The lost city of Pompeii preserved in Ash
Pompeii was an ancient city located near Naples, Italy. In the year 79 A.D., the infamous Mt. Vesuvius’s volcanic eruption transformed the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
The Volcanic heat and ash annihilated the city of Pompeii and all its residents.
However, the strangest thing is the fact that the people were burned into permanent positions capturing the exact moment of their death and did not succumb to the elements through time.
For a long time, archaeologists thought that all the victims died quickly, vaporizing from the hot ash and leaving their remains in the dust that cooled and hardened.
Later it was found out that victims were baked slowly to death.
Certainly one of the painful ways to die.
Make sure you notice the person people in the picture standing in the cave, because it’s the only way you will appreciate what I’m about to tell you. The picture above isn’t a natural cave, but a burrow. This from a giant ground Sloth that lived alongside humans in the Amazon as recently as 12,000 years ago.
You can see even the scratch marks in these above pictures on the sides of the burrow and the hands of these animals were massive. The ground sloths of America they got huge. They rivalled the size of elephants in Africa today.
Grounds sloths originated in south America, and made their way to North America, before most of the other south American animals did. They were excellent at island hopping and made it as far as Cuba and the Caribbean Islands.
The picture above is one of those species from Cuba and the radio carbon dates for this species go back around 4000 years ago, so they were alive pretty recently.
There’s 27 different genera of ground Sloths across 4 different families, that were alive in the late Pleistocene. The Pleistocene is that time period that ended around 12,000 years ago leading to the Holocene, a more stable climate for our species and agriculture.
We continue to learn more and more about these ground Sloths. Sloth Mylodon was not a Vegetarian. A very recent why published study showed evidence from the teeth when they looked at isotopes show it wasn’t strictly an herbivore and may have been as a scavenger.
Strangest can’t say, but I find them quite intersting.
- City of Derinkyu(turkey) : A man found a hidden room behind a wall in his home which after further digging revealed multilevel underground city, 18 stories deep. Each floor could be closed off separately. The city could accomodate upto 20,000 people.There were sections of Stables , churches, Lodging, storage and wineries.Area was fitted with thousands of ventillation shaft and waterways.
2. Antikythera Mechanism : It’s been called the world’s first analogical computer. It was found in Roman era shipwreck. It tracked Lunar calendar, Eclipses, Charted the position and phase of moon. Planetary motion in the mechanism was accurate to with in one degree in 500 years.
