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00:00Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
00:30Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
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01:10και οι πολύ συμφωνίες.
01:14Αυτός είναι η κυβερματικοί του κυβερματικούς.
01:28Τις τρεις ειδικά σιμπλε όπινες,
01:30ΑΠΕΡΙΕΗ,
01:32ΑΠΕΙΟΙΗΝΔΟΙΗΕΗΛΕΙΘΟΣ
01:34Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
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05:10που μπορούν να έχουν δώσει το καλύτερο του πραγματος και τι.
05:16Η πυραμία κεφαλούν δεν έχουν βοηθούν, νοηγέντες πίρυμα, δεν έχουν υποχρελί.
05:21Θα πρέπει να δώσει το διεκκτοβούν ασπίσοντο μεγάλο πράγμα.
05:24Με είναι γενικότερο, ίδιόν θα μπορούν να μουσουν τα πυραμία.
05:29Αν είναι ιδιωμένα, δεν έχουν πραγματικά.
05:33Μπορεί να έχουμε να αφήκανε πίρυμα.
05:40Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
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07:10Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
07:12Μετά από αυτήν την κομμάτια κομμάτια,
07:15δεν έπρεπε να δείχνει,
07:17επειδή γνωρίζει ότι είναι δεκορήθηση με λίγες από την οικογέντητα εγκυπτήρια.
07:23Δημιουργεί ότι είναι υπέρας τελευταίες φυλλές.
07:30Ριδιασκοβή των φυλλών αλληλεύει όλοι.
07:33Μετά μπορούν να δημιουργήσουν τα ρελικασία και να δημιουργήσουν αν είναι η πραγματική ήρθε.
07:38Но the results are a shock!
07:43It was over 500 years earlier than the day of the building of the Great Pyramid,
07:49which was really surprising.
07:53500 years is quite some gap.
07:58In terms of the ancient Egyptians,
08:00that's way before they were even thinking about building pyramids.
08:05Is it really plausible that something so old
08:07θα πρέπει να δημιουργήσω 500 χρόνια πριν από την Ελλάδα.
08:11Εγγύπτο δεν έχει πολύ καλύτερο καλύτερο,
08:16και έτσι έτσι θα έρθει από το Λεβανόν.
08:19Και επίσης αυτό ήταν πολύ καλύτερο να δημιουργήσω σε Ελλάδα,
08:24θα έρθει καλύτερος πρόσφαλής.
08:29Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE, αρχαιολογικά εξαφασίες
08:32οι περιφερμαντικοί εγηπτών που δημιουργήσω αρκετά τα εγηπτών στην ειδίκτη πληροσμή,
08:37γι'αυτό από τα τερία αυταία και τα πληροσμή.
08:40Οι μεταξύ του εγηπτών της εγηπτών της εξαφαλής της οικονομικής υπηρεάς
08:45παίωση με τα δημιουργήσεις που γνωρίζονται από την Εγηπτών.
08:48Αυτή δεν έκανε το πυκοία,
08:51τι να είναι για το πράγμα?
08:55Όταν περίαν δύσκολο,
09:00κάποιοι ευρώ Ήμπέρας πιστεύουν
09:02να μπορούν πιο ευρίανους's σύντρυμού.
09:04Έναν δίκτωσό λαπτώμα.
09:07Μπούτη τα πυραμμία δεν είναι μόνο μόνο μόνο μόνο μόνο μάθος.
09:11Μόνο μόνο μόνο μόνο μόνο μόνο μάθος.
09:13Και από τη σύνοση της πυραμία
09:15μέχρι να μέχρι αρκετάει,
09:16είναι 51.5 σύνορα.
09:18Τι στιγμόμενο,
09:20και είτε ακόμη και γύρια από τη σημεία.
09:24Εgyptians already know that getting your angles wrong is a big problem.
09:30This pyramid is built by Khufu's dad, Sneferu.
09:36It's known as the Bent Pyramid.
09:39Essentially, it looks as if Sneferu's pyramid originally was built at too steep an angle,
09:45and it failed.
09:47Recognizing their error, the Egyptians corrected it,
09:51and it looks a bit wonky as a result.
09:56Clearly, the ancient Egyptians eventually arrived at the conclusion
10:00that 51 degrees is the optimal angle to build your pyramid.
10:07A set of tools to help keep you on track was probably a necessity to hit that very precise mark.
10:14The Dixon relics could explain the mystery of how the builders achieved this in the Great Pyramid.
10:20These could be parts of actually one single tool.
10:25The wood could be the handle attached to the hook,
10:29and then the ball could have been attached also to this instrument as a sort of plumb bob.
10:35The way a plumb bob works is it's essentially a weight hanging off a string,
10:42and thanks to gravity, you get perfect verticals.
10:47That would explain the groove around the sphere.
10:50By adding just a few pieces of missing wood, the Dixon relics become even more.
10:57A multi-angle plumb bob.
10:59One that not only allows you to measure verticals,
11:02but horizontals and diagonals as well.
11:06But there is a problem with this theory.
11:11The missing section of wood to make it work is missing.
11:17There is another explanation.
11:19Some experts have suggested the Dixon relics explain a different mystery of the Great Pyramid.
11:24Its four corners line up with the four cardinal directions.
11:29True north, south, east and west.
11:33With a margin of error of less than a tenth of a degree.
11:37Getting this orientation right is central to ancient Egyptian beliefs in the afterlife.
11:42The stars in the north were considered immortal for the ancient Egyptians.
11:49By building the pyramids and orienting them towards the stars,
11:54the Egyptian pharaohs would also become deities at their death and join these stars.
12:01To achieve this vital orientation of the king's tomb,
12:05the ancient Egyptians can use a special tool called the merket,
12:10the instrument of knowing.
12:12The merket looks like a plum ball and it was employed to locate a particular star in a specific point in the sky.
12:23They will orient this instrument towards the meridian,
12:27the line that goes from the north to the south.
12:30One key thing about the merket is that it was used in conjunction with a long forked device called a bay.
12:38And that looks very much like one piece of the Dixon relics.
12:42So used in tandem, they could help you determine exactly where true north was and to help you line up the structure with the pole stars.
12:51And it raises the question of whether the Dixon relics were somehow a device just like this.
13:00But some experts are unconvinced.
13:01Because if these are precious tools, why hide them away inside one of the mysterious shafts?
13:09Four of these hidden shafts have been discovered, two in the king's chamber and two in the queen's.
13:19No one knows what they are for.
13:20And therefore,
13:21could these strange things hold the answer?
13:31In 1993, more than a hundred years after Dixon and Grant's discovery,
13:38a German engineer, Rudolf Gantenbrink sets out to discover the purpose of the shafts.
13:45Gantenbrink sends a robot into these inaccessible shafts.
13:49And the robot comes up against a dead end.
14:01But intriguingly, there are two copper pins in the wall.
14:07He also finds a squared off wooden pole.
14:11Looks kind of familiar.
14:13Perhaps like the Dixon relic wood looked before it disintegrated.
14:17Could this explain the three strange objects?
14:21Because if you lay the pole Gantenbrink found, the length of wood and the copper hook end to end,
14:27it seems as if all three could connect together as one long hooking tool.
14:32One of the theories that comes out of this is that perhaps the Dixon relics are essentially an escape artist's toolkit for the soul of the pharaoh.
14:43Perhaps the stone was to pound through the wall and the hook would connect to these pins
14:49and the wooden pole would allow him to lever his way out and up into the sky to take his place in the realm of the gods.
14:57But as with every theory about the Dixon relics, there's a hitch.
15:02The hook and the pins, they don't match up.
15:06The copper pins in the shaft are approximately seven and a half centimeters apart.
15:11But the double ended hook is roughly five centimeters wide.
15:15The hook doesn't fit.
15:18We may never know the true purpose of the Dixon relics.
15:23But one thing experts are confident about.
15:27These are the real deal.
15:30They were hidden in the Great Pyramid by its builders four and a half thousand years ago.
15:36Whether they are builder's tools or a pharaoh's escape system, they remain some of the most precious relics of a lost world.
15:51In the Michigan History Center is a curious polished wooden cabinet.
15:56It looks like some kind of Flash Gordon movie prop.
16:00But this is a real machine.
16:03And it produces a type of radiation known to be lethal.
16:07The crazy thing is that it's not some very sophisticated and essential medical device.
16:12It's being used in shops on children.
16:15Using state-of-the-art digital imaging, we can examine this strange device in minute detail.
16:26This is the Adrian fluoroscope.
16:29Made in the 1930s, it stands just over a meter high.
16:34Roughly 60 centimeters wide and 80 centimeters deep.
16:38This is a beautiful instrument.
16:40Looks very professional.
16:42Polished wood on the outside.
16:44It looks the part.
16:46Its top is covered in switches and dials.
16:49It has three metal ports that look a little bit like binoculars.
16:53And you can stand and look down into the machine.
16:56Near the base is a small step with a wide opening into the machine's interior.
17:01Which is where the damage could be done.
17:05This contraption is actually potentially very dangerous.
17:08But it was used for decades all across the Western Hemisphere.
17:11Who came up with this dangerous idea?
17:14What happened to the people that used it?
17:16What is it actually for?
17:20Zoom in to the base of the Adrian fluoroscope and there's a very obvious clue as to its purpose.
17:30You can see at the bottom there's a hole that is just the right size for a human foot.
17:34Curious machines like this one sold under names like the pedoscope or the footoscope were once a common feature in shoe stores.
17:43The idea of this device was that instead of having your feet simply measured, you were going to use latest technology to really precisely decide how well a shoe fitted your foot.
17:56In this machine, low-tech rulers are out.
18:01In their place come high-tech x-rays that magically reveal the hidden structure of the foot.
18:09X-rays are really the same kind of thing as light.
18:13The only difference from ordinary light is that they have a much shorter wavelength and a much higher frequency.
18:19So beyond the visible spectrum, you get to the violet end of the spectrum.
18:26If you go beyond that, then you get to ultraviolet radiation.
18:30If you go even further, then you get to x-rays.
18:33X-rays have been around since 1895, when German physicist Wilhelm Konrad Röntgen discovers a previously unknown form of radiation.
18:48They have a miraculous property.
18:50They can pass right through solid objects.
18:53He names them x-rays.
18:55Because x-rays have such short wavelengths, they're able to pass through materials that would scatter visible light.
19:07So x-rays are a way of probing for particularly dense areas of material, like bones.
19:15The week after his discovery, he took this seminal photograph of his wife's hand.
19:20And on that you can see the bones in her hand, but you can also see this bulbous wedding ring.
19:27When she saw this image, she allegedly said, I have seen my death.
19:31This idea that you're somehow seeing inside the flesh into our inner self.
19:37The person who develops this wonder ray into the technology behind the footoscope is this man.
19:44Superstar inventor, Thomas Alva Edison.
19:47May 1896, at the National Electric Light Association, he debuted his new invention, the fluoroscope.
19:58Hundreds of people lined up and essentially they would stand in front of a screen and they were able to see the insides of their body.
20:05They could see their whole skeleton.
20:07Edison's astonishing new technique wows the crowds.
20:11It becomes known as fluoroscopy.
20:13It gave moving images of the skeleton that you could very easily create with one of these x-ray devices and a screen.
20:24It didn't need any high-tech equipment, so it quite quickly became commercialized.
20:29When Röntgen discovers x-rays, shoe fitting probably isn't a purpose he ever considers for his wonder ray.
20:39Essentially what you did was you would go in to the shoe shop, you'd try on a shoe, and then with the shoe on you would put your foot inside the footoscope.
20:48The x-ray tube inside the base bombards the shoe from underneath with radiation.
20:58A fluorescent screen sits above the shoe.
21:02The image on it reveals the customer's foot inside the shoe.
21:06And that's where the strange metal castings on the top of the machine earned their key.
21:11The footoscope has three viewing ports. One of them was a bit lower than the others.
21:18One would be for the salesperson, the other would be for the parent, and the third one would be for the child who is usually really fascinated to see the insides of their foot.
21:27They were instructed to wiggle their toes, and the idea was that you'd then see how much room there was.
21:37So you can imagine that this was quite sensational.
21:41We like super high-tech, super sciency stuff.
21:46So if you have a simple machine that measures a foot, that's not nearly as good as a crazy x-ray machine that measures the foot with hyper invisible science.
21:54And that can be a bit of a problem because often the super sciency thing doesn't work better than the very simple version of things.
22:02So does this high-tech showstopper actually work?
22:06The real problem was that it wasn't the bones that mattered so much in shoe fitting as the soft tissue around it.
22:14And this was invisible to the x-rays.
22:16So that's a no then.
22:20Today the idea of x-ray shoe fitting seems a little like overkill.
22:25So why create this device in the first place?
22:35Its development really takes off in the First World War.
22:39The most likely origin story is that of a medical doctor who worked for the military called Dr. Jacob Lowe.
22:49Dr. Lowe is inundated by soldiers with foot injuries that need x-rays to assess the damage.
22:56The solution to his backlog turns out to be a fluoroscope turned on its side.
23:02The advantage of fluoroscopy was that you could examine the foot without having to remove the boot.
23:08And so you could do it much more efficiently.
23:11When the war ends, Lowe realises he's sitting on a big idea.
23:14Lowe sees a real opportunity here and he modifies the device for the shoe fitting industry.
23:25He forms the Footerscope Corporation and they filed their patent in 1919.
23:30In January 1920, Lowe reveals his revolutionary shoe fitting device to the world at a retailers convention in Boston.
23:37This tells us quite a lot about the scientific importance of the device in that it wasn't really about science.
23:45It was much more about selling.
23:47Encased in expensive mahogany, devices like the Adrian fluoroscope don't come cheap.
23:53The $900 price tag, the equivalent of $13,000 today, represents a major investment for any shoe store that wants one.
24:02But all over the world, people go crazy for wonder machines like this.
24:09People love them.
24:10So people would go into shoe stores just to see their feet in the device rather than even to buy shoes.
24:19Ultimately, this is a kind of technological performance that doesn't really have any useful purpose, but it is a really good sales device.
24:27The popularity of this device and its rivals grows.
24:32By their peak in the 1950s, there are thousands of machines in use across the world.
24:38But there is one major problem.
24:42No one's really thought to ask, is it safe?
24:44At the turn of the 20th century, little is known about the danger of x-rays.
24:58The clues were there all the way back in 1896.
25:02The scientist Nikola Tesla put his finger in an x-ray and came out with burns.
25:07He didn't realize that those were actually radiation burns caused by the x-ray though.
25:11Thomas Edison, inventor of the fluoroscope, is probably aware of the risks after his assistant, Clarence Daly, falls seriously ill.
25:22His hair starts to fall out.
25:25He begins to experience nausea and dizziness.
25:28He starts to experience lesions on the skin.
25:31He does actually have skin grafts from other parts of his body onto his hands, but the lesions still remain.
25:38Eventually, he has to have both of his arms amputated.
25:41And within a short period of time, he actually dies from radiation sickness.
25:46By 1920, when the Adrian fluoroscope arrives, the dangers x-rays posed to humans are becoming obvious.
25:53Exposure from x-rays can have very detrimental effects. For example, you could lose your eyesight, you could get burns, infertility can very easily develop, cancer can grow.
26:08So you have all types of very nasty effects from radiation.
26:12Yet despite the increasingly visible risks, machines like this Adrian fluoroscope are not the only ones capitalizing on the new science.
26:23Even the side effect of hair loss from x-ray exposure is an opportunity to make a fast buck.
26:29In the 1920s, physicist Albert Gieser invents the Trico machine.
26:34It uses x-rays to zap unwanted hair.
26:44The client would come and sit and would be basically, the x-ray source would be put in front of them and they would be irradiated in ways that would destroy, you know, hair producing cells.
26:57But that, of course, had the potential to inflict all kinds of other damage as well.
27:0175 Trico clinics open across the United States.
27:06It's estimated that tens of thousands of women probably use these machines.
27:10It isn't until the 1970s that the awful consequences of the Trico system finally emerge.
27:17Over 30% of women who had used it developed skin lesions, ulcers or even cancer.
27:24So just how dangerous are x-ray shoe fitters?
27:28It's emitting x-rays all the time because you want to see your foot in real-time imagery, so you get a lot of radiation and nothing protects you from it.
27:40It was, you know, estimated that a single shoe fitting could end up giving you what was considered to be the safe dose of radiation that you shouldn't exceed over an entire year.
27:55In 1946, the American Standards Association issues a safety code that strictly limits x-ray exposure levels.
28:02But that doesn't mean this machine is safe.
28:05Even when later on the dangers of x-rays were recognized and lead shielding was added to these devices, one couldn't rely on that to make them any safer, that maybe the shielding wouldn't be properly fitted, it would be leaky.
28:22But was anyone actually harmed by a shoe fitting machine?
28:32There are surprisingly few recorded cases of shoe fitting induced radiation damage amongst customers.
28:40Staff are not always so lucky.
28:42One case is documented of a foot model or a leg model that was radiated so much that her leg had to be amputated.
28:52The real danger was to salespeople because they were doing it several times a day and they were also often actually placing their hands inside and adjusting the foot.
29:01We do know of one case of a woman who was affected by severe radiation induced dermatitis and there are probably many other cases who just haven't realized that that was the cause.
29:14By the early 1950s, the American medical organizations are issuing warnings of the dangers of shoe fitting fluoroscopes.
29:22People have begun to realize that it probably wasn't a good idea to irradiate your customers.
29:27By 1957, Pennsylvania became the first state to ban the footoscope.
29:33Switzerland followed suit in 1959.
29:36The last x-ray shoe fitting machine is still in use in a shoe store in West Virginia as late as 1981.
29:44And as recently as 2004, another case of skin cancer is linked to radiation exposure from a shoe fitting machine.
29:51But the true scale of damage done may never be known.
30:04In the vault of the Museo Nacional de Anthropologica in Mexico City lies a strange terracotta carving of a head.
30:11It's really unusual.
30:12For 90 years, this face has confounded historians and archaeologists.
30:22This is what people call an out of place object. It's an object that shouldn't be there.
30:28Now, using the latest technology, we can re-examine this incredible object in minute detail.
30:39This is the Calixtlahuaca head.
30:45It's about the size of a golf ball, just a couple of centimeters across.
30:48And we think it might once have been part of a tiny statue.
30:52The face is of a bearded man with wavy hair, wearing a cap.
30:57Some archaeologists believe they have seen this look before.
31:00The style of the face and the beard looks very similar to what we see in Roman statues from the 2nd century CE.
31:12Which is unremarkable until you consider where the head turns up.
31:17It was found with a group of grave offerings inside an Aztec tomb sometime between 1476 and 1510 AD.
31:30That should be impossible, because it is before Europeans reached this part of the Americas.
31:35I feel pretty confident in saying that there weren't any Romans in the Americas.
31:42Some experts have suggested we need to tear up our history books.
31:47But what's really going on here?
31:50Exactly how old is it?
31:53Is it Roman?
31:55Could it really have reached America before Columbus?
31:58Or is this something else entirely?
32:06The strange terracotta head is discovered on an archaeological site roughly 60 kilometers west of Mexico City.
32:13In the 1930s, José García Payón was excavating a tomb in the ancient city of Calixtlahuaca.
32:21The city was founded around 1476 by the Aztec emperor Axiactol.
32:30And it remains an outpost of the empire until its residents rebelled in 1510.
32:36The emperor at the time, Moctezuma II, reacted by destroying the city aside from its temple completely and moving its inhabitants to a different place.
32:50The city only exists for 34 years.
32:56So when Payón opens this Aztec tomb, he knows that the chronology has to be between 1476 and 1510.
33:071510 predates the arrival of the first Europeans in Mexico by seven years.
33:13And what makes this story so mysterious is that the grave hasn't been touched since it was sealed sometime before 1510.
33:24As Payón was excavating, he had to go through three archaeological levels until he got to the tomb.
33:31So there doesn't seem to be any disturbance of the contents of this burial.
33:39They know it is the tomb of an Aztec nobleman because it still contains typical luxury grave goods like these, including gold and precious gems.
33:48But one item stands out.
33:54In amongst them is this small head with a beard.
33:57You don't see anything like it elsewhere in these sorts of offerings.
34:00It becomes known as the Calixtahuaca head.
34:06Why are archaeologists so certain there's something wrong with it?
34:11For a start, its thick wavy hair looks nothing like a period description of the Aztecs.
34:14The hairstyle was coarse and straight, kind of cut across the forehead.
34:29And a full beard would be even more alien to most Aztecs.
34:33Hair on the face was considered unpleasant.
34:36And there are stories of mothers putting hot cloths on the skin to prevent hair from going and tweezing any hairs that were there.
34:44Nothing about it makes sense.
34:47This head doesn't fit with what we know of Aztec art.
34:51It's a complete outlier.
34:54The alien nature of the head leads to an extraordinary suggestion.
34:59because archaeologist Eric Boehringer believes he recognizes the style.
35:05And it is a long way from any Aztec, 10,000 kilometers away.
35:11Boehringer identified this as possibly Roman and said that it looked a bit like some 2nd century AD Roman styles in art.
35:23A second classical scholar, Bernard André, suggests an even more precise Roman date.
35:30He thinks it belongs to the Severan period, which dates from 193 to 235 AD.
35:37And when you look at the Severan emperors, you can see a likeness.
35:43But how can a Roman head end up in an Aztec tomb that is sealed years before Europeans arrived here?
35:57If this head really is Roman, it implies that Peon has stumbled on something historically ground shaking.
36:05Evidence that the Romans have crossed the Atlantic centuries before Columbus.
36:09But the academic community reacted to this as something that was completely outlandish.
36:17It could have never happened.
36:19And something odd about the head's announcement to the world also troubles them.
36:25Peon's excavation takes place in 1933, but his first full report on the head doesn't appear until nearly 30 years later.
36:33When this is such a sensational object, it's kind of hard to get your head around how you would find something like this and then leave it unpublished for that amount of time.
36:46For a further 30 years, the head is ignored.
36:51Until in 1995, archaeologist Romeo Christoph reopens the debate.
36:57Romeo Christoph got special permission to drill a tiny sample out of the head and the dust was sent to one of the Max Planck Institutes in Germany for thermoluminescent analysis.
37:09This technique can date inorganic material like pottery.
37:15Although there are problems with the sample, the test suggests that the head is between 750 and 2,890 years old.
37:24So what the thermoluminescence does suggest is the idea that this object is probably pre-Columbian.
37:31It predates the period of European colonization.
37:37And the dates do fit with the sculpture being Roman.
37:41Could a head from Europe really have reached Mexico before the first Europeans?
37:46The problem with the Romans reaching the Americas first is this.
37:585,000 kilometers of Atlantic Ocean.
38:03Romans are not known as ocean sailors.
38:06They prefer the relative shelter of the Mediterranean.
38:09Christoph explains this by proposing what he calls the drift voyage theory.
38:13The drift theory is this idea that the Romans had a lost or abandoned ship that somehow just drifted to the South Americas.
38:24This idea is supported by a recent archaeological discovery of a Roman trading post in the Atlantic Ocean on the Canary Islands.
38:33Once they found evidence of Roman trade in the Canary Islands,
38:38they then said, oh, well, the prevailing currents could have carried a ship.
38:43And I mean, who could say that it couldn't?
38:47And there have been other claims of Roman finds in the Americas.
38:52Ampharos, coins, even a Roman sword.
38:57But there's a catch.
39:00The problem with these objects is that people are trying to create a connection.
39:06One example are the amphora, which were made by a Portuguese potter in the 1960s and actually put in the ocean as a means of aging them.
39:17Later discovered accidentally by a diver, they were mistaken for genuine Roman jars.
39:23And there is one other stumbling block to the drift theory.
39:26Apart from this head, there is literally nothing else to substantiate the arrival of a Roman ship in South America.
39:38Most historians and archaeologists believe drift theory requires too many leaps of faith.
39:44Perhaps there is an altogether simpler explanation for the head.
39:52Maybe it's not European in the first place.
39:59Evidence suggests that it wasn't unknown for Aztec graves to contain non-Aztec objects.
40:04The indigenous people in this period are clearly interested in exotic objects.
40:10You see lots of shells brought from the coast, brought long distances for symbolic meaning.
40:15And occasionally small objects like Olmec heads from more ancient cultures.
40:20The Olmec civilization ruled in Mexico for a thousand years, from around 1400 to 400 BCE.
40:30The Olmecs were a very sophisticated civilization with advanced architecture.
40:36They developed some of the styles of building that we're familiar with, like step pyramids.
40:40They map the heavens.
40:41They really are a blueprint for some of the later civilizations in Mexico.
40:47And they were expert sculptors.
40:50They've left behind a real legacy of wonderful archaeology, including these very famous monolithic heads.
40:58But not all their sculptures were monumental.
41:02There's also a small Olmec sculpture shown as a kneeling figure who has a beard.
41:08Excavations of Aztec graves have found evidence that Aztecs collected Olmec artifacts as grave goods.
41:16There's even the case of a small Olmec head being found in the offerings of the Templar Mayor at Tenochtitlan.
41:24So it had clearly been treasured or traded for a long period of time.
41:29Could this strange head also be Olmec?
41:33It's the right time period, the right continent.
41:35But the reality is that we have never seen anything like this that is of Olmec origin.
41:41Maybe there's an altogether simpler explanation.
41:47What if it was never buried in the tomb in the first place?
41:50Professor John Paddock, who was a famous professor of Mesoamerican studies, often told stories to his students about how one of the excavators on Payon's excavation actually dropped the head there as a joke.
42:11Supporters of the head's authenticity say Payon's son is certain his father was always present on the dig.
42:19So there was no opportunity to plant the head.
42:23As someone who's been on digs, it's very difficult to be there guarding the dig the entire time.
42:29But if it is just a practical joke, why does no one ever own up to it?
42:36Possibly because there's a gap of nearly 30 years before Payon reports the fine.
42:41If it was done as a hoax, no one is really going to want to step up 30 years later and say, oh yeah, oops, that was me.
42:50That was me.
42:51The laughter period has kind of finished for that.
42:56So that makes it difficult.
43:00No eyewitnesses to the dig are still alive.
43:03So whilst the hoax story makes perfect sense, we can't prove it.
43:10Definitive answers about this strange object remain elusive.
43:15And perhaps that's unsurprising.
43:18Humans love a mystery.
43:20We want to see something that changes our understanding.
43:24But sometimes we just have to accept that a thing out of place is just an isolated object.
43:29And we're not going to know how it got there, or exactly why it was there, or who made it.
43:35And we just kind of have to accept that uncertain tip.
43:47kind of leave the dark.
43:49Let man turn it out of place.
43:50Shut the pleasure.
43:56But nor did you not know how it would be part of because you're about to leave.
43:58We still have to do our best.
44:00And we'll see you soon.
44:02Yeah.
44:08Yeah.
44:17Ευχαριστώ.