In December last year, the World Wide Web spread around the potentially sensational news about a startling find made by Austrian archaeologists in the vicinity of the city of Salzburg.
"Scientists have discovered a 13th century mobile phone!" - wrote journalists from all over the planet. Even the most authoritative British tabloids have reported that the ancient clay artifact, no doubt, remarkably similar to a Nokia-branded cell phone, and this baffles eminent scientists.
Many alternative researchers and ordinary Internet users have concluded that the alleged misplaced artifact is evidence of the existence of either aliens or time travelers. According to one theory, representatives of some extraterrestrial civilization arrived in the Middle Ages on our planet and showed people a real smartphone, and the affected earthlings made a copy of it from scrap materials. Another version says that in our days or in the future, someone made a replica of an irreplaceable gadget and sent it to the past.
However, now the origin of the "ancient mobile phone" has received a completely rational explanation. It turned out that the German sculptor Karl Weingartner, who created several cell phones from clay in 2012 and inscribed Sumerian cuneiform on their buttons, was to blame. According to the artist, this was done with the aim of imagining what mobile gadgets invented by the Sumerian civilization would look like.
Nevertheless, even with this explanation, several questions remain. For example, why was Weingartner silent all this time? Didn't he and the people around him see the sensational news on the web? Where are the other copies made by the joker sculptor? And was the pottery actually excavated in Austria? If so, how did it get there? Or was it someone's newspaper duck, which was readily picked up by many of the world's media?
Some conspiracy theorists, by the way, still believe that this is a real inconvenient artifact, and the German sculptor, they say, is simply helping the powers that be to hide real information about the anomalous find. There are quite serious arguments for this. Firstly, the artifact, as the scientists determined then, was the 13th century, otherwise no one would have raised a fuss: just think of some kind of modern clay toy. Did the ordinary sculptor Karl Weingartner manage not only to create a replica, but also to age it by eight centuries? Secondly, if it was just a newspaper duck, then why should the serious sculptor Karl Weingartner soil his good name in this dirty business?..
