By Scott Longman
Sometimes, it really is better to be lucky than good. One of the arenas proving that is archeology. Hard to believe, but some of the most epic finds in all of archeology have simply been wild accidents.
How wild? Believe it or not, one of the more monumental discoveries about pre-human history came from a shit fight. A literal shit fight. As in, two guys fastballing actual excrement at each other. It was at a place called Laetoli, Tanzania, in 1976, on an archeological expedition. Well, recreation is where you find it, and at that place and that time, your best recreation was, apparently, elephant dung and a good arm.
Anthropologist Andrew Hill was enthusiastically exchanging fusillades with one of his colleagues, when he sought cover in a creek bed. Dropping flat, he had a sudden realization that his nose was six inches from something odd. Watercourses have a wonderful way of sometimes eroding away millions of years of upper strata to surprise uncover some ancient magnificence, and, well, he was within gingivitus range.
He recognized it as an animal footprint in rock, and probably an ancient one. It took until a later expedition to have a really good look at the area, but what they found was knowledge-changing. They found pre-human footprints, a 75-foot-long trail of them, 3.7 million years old. Walking upright, with real-deal bipedalism. It was the oldest evidence at that time, and a huge find that remains monumental to this day.
Fire on the Mountain
Then there’s Machu Picchu. Most people are familiar with the main site, a seemingly impossible set of ruins perched 8,000 feet up on a Peruvian ridge. But fewer people know about the Machu Picchu trail. Of course, there had to be some way to get up there, and there were three, but there was one main one. Much of the environment just to the sides of the trail is dense jungle, Romancing-The-Stone-Meets-Apocalypse-Now kind of triple-canopy impenetrability.
In August of 1988, a bunch of farmers started a controlled burn adjacent to the area, but some dry vegetation and high winds got up a flamefront up fit to make even Karen Bass take notice. Way up in those mountains with damn little firefighting apparatus, the fire went all unsupervised-federal-grant. It took 50 days, but they finally managed to knock it down.
To their surprise, there in the carbonized aftermath was a stunningly complex stone wall and trail system built by their ancient forebearers, running for miles. Another absolutely enormous find, purely on accident.
Monumental Monument of Ego
But you really can’t beat a crushing communist system if you want a crazy-good archeological find. Well, actually, you can, but it worked out this time. China, 1974, outside a city called Xi’an. A farmer named Yang Zhifa and his posse were desperately seeking water for their crops, and so they commenced to digging a well. In that excavation, they found evidence of ancient Chinese history.
At the time, the Chinese HMFIC was Mao, who had no compunction about murdering tens of millions of his fellow citizens, often on awfully slim pretexts. No doubt Yang was aware of this, so, no fool he, he snatched up his finds and promptly gave them to his local Der Kommisar.
What he’d discovered was immense.
It was part of a death city, a ”necropolis” of mind-numbing proportions, built for the emperor Qin Shi Huang, who was, arguably, the guy who unified China. It was constructed sometime around 200 B.C., and covers an incomprehensible 38 square miles. For a gravesite. For one guy.
He, or at least the equivalent to whoever actually ran our last administration, had ordered a staggering 8,000 terracotta soldiers to be buried with him, to serve him in the afterlife. If that seems odd, it was a real improvement over what his predecessors did, which was take their actual servants and bury them along with him while still alive and kicking, a policy which proved less than popular.
Better Lucky Than Good
As to the terracotta soldiers, they were impossibly detailed, each with individually crafted faces, wearing the appropriate uniforms for their ranks and most holding real weapons. More than 40,000 weapons or weapons components have survived. Oh, and 130 chariots with more than 500 horses.
Historians have analyzed that it took about 700,000 conscripted — read “slave”— laborers to create this incomprehensible monument to ego. Goes to show that China’s political system has, essentially, ended up today where it started.
The tragic origins notwithstanding, the find has been called the greatest archeological find of 20th century.
Lastly, a real-life Indiana Jones, legendary paleo-archeologist Don Johanson found an enormously important pre-human skeleton by at first going for a clear-his-mind walk and kicking at stuff along the way. Sometimes, it really is better to be lucky than good.
