The latest technology....................
Jerry Glover seeks out technology that is not so up to date
Have you seen the finale of the classic film Planet of the Apes? Charlton Heston falls to his knees in the shadow of the beached ruins of the Statue of Liberty, crying “You maniacs! You did it!” because the sight of the half buried monument has made him realise he is on a future earth where a nuclear war had changed the course of evolution. Such a spectacular example of a discovery that irrevocably changes our view of the distant past is not so far removed from things that have been found in reality: amazing objects called out-of-place artefacts (OOPARTs.) While many are highly contentious, if not downright dubious, and continue to provoke stormy debates, a few examples are well-attested by science, causing us to wonder at just how advanced ancient peoples really were, and how much of their technological achievements have vanished in the mists of time. In 1900, a Greek sponge diver discovered the wreck of an ancient cargo ship a few metres off Antikythera island, which sits about halfway between the tip of northwestern Crete and the isle of Kythira in the Ionian Sea. Several fine Greek statues and other objects were recovered from the vessel. But it wasn’t until a year later that archaeologist Valerios Stais noticed how a lump of rock taken from the ship had a cog wheel embedded in it. Further encrusted ‘rocks’ containing toothed wheels added up to the components of an astonishingly intricate clockwork machine made from bronze.
Read more in the 14th issue of Beyond.
