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l of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time

More than a century ago, Albert Einstein developed his famous theory of relativity. The idea that space and fourth dimension are linked together means that time travel might be possible … one day, one time physicists figure out how it works.

Still, travelers and archeologists have known for centuries that the opportunity to step back in time already exists. Yes, really. By visiting archeological sites around the globe, you can encounter how the city of Pompeii worked right earlier it was covered in volcanic ash, the lost Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, incredible cave drawings in Brazil and Spain, and even the wealthy trading hub of Petra—no flux capacitor required. Even simply learning near archeological findings from home, like the Rosetta Stone and its captivating code or a 44,000-yr-quondam pictorial story from Sulawesi, Indonesia, offers a deeper appreciation for collective ancestors and a humbling reminder of our place in the universe.

When it comes to archeological discoveries, you've got a seemingly infinite array of options to read and learn nigh. So which ones have fabricated the biggest impact on scientists' understanding of humankind? To find out, Stacker took a await at 50 of the greatest archeological findings of all time, based on reports in news outlets (like National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, BBC News, and The Guardian), UNESCO World Heritage site listings, articles from archeology magazines, and other publications. The list includes of import discoveries from around the world, ranging from the Americas to Asia, and even Antarctica.

While nosotros're all stuck at dwelling house, in that location's no amend mode to transport yourself to a unlike time and place than by learning almost fascinating archeological sites and discoveries beyond the globe. Click through to see 50 of the greatest archeological discoveries made throughout history—and don't be surprised if they inspire hereafter travel plans, once it's safety to explore the globe again.

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McLaren D, Fedje D, Dyck A, Mackie Q, Gauvreau A, Cohen J // PLoS ONE

Oldest-known human footprints in North America

In 2018, Live Science reported on a remarkable discovery made by anthropologists in British Columbia: the oldest-known human being footprints in North America. The 29 runway marks are reportedly 13,000 years old, farther supporting the thought that people were living in western Canada at the decision of the last ice age.

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Tutankhamun'southward tomb

Egyptologist Howard Carter unearthed the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun as he was working on the excavation of the Valley of the Kings in 1922. The densely packed archeological detect took eight years to certificate and empty due to it beingness left in disarray after multiple robberies.

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Borobudur

Locals in Indonesia led the British ruler of Coffee, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, to the site of Borobudur, the globe's largest Buddhist temple, in 1814. The roughly 1,200-year-old temple features 72 openwork stupas, each of which holds a statue of the Buddha. Still a place for Buddhist pilgrimage, the archeological site reflects a combination of ethnic Indonesian scenes with an Indian influence.

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The Lost City of Tenea

Greek archeologist Eleni Korka finally found the Lost City of Tenea in 2018, marking the end of a 34-twelvemonth search for the Trojan-founded city, per Artnet. Archeologists have since found a whopping 200 coins on the site, demonstrating the metropolis's incredible wealth, which had been discussed in ancient texts.

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Pompeii

When Mountain Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, it preserved the Roman urban center of Pompeii (forth with the final moments of its fated residents) under a roughly xx-foot layer of pumice stone and ash. The archeological site, which includes fresco-covered homes, was discovered more than than i,400 years afterwards past architect Domenico Fontana. Now a popular tourist site, the archeological site of Pompeii offers an understanding of cultural, religious, and political life in this aboriginal city.

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Terracotta warriors

People's republic of china's starting time emperor, Qin Shi Huang, was buried in a tomb protected by an army of 8,000 life-size clay soldiers—each with unique hairstyles, postures, and facial features—when he died in 210 B.C. Farmers discovered the terracotta warriors in 1974, and since and so, investigations have led archeologists to believe that the emperor's tomb is a massive replica of the city of Xi'an.

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Rosetta Stone

Soldiers in Napoleon Bonaparte'southward army accidentally discovered the remarkable Rosetta Rock while working on a fort in the Nile Delta, according to the British Museum. The antiquity, which dates back to 196 B.C., is inscribed with "a purple prescript issued past priests on behalf of Ptolemy 5, and so ruler of the Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt," in three distinct scripts: Egyptian demotic script and hieroglyphs, along with ancient Greek. The message was deciphered by Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion in 1822, which allowed other ancient texts to be translated.

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Knossos

Dubbed Europe's oldest city, Knossos is an archeological site on Crete that dates back to the Bronze Age. It was discovered past amateur archeologist Minos Kalokairinos in 1878. The palace circuitous contains around i,300 intricately decorated rooms, along with baked clay slabs with inscriptions in an unknown language.

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Sutton Hoo

Archeologists got a vivid glimpse at the medieval world when the excavation of Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk, England, began in 1939. The largely in-tact ship burial held Anglo-Saxon grave goods, including Byzantine artifacts, weaponry, and a at present-famous helmet.

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Man luzonensis

In 2019, researchers in the Philippines discovered evidence of an ancient human species that scientists were previously unaware of. Dubbed Human luzonensis, the small hominin is believed to have lived on Luzon isle between 50,000 and 67,000 years ago, National Geographic reported. It was identified after archeologists found seven teeth and half a dozen small bones.

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Petra

The "lost city" of Petra had been referenced in historical documents for quite some fourth dimension, just it wasn't until 1812 that the site had finally been found by Swiss explorer Jean-Louis Burckhardt. The impeccably intact Nabataean Aramaic archeological site, which was get-go inhabited in 7000 B.C., showcases what life was like in a trading city focused on wealth.

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Machu Picchu

Explorer Hiram Bingham rediscovered the "lost" Inca citadel of Machu Picchu in Peru in 1911. The well-preserved archeological site, which was synthetic in the mid-1400s, gives historians a sense of the technological capabilities held by the Inca Empire when it was at its about powerful. The cave cemeteries and terraced platforms also offer a glimpse at how everyday people lived in this area.

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Cavern of Altamira

The Cave of Altamira, a Paleolithic cave in Northern Kingdom of spain, contains peculiarly well-preserved polychrome paintings and charcoal drawings of human hands and animals. The astonishing archeological site was found by Modesto Cubillas in 1868. UNESCO said the artwork showcases "outstanding illustrations of a significant phase in human being history."

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Staffordshire Hoard

A homo named Terry Herbert was using a metal detector over farmland in Staffordshire, England, in 2009 when he stumbled across a substantial archeological finding: aureate artifacts. He reported the treasure to the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which scheduled a weeks-long archeological dig. They uncovered thousands of other items—the "largest drove of Anglo-Saxon gold and silvery treasure ever institute"—earning the booty the name Staffordshire Hoard.

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Pleonr // Wikimedia Commons

Castilian Stonehenge

A drought in Spain'due south Extremadura region allowed archeologists to finally meet the long-submerged Dolmen de Guadalperal, in 2019. Also known as Spanish Stonehenge, the seven,000-year-old site contains 100 monolithic stones, some of which are half-dozen feet alpine. Locals believe it may take been a trading hub with a religious chemical element.

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The Lost Leaders of Jamestown

In 2015, a squad of researchers identified 4 skeletons institute in the celebrated 1608 church building of Jamestown (where John Rolfe and Pocahontas were wednesday) as the remains of the "founders of the starting time permanent British settlement in America," National Geographic reported. The forensic researchers used the teeth of the skeletons to figure out how long the "Lost Leaders of Jamestown" spent at the settlement.

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Dead Sea Scrolls

While disposed to his flock in 1947, a young Bedouin shepherd in the Judean Desert made one of the greatest archeological discoveries ever: the Dead Body of water Scrolls. Held in large clay jars, the former scrolls contained Hebrew manuscripts written more than 1,000 years earlier than any existing Biblical text, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority.

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Nazca Lines

Fly above Peru's Nazca Desert, and you lot'll meet huge geoglyphs that resemble animals and plants. Dubbed the Nazca Lines, the archeological finding dates back to between one,500 and 2,500 years old. American historian Paul Kosok is credited as the first researcher to comport an in-depth study of the Nazca Lines, the purpose of which is still a mystery.

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Ayahuasca from the Bolivian Andes

In 2019, researchers discovered that a millennium-old leather bundle constitute in a cave in the Andes of Bolivia independent the active compounds for ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic tea, the University of California Berkeley reported. The artifact is the offset prove that S Americans have been using hallucinogenic substances for at least one,000 years.

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Pre-Hispanic skeleton

As they were building a h2o tank foundation in 2020, people in Tamaulipas, Mexico, found ane of the first consummate skeletons of a pre-Hispanic human. Researchers believe the remains, which had been untouched for more than than a millennium, belonged to a human who was betwixt 21 and 35 years old at the fourth dimension of death.

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299,000-year-former skull

In 2020, a research team from Commonwealth of australia's Griffith Academy and London's Natural History Museum took a closer look at a skull discovered in modern-day Zambia nearly 100 years earlier. They discovered that it was 299,000 years old, not 500,000 years old, as previously speculated. However, the more accurate dating suggests that multiple human species lived in the surface area at the aforementioned fourth dimension, per Nature.

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Tombs of pyramid builders in Egypt

It's been long speculated that the Great Pyramids of Giza were built by slaves. Notwithstanding, a 2010 discovery of ancient tombs, reported to be more than than iv,000 years onetime, with skeletons of pyramid-builders indicates that they were paid laborers, according to The Guardian.

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João Zilhão and colleagues // Wikimedia Commons

Painted vanquish from Neanderthals

Researchers unearthed a painted fossil marine shell from a cave in Northern Italy that was collected by Neanderthals, according to a 2013 article in PLOS ONE. While Neanderthals are oft thought of every bit primitive cavemen, the busy antiquity suggests that they may have collected artwork and thus been more than sophisticated than one time believed.

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VANO SHLAMOV // Getty Images

i.8-milion-yr-one-time skull

Starting in 2005, scientists spent eight years researching the features of a one.viii-million-twelvemonth-old skull unearthed in the country of Georgia. Their research suggests that the early Man species (a predecessor to humans) may accept had a much simpler development than previously idea, per The New York Times.

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The earliest story told in pictures

A 2019 report in Nature found that a panel of elaborate stone art from Sulawesi, Indonesia, is believed to be the earth's earliest figurative artwork and "oldest pictorial record of storytelling." The rare archeological finding depicts a hunting scene with dwarf bovids and wild pigs and is estimated to exist nearly 44,000 years old.

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Daniel Mayer // Wikimedia Commons

Library of Alexandria

A team of researchers from Poland and Egypt excavated what appeared to exist the Library of Alexandria in 2004. The library contained "works by the greatest thinkers and writers of the aboriginal world," including Plato and Socrates. The excavation was the first time that a complex of Greco-Roman lecture halls was found in the Mediterranean.

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Hidden Japanese settlement in British Columbia

Archaeology professor Robert Muckle heard about a site tucked deep in the forest of the North Shore Mountains of British Columbia in 2004. While he idea it might be a celebrated logging army camp, he spent the next 14 years excavating the area and finding signs of a long-lost Japanese settlement, Smithsonian Magazine reported. Researchers have since dug upwards more than one,000 artifacts, besides as show of a Japanese bathhouse at the site.

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Recording of long-lost Beatles performance

Non all archeological finds are thousands of years onetime. Case in bespeak: the discovery of a recording of a performance of "Paperback Writer" past the Beatles on "Summit of the Pops" in 1966. The BBC didn't record the show at the time, and fans had long believed that it was lost, according to Smithsonian Mag. However, fan David Chandler captured the performance with a personal camera and stored the recording in his cranium for decades, merely to rediscover information technology once again in 2019.

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Chichén Itzá

Chichén Itzá, a massive pre-Columbian city created by the Maya in Yucatán Country, Mexico, garnered worldwide attention after explorer John Lloyd Stephens wrote about it in 1843, only it wasn't until the early on 20th century that archeologists from the Carnegie Institution would brainstorm conducting archeological research. The site is considered to exist among the mythical swell cities and offers researchers the take chances to study a myriad of architectural styles.

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Tikal

Excavations of Tikal, the ruins of an ancient pre-Columbian Maya urban center in modern-day Guatemala, were started past the University of Pennsylvania in 1956. Since then, it has become one of the best sources of understanding of the lowland Maya cities and features a range of temples, monuments, and palaces.

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Helmets fabricated from children's skulls

In 2019, archeologists working on an excavation site in Salango, Ecuador, published their discovery of two infants who were buried wearing helmets made from the skulls of other children in Latin American Antiquity. The burial mounds are believed to accept been created in the yr 100 B.C. The findings offering clues well-nigh the unique babe mortuary rituals of the Guangala culture.

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Stonehenge

The first recorded excavation of Stonehenge, a prehistoric monument consisting of a ring of xiii-foot-loftier stones in Wiltshire, England, was started by the Duke of Buckingham in the 1620s. The monument, which dates back virtually 5,000 years, has helped researchers learn more about the ceremonial practices of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages.

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Sir Ernest Shackleton's whisky

Researchers retrieved whisky bottles that one time belonged to explorer Ernest Shackleton that were tucked below his hut in the water ice of Antarctica in 2010. The bottles were abased when Shackleton ended his trek to reach the Southward Pole almost 100 years before. At the time of the discovery, Whyte & Mackay's, which at present owns that brand of whisky Shackleton drank, planned to extract small samples of the booze to see if they could recreate the recipe.

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Richard Ellis // Wikimedia Commons

Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum

Construction workers accidentally discovered a Neolithic subterranean structure in Paola, Malta, when they were cutting cisterns in 1902. Now known equally the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, the finding contained grave goods, man remains, and a multilevel construction with interconnected chambers. Information technology has given researchers more insight into the Maltese civilisation of building temples.

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Göbekli Tepe

Göbekli Tepe in Turkey contains the oldest-known megaliths in the world. The aboriginal site, thought to be of ritual or social importance between the 10th and 8th millennium B.C.E., features more than 200 pillars. The archeological site was first surveyed in 1963 past a research team from Istanbul Academy and the Academy of Chicago.

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Olaf Tausch // Wikimedia Eatables

Hidden Palace of Ramesses Ii

While researching a royal temple, archeologists from New York found an aboriginal Egyptian palace that's connected to the Temple of Ramses Two in Abydos, reported Newsweek in 2019. The discovery gives researchers more than clues about temples of the period and even prompted the offset change to the temple's flooring program in around 160 years.

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Lucy, the first Australopithecus afarensis skeleton

Paleontologist Donald C. Johanson discovered the first Australopithecus afarensis skeleton always unearthed in Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974. "Lucy," as the 3.2-one thousand thousand-year-old ape has come to be chosen, was thought to be the earliest-known ancestor species to humans for the next 20 years, according to National Geographic.

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JUAN MABROMATA // Getty Images

Frozen bodies of children sacrificed by Inca

Researchers learned more than about Inca child sacrifice from the frozen bodies of 2 boys (age four–five years onetime) and a 13-year-onetime girl, found in a tomb near Volcán Llullaillaco, Argentina, according to a 2013 paper published past the Proceedings of the National University of Sciences. Data extracted from the scalp hair of the remains implies that the children ingested coca and booze, and may have been overall treated differently than other children before they were sacrificed.

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Impress Collector // Getty Images

Medieval female scribe

In 2019, a multidisciplinary enquiry squad discovered "an abundance of ultramarine particles" in the dental remains of a woman who was laid to rest at a German monastery in the 11th or twelfth century, according to Archaeology magazine. Because the bright blueish paint was extremely expensive and rare at the time, researchers believe that the woman served equally a scribe who used ultramarine when creating sacred manuscripts. It may somewhen lead to the discovery of more than female scribes from the early on medieval menstruum.

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moving picture alliance // Getty Images

Aboriginal human being jawbone outside of Africa

A fossil found on State of israel's Mount Carmel by a university freshman in 2002 would later be determined to be the oldest human jawbone unearthed outside of Africa most two decades later, per Artnet. Information technology was evidence that humans traveled outside of Africa around 50,000 years sooner than what experts previously believed.

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Angkor Wat

The writings of French naturalist Henri Mouhot in the mid-19th century prompted waves of archeologists to visit Kingdom of cambodia and learn more about the once-sprawling metropolis of Angkor Wat, per the BBC. The massive Buddhist temple circuitous is considered to be one of the world's largest religious monuments and is a source of Cambodian national pride.

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Frozen Siberian mummies

Archeologists establish the remains of more than than 40 people, including a slain warrior, in southern Siberia in 2003. The mummified bodies belonged to a class of warrior-nomads known as the Scythians. The findings have given researchers more details near the lives of ancient people in the region, including some of the earliest-known battlefield surgeries, Discover magazine reported in 2008.

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Skara Brae

A severe tempest in Scotland stripped the earth of a knoll and revealed the outline of the long-abandoned village of Skara Brae in 1850. Some 5,000 years old, Skara Brae is considered to be among the best-preserved Neolithic sites on the continent. Researchers are still trying to figure out why the residents abased the area, reported National Geographic in 2019.

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Ġgantija megalithic temple complex

While travelers and explorers had long known about the megalithic temple circuitous of Ġgantija in Republic of malta, excavations didn't begin until 1827, with more extensive digs occurring in the mid-20th century. Believed to accept been erected as early every bit 3600 B.C., the Ġgantija temples are ane of the oldest existing religious structures created past humans and accept since earned designation as a UNESCO Earth Heritage Site.

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The Acropolis of Athens

While Greece brims with fascinating archeological sites, none are quite as famous equally the Acropolis of Athens. The site was constructed over thousands of years, starting as early as the Bronze Age. Researchers began restoring and preserving the site effectually the turn of the 20th century. The Acropolis of Athens is now considered to be a universal symbol "of the classical spirit and civilization," notes UNESCO.

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Senegambian stone circles

Built over a period of i,500 years, the Senegambian rock circles are function of a sacred landscape spanning more than than 11,500 square miles in Gambia and Senegal. Excavations on the megalithic circles occurred in 1964 and 1965. The concentration of the 1,000-plus monuments offers insight into a "prosperous, highly organized and lasting society," UNESCO says.

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Lalibela churches

Amongst the almost famous archeological findings in Federal democratic republic of ethiopia are the land's monolithic churches, believed to take been built as early on as the seventh century. They are of significant religious importance for Ethiopian Orthodox Christians and feature an all-encompassing drainage arrangement and ceremonial passageways.

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Sunstopper1st // Shutterstock

Medieval cities in Cambodia

Laser-scanning applied science helped researchers uncover several medieval cities buried in the Cambodian jungle in 2015, The Guardian said. The never-before-seen cities are believed to take comprised "the globe'southward largest empire in the twelfth century."

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Serra da Capivara National Park

Scattered throughout the rock shelters of Brazil'south Serra da Capivara National Park are cavern paintings, some of which date back more 25,000 years. They were created by ane of South America'south oldest homo communities, per UNESCO.

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Thingvellir

Thingvellir, established by the Vikings in the yr 930 A.D., is the site of the world's oldest parliament, in regular utilise until the 19th century. Not simply did it play an of import part in antiquity, information technology likewise served as a symbol in the Icelandic independence movement. Information technology's now considered one of the state'due south "holiest" sites, according to Republic of iceland mag.

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