Millions of people are fascinated with the idea of looking for bargains at markets and antique shops. One such story of success happened in Vienna back in 2011, when a 300-year-old skull was found in a small antique shop.
According to the Austrian store owner, this skull belonged to a man who provided medical assistance to Tibetan monks. The man’s teeth and skull were perfectly preserved, and his head was carved with various depictions of the macabre. The true origins of the skull remain a mystery, but it is still considered a rare piece of history.
A Stone Head Portrayal of a Warrior
The Olmec were a society of villagers that lived along the Gulf Coast of Mexico. These people were mostly known for the special statues they carved out of stone, often weighing around 20 tons each. These stone heads were carved to commemorate their rulers and are still well preserved today.
The boulders were brought by the Olmecs from the Sierra de Los Tuxtlas mountains in Veracruz. The heads they sculpted out of them were arranged in lines at important Olmec locations. Like many archaeological mysteries, it remains unknown just how they managed to move these massive boulders from one place to another.
A Mummified Monk
Monks have been known to perform near-superhuman feats of mind control on more than one occasion. In 2015, archeologists in the Netherlands were stunned when they discovered what is perhaps the greatest monk prank of all time.
More than 1,000 years ago, one monk decided to drink a highly poisonous tea to appear as dead in a full lotus position. He was then turned into a real-life mummy. The dead monk was then cast into a statue and remained hidden inside it for almost twenty generations.
An Ice-Man
The body was discovered in Canada in 1999, and scientists dated the corpse to be between 300-600 years old. Aside from the well-preserved body, the hunters that discovered him also found his walking stick and a fur coat.
What’s interesting about this case is that through DNA testing, they were able to find over 15 living relatives of the man in the ice, who had simply been dubbed “Canadian Ice Man.”
Mammoths
The remains of the ancestors of modern elephants, woolly mammoths, have been discovered all over the world, from Alaska to Siberia. These gentle giants had tusks that could reach up to 15-feet in length and could weigh up to 15 tons, although they weren’t necessarily the largest species of mammoths. Remains of these creatures have been dated back between 39 and 40,000 years ago.
In 2013, researchers discovered perhaps the most well-preserved woolly mammoth to date, deep in Siberia in a tomb of ice. They believe that the female mammoth had lived nearly 40,000 years ago. The body was still so intact that it still had some blood.