor, investigating the authenticity of the source, which is recorded in the Christian Encyclopedia, the official directory of the Italian Roman Catholic Church (the event itself was captured in woodcarving, which is kept in the Cathedral of Palencia, Spain), quotes Dr. José Rivas Torres, professor Medicine of the University of Malaga: “The evidence on the carvings is clear to any surgeon. Modern medicine has not yet coped with the problem of rejection of foreign tissue by the human body, and it is the solution of this problem that makes limb transplantation possible. This is historical proof of the fantastic development of medicine many centuries ago."
Both surgeons became Christian martyrs when Emperor Diocletian ordered them to be beheaded in 303. Monsignor Giovanni Ottieri (from the Vatican Library in Rome) stated that the Vatican documents confirm the fact “the canonization of Cosma and Damian shortly after their death; the cause of their canonization was their medical miracles and martyrdom."
The ancient man did not forget about his teeth.
January 23, 1970 Dr. Lucille E. St. Homey of the Smithsonian Institution and Dr. Richard T. Coryzer, a dentist in Glen Burnie, Maryland, announced their recent discovery of two “beautifully filled teeth” in a 1,000-year-old skull dug 32 years ago near St. Louis, Missouri. According to the anthropologist and dentist who made this discovery, a filling material like cement represents "the first evidence of tooth preparation for treatment seen in prehistoric or ancient people."
It turns out that modern man simply re-learned what the ancient people knew for a long time, and the modern world declares the previous knowledge to be advanced thinking and the latest achievements in medicine and dentistry. Apparently, such "retraining" may simply be cyclical.
