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from the search-for-roman-vending-machine-begins dept.
The eyes of a visiting archaeologist lit up when he was shown the 10 tiny, rusty discs that had sat unnoticed in storage for two and a half years at a dig on a southern Japan island.
He had been to archaeological sites in Italy and Egypt, and recognized the "little round things" as old coins, including a few likely dating to the Roman Empire.
"I was so excited I almost forgot what I was there for, and the coins were all we talked about," said Toshio Tsukamoto of the Gangoji Institute for Research of Cultural Property in Nara, an ancient Japanese capital near Kyoto.
The discovery, announced last month, is baffling. How did the coins, some dating to the third or fourth century, wind up half a world away in a medieval Japanese castle on the island of Okinawa? Experts suspect they may have arrived centuries later via China or Southeast Asia, not as currency but as decoration or treasure.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday October 19 2016, @08:56PM
On the other side of the world you got Redfern's London Chinese skeletons.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37452287 [bbc.com]
People did get around back in the old days, not often, but it happened, and I'm not entirely surprised that a couple coins here and there ended up at the edge of the world or the occasional odd skeleton shows up in the most unlikely places.
The pre-columbian euros in America are a more interesting problem and last time I bothered looking into it, it was pretty much settled that the Danish Vikings had settlements in Canada or nearby anyway.
What gets far fetched is stories about entire peoples migrating across the planet, like some stories out of Utah that seem somewhat unlikely. Or Atlantis or whatever else.
Because I feel like rambling, pre-historic as in pre-writing but genetically identical to us people lived thru some amazing floods in the Mediterranean areas. The craziest interesting clickbait stories known to mankind today are maybe a tenth or hundredth the total sum of crazy stories our species has experienced in total since we became a species. Lots of stuff out there happened that we'll never know about. I'm sure some crazy stuff went down in 20016 BC but we'll never really know what.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 19 2016, @09:56PM
Ooo, ooo, i know that one [wikipedia.org]!
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Funny) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday October 19 2016, @10:48PM
If you're looking for even more extreme claims about the travels of ancient people, you can't go past this really [stuff.co.nz]
The claim is that ancient Greeks were the first people to settle New Zealand, not the Pacific Navigators in the 14th century, which is the accepted theory.
The book does need to be read in the context of the Waitangi Treaty Settlements [wikipedia.org] which some people find "politically correct" and a bad thing.
Also Noel Hilliam, one of the authours has made some pretty outrageous claims over the years, including the discovery of a Spanish Galleon wrecked on the West Coast of the North Island, (no-one else has seen it), and a Nazi U-Boat also off the North Island coast.