There are many places on our planet that are either not sufficiently studied, or represent complex and strange information, phenomena around which the classical theory and non-standard versions for modern science are debated. Here is one of these finds.
Fossilized wheel tracks found in various places, including in some parts of Turkey and Spain, were left by heavy all-terrain vehicles about 12-14 million years ago, according to Alexander Koltypin, a geologist and director of the Research Center of Natural Sciences of the Moscow International Independent Ecological and Political University.
This statement causes considerable controversy, since most archaeologists believe that human civilization has existed on our planet for only a few thousand, not millions of years. To agree with the theory of this scientist means to admit that even before us, there was a prehistoric civilization on Earth, which, perhaps, was sufficiently developed to have such vehicles.
Wheel tracks cross faults formed in the middle and late Miocene period (about 12-14 million years ago). Having determined the age of the faults, Koltypin suggested that heavy transport of a civilization unknown to us traveled these roads millions of years ago.
At that time the earth was wet and soft like clay. Large vehicles were loaded in the mud, leaving deep ruts in it. Over time, when the earth dried up, there were ruts of different depths in it. The transport continued to ride the beaten paths already on dry land, according to Koltypin, and the load was not so deep.
The vehicles were the same length as modern cars, but the tires were about 23 cm wide.
According to the scientist, very few works on geology and archeology contain information about these fossilized tracks of cars. But even in these rare references, as a rule, the explanation comes down to the fact that the tracks were left by carts pulled by donkeys or camels.
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“I will never agree with these explanations,” the scientist wrote on his Internet page. "Personally, I will always remember … that in the history of our planet there were other civilizations that disappeared long before the appearance of modern man."
Petrified wheel ruts in the Phrygian Valley, Turkey. (Photo by Alexander Koltypin).
Koltypin argues that the tracks could not have been left by light carts or chariots, because only heavy vehicles could make such deep furrows.
He has done a lot of research in various places where these traces were found, and he studied well the published studies on local geology. He suggested that the road network stretched along much of the Mediterranean and beyond over 12 million years ago.
These well-trodden paths were used by people who built those underground cities, the remains of which we can still find, for example, in the area of Cappadocia in Turkey. Alexander put forward a theory according to which these cities are also much older than it is believed in official archeology.
Petrified wheel ruts have been found in Malta, Italy, Kazakhstan, France and even North America, writes Koltypin.
Most of them are in the province of Kutahya, Turkey, and in the already mentioned historical area of Cappadocia. There, petrified wheel tracks stretch for many kilometers.
Cappadocia, Turkey.
Kutahya, Turkey.
A fossil footprint left by a prehistoric building next to similarly ancient wheel tracks in the Phrygian Valley, Turkey.:
Fossilized footprints in the Phrygian Valley, Turkey, still visible today, according to Dr. Alexander Koltypin, left by heavy vehicles that were driven around the area by people of prehistoric civilization.
Most archaeologists attribute many of these traces to different civilizations that lived at different periods of time. But Koltypin believes that it is not correct to attribute the same roads, potholes and underground structures to different eras and cultures.
Instead, he attributes them to one widespread civilization that inhabited the Earth in a distant era. Countless natural phenomena, such as tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, floods and tectonic disturbances, have wiped out most of the remains of that highly developed prehistoric civilization, he says.
Taking into account the impact of these natural phenomena on geological formations, Koltypin was able to determine that these potholes and roads appeared, most likely, even earlier than all these catastrophic events.
Heavy mineral deposits covering the tracks and erosion are also evidence of deep antiquity, the scientist says.
Petrification can occur over a period of several hundred years or even several months, so the mere fact that the wheel ruts are petrified is not yet proof that they are very old. But, Koltypin argues that other geological evidence indicates that they appeared during the Miocene, millions of years ago.
Nearby underground cities, irrigation systems, wells and more are also showing signs of being millions of years old, he says. But he adds: "Without careful additional research with the participation of many archaeologists, geologists and specialists in folklore, it is still impossible to answer the question of what kind of civilization it was."
More information from the expedition of Andrey Kuznetsov in 2014:
Here's what they write: On a large stone plateau, we saw clearly artificial formations - the same tracks from the wheels, which went by dozens in the same direction. All tracks are paired, so it is more correct to call them tracks. As it turned out later, these tracks are clearly visible on satellite images.
Fig 1. Satellite image of one of the track clusters.
Fig 2. One of the largest clusters of - up to 30 tracks.
The tracks run both on the flat and level part of the plateau, and on the more difficult terrain - they cross the hills, pass between them and directly along them. They intersect, sometimes converge or diverge.
Fig 3. Several tracks come together to disperse again after twenty meters.
Rice 4. * Food as I want *.
The place that interested us the most was the track that passed between two hills. The wheel tracks in it are no different from dozens of their neighbors, but it is in this place that we find tracks on the walls of the hills, which tell us a lot of interesting things about the characteristics of the vehicle that left them.
Fig. 5, 6. Deep rut between two hills without traces of the vehicle getting stuck.
The photographs clearly show how both walls are formed - they are even, as if cut off, and their width is slightly wider than the track itself.
On both walls there are symmetrical blocks of scratches, pressed through by a kind of trapezoidal protrusion that was located on both sides of the vehicle.
Fig 7. The scratches are strictly at the same height, forming a very even straight line from beginning to end.
Fig 8. It is difficult to reproduce the trapezoidal shape of the scratches in the photograph, but the depth and relief are visible.
Although at first glance the scratches seem to be rather untidy, two surprising facts can be observed: each single scratch can be traced along the entire length of the wall, and the entire block of scratches itself is extremely even in height along the entire length.
It soon turned out that the tracks between the two hills were not yet the most interesting find - they could compete with the prints that we found near a cluster of ruts, where the breed, unfortunately, was much worse preserved. This find was rectangular imprints in stone, slightly less deep than the rest of the tracks. The prints were in the immediate vicinity of the ruts.
Fig 9. Mysterious rectangles in the immediate vicinity of the ruts.
Fig 10. Quite deep (15 cm) track mark behind it.
Fig 11. In this frame, the footprint most resembles a rectangular imprint.
It is difficult to say something for sure about these rectangles - the rock has significantly weathered, and it is impossible to determine how even they were. Nearby there are ruts, which are also significantly destroyed, and sometimes they have completely crumbled, ground has been applied on top and grass is growing. The only thing that came to mind was the places where the cargo was removed from the vehicles and placed next to it, and an indirect confirmation of this - the dimensions of the rectangles fully corresponded to the maximum size of the cargo, which would comfortably fit on vehicles with such an axle width and wheel thickness that all ruts.
After returning from Turkey, the first thing we started doing was searching for all possible information about the formations we found, starting, of course, from the Internet.
On the Internet, we were not even expected to be disappointed … but an extreme surprise: in the entire network we found only one photo of exactly these ruts with the signature that these ruts were cut by the wheels of Phrygian carts.
There were millions of records about stone ruts in Malta (I will say right away that we are dealing here with fundamentally different formations and it is simply pointless to compare these tracks with the Maltese ones).
We and our colleagues found several materials dedicated to this region of Anatolia, including specifically devoted to ancient roads - and the result is almost zero. The only thing that can be learned from these works is that there were roads in this area, while despite the mass of graphic material (including architectural monuments located at a distance of 300-500 meters from the nearest tracks), there was not a single photograph of such amazing and preserved traces.
Fig 12. Aslankaya - one of the most famous monuments in the Phrygian Valley. From it to the nearest tracks no more than six hundred meters.
It turns out that scientists do not know about these tracks? Or they know and for some reason do not even bother to attach photographs or at least images from satellites to their scientific works, even if these works are directly related to roads … But we found no roads - these tracks do not form roads, we found groups of them here and there, these groups often run perpendicular to each other!
In a special program, we examined satellite images covering about six hundred square kilometers (an area of 20x30 km) around the tracks, finding all visible clusters - no system was outlined.
The increase in the area of analysis led to the localization of the area where traces can be found: this is a strip about 65 kilometers long and up to 5 kilometers wide - it would seem that the direction of the tracks lies in front of us, but the tracks themselves almost never went in the direction of the strip itself, and even vice versa - we cannot talk about the length of 65 kilometers, judging by the direction of the tracks, it is easier for us to talk about such a huge width.
If archaeologists know about this, it is not surprising that such formations are not of interest to them - after all, they do not want to fit into the standard system.
While some were looking for articles on archeology, others were studying geology. It was possible to find out that the rock in which there are traces is the volcanic tuff of the Miocene period (this means that the volcanic activity in the region ended more than five million years ago).
Fig 13. Simplified geological map of the study area. The area in which the agglomeration of traces was found is highlighted in orange. All rocks in the study area belong to the Miocene and are mainly pyroclastic rocks (tuffs), limestone rocks, and occasionally granites. The ruts appear to be formed only in tuffs. You can study the map here (Turkish).
By this time, we already knew for sure the main question about our find.
What and when was able to roll such tracks?
In order to start answering this question, you probably need to write down the possible versions, and then gradually discard those that do not match.
1. Natural (geological) origin.
2. Squeezed out by heavy equipment in the last hundred years, for example, during one of the world wars.
3. Rolled by Phrygian carts several thousand years ago.
4. Laminated in clay-soft stone.
Let's deal with all the versions in order.
Version 1. Natural origin
I did not choose this option by chance - the natural origin is often attributed to the ruts in Malta, and in Turkey we have often observed geological formations of amazing beauty and geometry.
It is enough to look at the agglomeration of tracks from space, so that there is no doubt about the technogenicity, and of course our favorite place - between two hills - leaves no doubt about its artificial origin, we add to this intersections at acute angles and rectangular traces from the load, and you can safely put this version on the shelf.
However, to be honest, I will mention one observation that could be useful in this version: we did not find pronounced places where the start, end of the ruts, points of sharp turn or reverse movement were found. For example, even in my favorite track between the hills, there is not a hint of traffic jam, and on the ascents (or descents, because the direction is almost impossible to determine) there are no traces of slipping.
Version 2. Modern heavy equipment
This version became one of the main ones after it was not possible to find the necessary information of a historical and archaeological nature in open sources.
Tuff is a relatively soft stone, its compressive strength is 100-200 kg / cm2, which, when calculated based on the contact spot of a wheel of 100 cm2, will give us the required weight of at least 40-80 tons of weight (for the status quo) and much a large weight to break the rock to such a depth (unfortunately, to calculate the exact weight, a calculation in the field of strength is necessary, there were no specialists among us).
Suppose that we only need 80 tons to push through, even then the required load will be twice the load of the most durable KAMAZ - and it already has 12 wheels, which are obviously wider than our tracks, and the rear ones are double.
If we apply the calculation of the load on tuff for KAMAZ, we get 35 kg / cm2, which is 3-6 times less than the required load for rock destruction.
That is, a wheeled vehicle with such a load on inflated wheels most likely does not exist.
A tracked vehicle is excluded at once for several reasons:
The distribution of weight on the tracks is much more even than on the wheels - this is exactly the property that gives tanks such cross-country ability, but we have deep ruts.
The tracks on the tracks leave characteristic chips on the hard surface - and we didn't find any tread marks.
When moving in an arc, the tracked vehicle would slightly destroy the wall (and even the track) opposite to the direction of rotation - in our case, there was no such damage.
The most important argument against the version of the modern origin is the even and even smooth lines of the tracks - if the tracks were pressed by the heaviest tractor, they would crumble and crack (tuff is rather fragile), large pieces would break off from them, the intersections of the tracks would be broken and filled up debris. All this is not.
Version 3. Phrygian carts
I think that for any historian or archaeologist, this version is not only the most logical, but also axiomatic - it simply does not need confirmation.
The logical chain is really simple here.
1) There is no doubt that carts drove in the Phrygian valley
2) Obviously, if you drive through one place many times, a track will form. When the track has become so deep that it is difficult to drive on it, they begin to drive not far from it, gradually rolling out new and new tracks.
1. With the fact that the carts were - no doubt, in museums there are figurines and bas-reliefs. But after all, carts travel along the roads - and those groups of tracks that we found least of all deserve the name "road".
What are roads characterized by?
Roads have a direction - In our case, there is no single direction of the "road" - on a site of several square kilometers we have several agglomerations, each of which has quite a few tracks. Agglomerations do not add up to one road, but often have different directions.
Roads are made optimal - they should be straight where possible, level, where you can find a level place, it is necessary to avoid sharp ups and downs.
There is very little optimality in our case - we found a place where neighboring tracks go under a hill, over a hill, along its edge and next to it, as if it was absolutely all the same whether to cross an extra hill or not, but the precedent with driving between two hills, in which there was a risk of getting stuck between them or simply destroying the structure of the cart is generally outrageous - meanwhile, a few meters away there are several ruts that bypassed this depression.
Roads are being repaired - if the optimal route is chosen, it will not be abandoned, if it is possible to use it further. In our case -
no traces of repair were found. But there is nothing easier than filling a too deep track with broken tuff and continuing to use it as a new one. There is enough broken tuff around, you just need to invent a shovel or even a simple broom.
In the end, they build roads! Of course, if we have a stone plateau in front of us, construction on it is not necessary, but the stone is not everywhere. Where the rock passes into the ground, there should be a road - from flat stones or paving stones, from pebbles or wood.
If the carts left deep traces in the stone, and even dozens of parallel ones, then I can't even imagine what would have happened to the soft ground if there was no equipped road on it - most likely after a short time it would have become impossible to drive, the carts would drowned in the torn up soil and without construction, they would have had to roll out tracks in parallel, not in tens, but in thousands.
We did not find a single fragment of construction, not a single place that could claim to be a dirt road of antiquity, we did not find anything outside the tuff.
Summing up: we did not find the optimum in choosing a place for the tracks, we did not find any signs of repair, we did not find traces of road construction, and most importantly, we did not find the main property of the road - the general direction.
2. The very characteristics of the tracks do not allow them to be considered rolled over many years!
To begin with, let's figure out how the tracks should look like, which are rolled in stone by a cart without shock absorbers (after all, no one would argue that there were no shock absorbers 2-4 thousand years ago?).
1) A particular track should have approximately equal depth wherever the rock density is approximately the same.
If you are driving on tuff, then there is no “dry place” in it like in clay, it will wear off more or less evenly, and the dependence will be more on the angle of inclination than on the place.
2) The bottom of the track cannot be even.
You, of course, saw holes on asphalt roads and probably noticed that at first a small pothole or even a crack forms, then day after day it grows and deepens, turning into a pothole, and all this at a time when the like New.
The physics of this process is very simple - when a pothole is formed, each wheel that falls into it beats against it with a force much greater than the pressure on smooth asphalt. The surface is already damaged, and the wheels are constantly knocking on it, which causes further destruction of the asphalt, which at some point begins to grow exponentially.
The destruction is suspended when the pit becomes so deep that they are already afraid to drive through it, or when the brave road workers make a patchwork.
It is these processes that will occur in the rut - as soon as the first pothole is formed in one of the tracks of the track - every time a wheel passes along it - it will beat against its bottom, while the cart will slightly tilt towards the track where the pothole formed. The more wheels pass, the deeper the pothole will become, the wider the track will become in this place.
So - the bottom of the track should look like a washboard over time, and the sides bulge in different directions.
3) The intersections at sharp corners cannot maintain any shape.
The physics that will act on intersections (except for intersections at angles close to a straight line, and we found only one of these) is very similar to the physics of potholes: a cart, approaching an intersection, would break the thinnest (and therefore fragile) sections with its wheels, and instead of even corners, we would see something shapeless, smoothed. And the fewer the guides for the wheels, the more the walls of the intersection would collapse, turning it into a fairly flat place with several entrances and exits. At the same time, all the tracks approaching the intersection would be much wider at the point of entry to the intersection than the average track, because after leaving the intersection, the cart would not always exactly hit the target of the desired track and, again, the wheel beat against the walls, grinding and chipping them. Even if the new track crosses the old, no longer used,we should see identical destruction, only the entry-exit of the old track will not be widened.
And again, in short: the track that the cart has rolled over a long time should have a similar depth along its entire length, it will have a hilly bottom, curved walls, and when crossing with other tracks there will be a rather broken intersection.
All this is not present in our case. Firstly, we have places where the ruts become less deep - and usually everything that is in this place, although the breed has not changed. Even if this is attributed to the high density of tuff in a particular place, this cannot explain this photo in any way:
Fig 14. The mound is pressed along the very edge - like a pile of sand, along the edge of which a tractor drove, pushing it a little.
Secondly, wherever the tracks are well preserved, we have a very flat bottom. In fact, the bottom is phenomenally flat, no regular potholes have been found anywhere - and this is provided that the tuff is fragile: one blow with a hammer and large pieces will fly around.
Thirdly, almost all intersections with sharp corners have a high safety of intersections - no breaks, no widened exit tracks.
Fig 15. Very smooth edges and sharp corners.
Fig 16. Macro photo of the previous intersection. The rounding formed by the bottom and side wall of the track has a radius of less than 5 mm. Unfortunately, we didn’t think of throwing a coin there to fix the size accurately.
In order not to be unfounded, speaking of archaeologists and historians, I contacted Professor Jeffrey Summers, who specializes in ancient Turkey's communications. What he wrote about these roads is exactly the same as the logic above:
“The carts and chariots would have had iron tires, at least some of them. The ruts continue to be made until they are so deep that the axle hits the ridge between. Where there is space new tracks are made along the same route."
“Carts and chariots had iron rims, at least some. The ruts continued to be used until they became so deep that the carts began to cling to the axle. A new path was laid in an empty place along the same road."
All this allows us to say with confidence - the tracks that we have are not the remnants of the roads that archaeologists talk about.
Version 4. Soft stone
If we assume that the ruts appeared when the stone was still soft, all the contradictions of the physical and logical properties disappear.
We no longer need to consider this place a road - just a dozen other carts drove on the clay, nothing particularly remarkable - the same can be seen along the fields in the summer season. At the same time, all the tracks that were rolled not on stone, but on the ground have long disappeared, to look for the remnants of them is like looking for last year's snow.
It is also not necessary to roll such ruts for years, judging by our observations - most of them were rolled at one time, some were driven two or three times.
All misunderstandings with a flat bottom, walls and sharp intersections without traces of destruction at intersections immediately disappear - with a single passage, everything should look exactly as in our photographs. Cracks and chips in soft stone should not appear either.
The traces from the cargo, which are mentioned at the beginning of the article, are also quite logical - if a heavy box was removed from the transport, then it may well leave behind a squeezed trail in soft soil.
But in spite of the fact that the contradictions with physics are completely removed, new contradictions appear - with geology and history.
In what cases could the stone be soft?
For example, some time after the eruption, but the eruptions in the area ended more than five million years ago.
The second option, which was expressed by the author of our expedition - the tuff erupted at the bottom of the lake, cooled down and formed a very loose bottom; later the water left, the lake turned into a swamp, then into clay, and then it was completely frozen. In this case, tuff could have been soft for much longer, maybe even up to our time. But only if there was clay 2-4 thousand years ago (which did not have time to solidify over millions of years), then surely there would still be places in which it did not solidify - for example, next to a lake or a river. We traveled all over the area - there are no swamps here, all the tuff is equally hard, even the one on the shore of the nearest lake (from footprints to the lake - from 700 meters to 15 kilometers).
It turns out that in both cases the tuff froze much earlier than 2-4 thousand years ago. Some areas of tuff are severely damaged and weathered, which also indicates a significantly older age.
Even more interesting
It takes a long time and with good taste to come up with hypotheses about what kind of vehicle traveled around the non-petrified tuff many millions of years ago, so I would like to leave it to the will of the reader. Instead of hypotheses, I want to add some more interesting facts and observations that we made over the two days that we studied the tracks.
Where are the animal prints?
We looked for prints of animals or humans along the tracks, but did not find them. Even where the traces were perfectly preserved, we did not see any, even the most superficial dents.
Between the tracks there is nothing that would remind of who pulled the cart, and even quite the opposite - there are places where the area between the wheels has such a shape that we walked along them with caution - curved, at an angle, sometimes just shapeless areas.
Fig. 17. It is dangerous for even a man to walk in this place, and a horse pulling a heavy cart can easily break his legs.
Let me remind you that we found unusual rectangular prints, as if from a cargo removed from carts, in one of the regions - however, there the level of erosion is such that we could not determine around the traces of a person or an animal. For the same reason, it is impossible to draw conclusions about the shape and quality of the inner corners in rectangles.
Fig 18. Despite the erosion - on the next expedition we will definitely look for footprints here again.
Independent suspension
The assumption about a possible independent suspension arose after we left: the impressions were still fresh and I went over everything that we saw in my head and felt that there was something else that we hadn't paid enough attention to.
At some point, I remembered that among the ruts there was also one that passed with one wheel along the top of the knoll, and with the second one thirty centimeters lower - along its side. The track was vertical! A cart with a rigid suspension simply could not leave a vertical track - a difference of 30 centimeters with an axis width of 180 centimeters would give an angle of 11 degrees.
Fig. 19. Schematic representation of the cart (the thickness and height of the wheels, the width of the axle and the difference in height of the hill are observed; the depth of the tracks is increased for clarity).
On the left is an ordinary cart with a cruel suspension, leaving a vertical track.
In the center - an ordinary cart leaves a trail on a hill with a height difference of 30 cm.
On the right, a vehicle with independent suspension leaves a vertical track.
Confirmation of this version will not only (and for the umpteenth time!) Change our understanding of the complexity of the vehicle, but will also be a weighty additional proof that the tracks are rolled at one time (otherwise the depth, the width of the lower track should be higher - after all, on it had much more weight of the cart).
Unfortunately, among the photo and video footage I did not find the very hill that would confirm this version, so for now we will leave it as a hypothesis, confirmation or refutation of which we will try to find in the next expedition.
Photos:
Fig 20. Mountains around are weathered - filling the ruts with soil in which a stunted shrub grows.
Fig. 21. Crossing the tracks at an acute angle
Figure 22. Turning characteristics.
Rice 23. A narrow footprint, three times narrower than the others, and most importantly - unpaired, as if someone rode a motorcycle or even a bicycle; it is impossible to determine the presence or absence of a protector here.
Fig. 24. Just five hundred meters from the perfectly preserved tuff, we found a heavily eroded rock.
Figure 25. Trail from double rolling on one track. On the right, the wall is even, and on the left, the wall was pressed through. It is noticeable that the pressed ground slightly increased the depth of the left track.
Who else has any versions of the formation of these traces? Or maybe you've read intelligible and well-reasoned refutations, versions, opinions - please share your links.
