I don’t know about you, but I find it pretty amazing when people discover something new. That said, I also feel like the chances of someone without training or expertise uncovering something we’ve never seen/done/experienced/realized before is pretty slim.
While the odds may have been against them, these 7 people actually did accidentally stumbled onto a major discovery, which I guess means that it could totally happen again. So maybe, I don’t know…be prepared?
The next time your mom/spouse/kid says you’re wasting your time fooling around with Google Earth, remind them how an Italian man doing just that discovered an ancient Roman villa buried under the soil.
He noticed an oval shape that was over 1,600 feet long casting strange shadows, and when he traced them, he thought the shadows resembled the shapes of buildings. He notified local archeologists and later learned that he was right – he had discovered a major historical artifact (probably in his underwear eating pizza).
When a Turkish man decided to do a little home renovation, you can bet he never in his wildest dreams could have imagined what lurked on the other side of one of his walls.
It was a strange room that turned into a tunnel system that wound through an underground city and sprawled 280 feet underground. Archeologists estimate that it was built between the 12th and 15th centuries B.C.E. and was used by Hittites to hide up to 20,000 people from their enemies.
In 1991, two random hikers were traversing the Alps and wandered off the beaten path only to find themselves staring down a gully at the naked body of a dead man lying facedown in the snow. They freaked out like they were in the opening sequence of an episode of Bones (rightly so), took a picture, then ran into town and notified police.
When officials got the body out four days later, they found not a murdered contemporary citizen, but the mummified remains of a man who had died around 3300 B.C.E. He is the oldest natural human mummy ever uncovered and has provided researchers with fantastic insights into how humans once lived.
A giant plaster Buddha sat in a Thai monastery for over 700 years before the monks…
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