Original subtitles

[sparse mysterious music]

[tense suspenseful rock music]

- [Danny] Mysteries can be buried anywhere.

Under the earth.

[volcano blasts] [airplane engines whirring]

[sonar beeps]

Beneath the sea,

[air whooshing]

or even right under our own feet.

[coins clinking]

And when we stumble upon them,

sometimes what we find can change history.

Tonight, discoveries that reveal secrets

meant to stay buried,

from a hidden cache of bones, with a disturbing story-

- These bones, have they been accidentally broken

or shattered over time,

they've been carefully and methodically cut.

- [Danny] To a message from beyond the grave.

- As he pulls off a strip of molding.

Two words jump out from the wood:

"confession" and "murder."

- [Danny] To an Ancient tomb shrouded in mystery.

- Whoever this person was

must have been a person of immense power and status.

- Join us now, because nothing stays hidden forever.

[tense uneasy music]

What starts as a routine renovation takes a dark turn

when a crew uncovers something

that turns the site into a crime scene.

[computer keyboard clacking]

- It is the summer of 1989.

A construction crew is renovating the basement

of a 150-year-old building in downtown Augusta.

When one worker drives his shovel into the dirt floor,

it hits something hard.

[tense dramatic music]

- He reaches down, and he pulls out a gigantic bone.

The initial thought is that it's maybe from a cow,

but the crew can't be 100% sure,

so they call the authorities.

- When officers arrive, they take one look at the bone

and ask the crew to keep digging.

And as they do, more bones surface.

Parts of a leg, a fragment of a pelvis.

- [Dr. Hakeem] They put the leg bones into the sockets of the

pelvis, and it's a perfect fit.

It's not a cow.

It's a person.

- [Danny] To help identify the remains,

police call in forensic anthropologist

Dr. Russell Moores.

- [Dr. Hakeem] For the next week, Dr. Moores

and a team of forensic anthropology students

carefully excavate the basement.

They tag and catalog every fragment.

- [Andrew] In the end, they uncover 10,000

human bone fragments belonging to at least 250 individuals.

- [Adam] Dr. Moores realizes a very chilling detail:

these bones haven't been accidentally broken

or shattered over time,

they've been carefully and methodically cut.

[pounding dramatic music]

- [Danny] This precision leads investigators

to a very specific possibility.

One rooted in the building's past.

- [Andrew] This building used to be part

of the Medical College of Georgia.

So the bones, they're the remains of cadavers

used in early medical education.

- [Danny] Back then, dissecting human bodies was illegal,

leaving medical schools desperate for a secret supply.

- [Adam] The school's seven professors

put their heads together to create a workaround.

They pooled $700 together and purchased an enslaved man

by the name of Grandison Harris.

- [Andrew] Officially, Harris was hired as a janitor,

but in reality, he was a resurrectionist.

Which is to say that he was forced to rob graves,

[spade slams]

providing cadavers for the medical school.

- [Adam] Harris mostly worked at night,

and most of the bodies were buried in plain pine caskets,

which were easy to breach with a simple ax or pickax.

[ax thuds]

- [Danny] After students finished their dissections,

the remains were tossed into the basement,

where Harris would unceremoniously bury them again.

- [Dr. Hakeem] When the Civil War ended in 1865,

Grandison Harris was freed,

and he used his reading and writing skills

to serve as a judge.

But during the rise of Jim Crow,

the racist backlash forced him back into grave robbing,

and he continued at it until he retired in 1905.

- [Danny] Harris dies in 1911,

and in a final twist, is buried in Cedar Grove,

the same cemetery he once plundered.

- [Adam] In 1998, the bones that were discovered

in the college basement

were returned to Cedar Grove Cemetery,

placed under a stone marker with a very simple inscription:

"Known but to God."

- [Danny] Bodies aren't the only thing that end up buried

where they shouldn't be.

Consider the strange object

two teenagers dug up in their yard.

[light thoughtful music] [computer keyboard clacking]

- [Andrew] It's January 1978, in the West Athens

neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Group of neighborhood kids are digging around

in a muddy backyard when they hit something hard.

[stick thuds]

Curious, they keep digging

and realize that what they found is big and not budging.

- The kids flag down a passing LAPD cruiser,

and they say, "Hey, can you come here?"

Detective Dennis Carroll gets out to investigate.

- [Dr. Hakeem] When he scrapes away the dirt,

he sees a weathered plastic tarp,

and when he taps on it with a shovel,

he hears a metallic thud, and that's when he realizes

there is something weird going on, and he calls for help.

- [Austin] A county employee arrives with a backhoe

and begins exposing the object,

and it keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

- [Andrew] Finally, Detective Carroll rips away the tarp

and looks down at something he could have never expected.

Buried in the ground is a green sports car.

[pounding dramatic music]

- [Danny] This isn't just any car.

It's a 1974 Dino 246 GTS Ferrari,

one of the most coveted rides of its time.

- [Andrew] The Dino was top tier.

Ferrari made fewer than 1,300 of them.

It was sleek, low to the ground,

and razor sharp in its handling.

[car engine roars]

Sticker price was 22.5 back in 1974,

which would be about $150,000 in today's currency.

- [Danny] A car this expensive

doesn't end up underground by accident.

So Detective Carroll starts looking for clues

and immediately notices something odd.

- [Austin] Towels are stuffed in the gaps between the windows

and in the tailpipe.

It's like someone wanted to preserve this.

- He runs the license plate

and realizes the owner was Rosendo Cruz, who was a plumber

that bought this Ferrari back in 1974

for his wife as a birthday gift.

- [Andrew] According to police reports, in December of '74,

Cruz took his wife out for a nice meal at the Brown Derby.

He didn't trust the valet to drive the car,

so he parked it himself in the street.

After dinner, when he and his wife came back,

the car was gone.

- [Dr. Hakeem] The car never turned up,

and so eventually Cruz accepted the insurance payout

and went about his life.

- [Danny] The Ferrari's discovery makes headlines,

but Detective Carroll's investigation goes nowhere.

- [Andrew] Detective Carroll interviews the tenants of the

house, but they've just moved in and don't know anything,

and neither does anyone else in the neighborhood.

With the trail once again gone cold,

Carroll turns the car over to the insurance company.

- [Steve] The insurance company puts it up for auction,

but the car's in such bad shape, it only sells for $7,000.

- [Danny] Then, 26 years later,

the story takes one last hairpin turn.

- [Andrew] In 2012, Detective Carroll sits down for an

interview with an online car site to discuss this case,

when he casually drops a bombshell.

Those kids who found the car, they never existed.

He made them up.

- [Dr. Hakeem] The real tip came from a confidential informant,

and Detective Carroll made up the kids

to protect his source.

- [Danny] According to that informant,

the car wasn't stolen by accident.

- [Andrew] He claims Rosendo Cruz hired a crew

to steal the car from the Brown Derby,

[car engine revving] [car tires screeching]

strip it for parts, and dump it in the ocean.

[water bubbling]

But instead, this crew wrapped it up

and buried it underground

like a treasure that they just couldn't see destroyed.

- [Danny] The car thieves don't come back,

and with no solid evidence,

Cruz is never charged with a crime.

But this isn't the end of the road for the Dino.

- [Dr. Hakeem] The man who bought the car from auction

decides to restore it, and bit by bit, piece by piece,

he brings the Dino back to its original glory.

- [Andrew] Today, the car looks just like it did

when it rolled off the lot in 1974,

but with one amusing detail:

the owner has vanity plates that read, appropriately,

"DUG UP."

- [Danny] Bogs are dark, deep, and hard to see into,

which makes them a perfect place for things to disappear,

as one Danish man is about to find out.

[tense thoughtful music] [computer keyboard clacking]

- It's a cold spring day in May 1891.

A Danish farm worker named Jens Sorensen

is cutting peat in a bog for fuel

outside the village of Gundestrup.

He's waist-deep in a trench, slicing into the spongy earth,

when suddenly his spade hits something solid.

[spade slams]

- It's not peat, it's not stone, it's metal.

As he digs, he discovers that this is

a round metallic plate, and nearby, he finds 12 more.

These ones are rectangular and curved,

and he also finds fragments of a metal tube.

- [Dr. Hakeem] They all appear to be silver

and are covered in ornate engravings:

snarling beasts, battle scenes,

and most dramatic of all, raven images of bearded Gods.

- [Danny] Sorensen reports the find to local authorities,

and the pieces are sent to the National Museum.

There, archaeologist Sophus Muller takes a closer look.

- [Andrew] Muller starts fitting the pieces together.

He arranges the 12 rectangular plates

in a ring around the larger circular one,

and then the pieces of the tube fit around the top,

forming a bowl.

- This is a silver cauldron, and it's quite large.

It's over two feet wide.

It's 16 inches tall, and it weighs nearly 20 pounds.

- [Hugo] Muller has the silver tested,

and it comes back at 97% pure,

with small pieces of gold used for gilding.

He uses that and the botanical makeup of the bog

to date the piece to about 150 BC.

- [Danny] It becomes known as the Gundestrup Cauldron,

and it's the largest piece of Iron Age silverwork

ever found.

- [Nicola] For all its beauty, it's also baffling.

The more that Muller studies it, the more confusing it gets.

- [Andrew] The metalwork technique is a trademark

of an ancient people called the Thracians,

fierce warriors and renowned artisans

who live in what is now the Balkans.

But the Gods and warriors depicted are Celtic,

and then there's the animals, lions, elephants, seahorses,

and the mythical griffin.

These are typically found in art from Asia Minor,

so what we have is a kind of cultural mashup

with no known origin.

- [Danny] Regardless of who made it and why,

how did it end up in a Danish bog?

- [Hugo] What we do know is that 2,200 years ago,

some Celts lived near where the cauldron was found.

The Celts considered bogs sacred ground,

literal portals to the divine.

They would leave offerings of food, animals,

even people in bog sacrifices.

Experts believe that the Gundestrup Cauldron

was left there in the bog as a deliberate offering.

- [Andrew] Today, the cauldron is on display

at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen

for all to see.

But the mystery of who made it and why remains.

- [Danny] Next, an even older secret unearthed in Africa,

one that goes back millions of years.

[tense thoughtful music] [computer keyboard clacking]

- [Hugo] In 1911, the German neurologist Wilhelm Kattwinkel

travels to German East Africa, what's now known as Tanzania.

He's there to study an outbreak of sleeping sickness,

but when he has time off, he indulges

in his personal obsession, collecting butterflies.

- Now one day he's chasing a butterfly through the scrub,

and he nearly falls over the edge of a cliff into a ravine.

Now he stops just in time, but then he looks down.

- [Hugo] 300 feet below,

something is jutting out of the earth: fossils.

Kattwinkel scrambles down

to try to pick up some of the pieces,

and when he returns home to Germany,

he takes some of them with him.

- Back home in Berlin,

he shows these unique fossils to paleontologists,

and they can't believe what he's found.

These fossils were revealed to have belonged to Hipparion,

a long-extinct three-toed horse

that existed close to five million years ago.

- [Danny] Word spreads fast,

and scientists descend on the site,

which becomes known as Olduvai Gorge.

- [Sami] Researchers begin digging,

and they keep coming across animals

that no one has ever seen before,

but then they come across something

that they didn't expect to find: a humanlike skeleton.

- [Hugo] The skeleton is positioned on its side,

arms folded across its chest.

It doesn't look like anything researchers have seen before.

At the time, the scientific consensus had been

that humans originated in Europe or Asia, not in Africa,

and certainly not this far back.

- [Danny] If this is a human ancestor,

it could upend everything we thought we knew about where

and when our story began,

and that possibility is enough to catch the attention

of one scientist in particular:

Louis Leakey.

- [Sami] Leakey visits Olduvai in 1931 with his family,

and while there, he uncovers and discovers

some ancient stone tools.

And over the following decades, he finds more fossils

like a partial skeleton, which includes the skull.

- [Micah] The skull shows a creature

that would've had a very large brain, but also small teeth,

and that aligns much more with modern humans

as opposed to our more ape-like ancestors.

- [Hugo] Carbon dating places the fossils between 1.5

and 2.3 million years old.

This is about a million years older than Homo erectus,

which had been the oldest known human ancestor at the time.

- [Danny] Leakey names the species Homo habilis,

Latin for "handyman."

- [Hugo] Over the next decades, more fossils turn up in Olduvai,

including more human ancestors.

Olduvai Gorge becomes a global hotspot for such finds

and earns the nickname the Cradle of Mankind.

- [Sami] In 1974, just across the border in Ethiopia,

a paleontologist and his grad student come across

a 3.2 million-year-old skeleton.

They name it Lucy.

- [Micah] Then, in the 1990s, an even older discovery is made.

This time it's a 4.4 million-year-old skeleton,

which they named Ardi, and she shows evidence

that ancient humans may have begun walking as much

as a million years earlier than scientists once thought.

- [Sami] I mean, it's hard to believe

that this whole series of discoveries

all come from the fact

that a guy was chasing a butterfly

and nearly fell into a ravine.

- [Danny] Renovating an old house can stir up all kinds of

things: dust, rot, maybe a little mildew,

but as one man discovers,

walls can hide much darker secrets.

[computer keyboard clacking]

- [Don] It is September 1986, in Fountain, Colorado.

A man named Jim Eggleston

is renovating his old two-story home.

[wood cracks]

- [John] He's replacing the trim of some windows in the bedroom,

[wood cracking]

and as he pulls off a strip of molding,

something on the back catches his eye: handwriting.

He leans in for a closer look,

and two words jump out from the wood:

"confession" and "murder."

- The message begins: "I, John W. Spicer,

make this my full confession

in the hope that when I am gone, it may be found,

and at last clear up the darkest mystery

that ever embraced one in human murder."

- [Danny] It's a century-old confession

that goes into gruesome detail.

- [Don] Spicer writes that back in March of 1893,

near the Cheyenne Mountains,

he robbed a man named John J. Sebastian.

Then he beat him to death and dumped his body in a ravine.

- [Andrew] Eggleston is stunned by what he's read.

He contacts a local reporter,

who tells him that he really needs to talk to the police.

Larry Martin, the chief of investigation

for the local DA's office, takes on the case.

- [Danny] Martin searches old police files

and newspaper archives,

but finds no record of an unsolved murder.

- [John] Eventually, he finds a match for a John J. Sebastian

in a railroad employment record from the 1890s.

Sebastian was working on the line near Colorado Springs,

but after 1893, his name vanishes from the records.

- [Danny] Once he hits a dead end,

Martin shifts his focus to the man

who left behind the confession itself: John Spicer.

- [Don] He confirms John Spicer built the house,

where the confession board was found, in 1899.

Then he tracks down Spicer's daughter, now 89 years old.

- [Andrew] She tells Martin that her father

killed a man in self-defense, only to be cleared by the law.

- [Danny] Unfortunately, the daughter's revelation

isn't enough to pin it on Spicer.

[tense dramatic music]

- [John] Martin believes the confession is real,

but without a body, a weapon, or a crime scene,

there's no way to move forward.

Plus, Spicer died back in the 1940s, so the case is closed.

- [Don] In 2008, Martin donates the confession board

to a local museum.

It's still on display, reminding us that some secrets,

even murderous ones, are taken to the grave.

- [Danny] Unlike Spicer, not all killers leave a note.

Sometimes the only evidence left is etched in bone.

[light thoughtful music]

- [Don] It's 2004 in York, England.

A couple is planning to build a new patio in their backyard,

but before they can break ground,

they need to have the site surveyed.

- The surveyors expect to find the usual:

some old pipes, maybe some Victorian rubble.

Instead, they hit something much more unexpected:

[spade thuds]

human skeletons.

And lots of them.

They look very old, and strangest of all,

most of them are missing their heads.

- [Danny] archaeologists are called to the scene,

and over the next few weeks, they unearth 82 skeletons.

- [Hugo] Right away, they can tell

that this is not a typical graveyard.

Nearly every one of the skeletons

belongs to a young man,

and all of them are powerfully built.

They also have signs of violent injury.

- [Don] But what really grabs the researchers' attention

is the decapitations.

- [Nicola] At first, the prevailing theory was that this

was the site of some kind of massacre.

[warriors yelling]

So we know that around York in the 9th century,

it used to be a Viking settlement,

and there were skirmishes between the Vikings

and the Romans.

So experts believe maybe

these skeletons were left over from this.

- [Danny] But when the team carbon dates the bones,

the results point to a different possibility.

- [Dr. Hakeem] These remains are much older,

dating back to the 2nd to 4th century AD.

At the time, York was a Roman military outpost

called Eboracum,

and with the Roman military comes gladiators.

[pounding dramatic music]

- [Hugo] Gladiator games were wildly popular in Roman Britain.

Most of the fighters were criminals, slaves,

and prisoners of war who were forced to fight,

and when they lost, they paid with their lives,

often by beheading.

[ax smashing]

- [Danny] Among the remains, one skeleton, labeled 6DT19,

stands out and leaves archaeologists puzzled.

- [Don] Researchers notice something strange:

jagged puncture marks on his pelvic bones,

three in the front, one deep gouge in the back,

and they don't match the clean wounds

you'd expect from gladiator swords or spears.

- [Danny] The marks continue to defy explanation until 2019,

when Dr. Tim Thompson reopens the case

and sees something everyone else missed.

- [Hugo] Thompson has a hunch.

He reaches out to various British zoos,

asking for bone samples.

He's not looking for the bones

of the zoo animals themselves.

He's looking for the kinds of bones

that big cats like lions, tigers,

and leopards chew on during their feedings.

- [Dr. Hakeem] When he gets the samples, he compares the gnaw

marks to the injuries on the pelvis of 6DT19.

And guess what?

They're a perfect match.

This dude wasn't just killed fighting like a gladiator.

He was mauled by a lion.

[lion roaring]

- [Don] For centuries, mosaics and Roman texts depicted

gladiators fighting lions, bears, even leopards.

But the lack of physical evidence

left historians skeptical.

- [Hugo] Now there's no doubt, and researchers are now on the

hunt to try to find more physical evidence

of bouts between gladiators and animals.

- [Danny] We've all stared out of a plane window

trying to catch a glimpse of something below.

For one man, this leads to a haunting discovery.

[computer keyboard clacking]

- [Dr. Hakeem] It's the summer of 2016,

and archaeologist Joshua Marano

is flying from Key West to Fort Jefferson.

It's a massive 19th-century military fort

built on a small island

about 114 miles off the Florida coast.

He's heading there for a routine site check

for the state historic preservation office.

- [Andrew] As the plane starts to descend,

something on the water catches his eye.

It's a line of evenly spaced dots forming an L,

which is unusual because it's very rare

for anything in nature to form a straight line.

- [Danny] Determined to figure out just what he saw,

Marano puts together a dive team to investigate further.

[air hisses] [clothing rattles]

[water splashing]

- [Andrew] They swim out to the spot

where he remembers seeing the distinctive shape,

and they sweep the area using GPS.

Eventually, one of the divers spots something:

it's a post, then another.

They dive closer and see that these are old wooden pylons

driven into the seabed.

- Then they spot something even more incredible.

A stone slab largely covered in seaweed.

When they brush it off,

it reads "John Greer, November 5th, 1861."

It's a tombstone.

- [Danny] After logging the find,

the team digs into Civil War-era records.

What they uncover brings the surrounding ruins

into sharp focus.

This isolated outpost once served as a quarantine hospital

set up to contain a fast-moving and deadly disease.

- Fort Jefferson was built in 1846,

and during the Civil War, it was used as a prison camp,

and hundreds of men were kept there.

Unfortunately, it's also an area

that was plagued with yellow fever.

And soon, scores of the prisoners

came down with this dreaded plague.

- [Dr. Hakeem] The fort was overcrowded,

and there was no real medical plan in place.

So the authorities built quarantine structures

on sandbars near the island, and these are pieces of land

that barely stuck out of the water.

- [Danny] These structures were used for decades

until yellow fever outbreaks

slowed at the fort in the early 1900s.

- [Dr. Hakeem] Eventually, the National Park Service

took over Fort Jefferson,

[thunder crashing]

but rising waters and hurricanes

ultimately wiped away those quarantine structures

and buried the sandbar and surrounding islands.

- [Adam] Fort Jefferson's role as both fort and prison

is very well known, but a happenstance chance sighting

by Marano uncovered a new dimension in its history.

- [Danny] Sometimes the past is washed away.

Other times, it's sealed in stone for thousands of years,

waiting to be uncovered.

[computer keyboard clacking]

- [Don] In July of 2018, a construction crew breaks ground

on a new apartment building in Alexandria, Egypt.

The site is crammed

into one of the city's oldest neighborhoods,

so space is tight, to say the least,

as the crew digs to lay the foundation.

- [Dr. Hakeem] When they get about 16 feet down,

the crew's equipment hits something solid,

and it won't budge.

- [Danny] For help, they call in archaeologist

Mostafa Waziry to investigate.

- [Hugo] Waziry and his team begin carefully clearing

all the soil by hand,

and what emerges from the earth is jet-black granite.

It's smooth, and the more soil they remove,

the bigger the granite seems.

- [Nicola] Eventually, they clear away a massive, heavy box.

It's nine feet long, five feet wide,

and it's about six feet deep, and it's sealed shut.

- [Don] Waziry knows immediately what he's looking at.

It's an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus

carved from solid granite,

and he estimates it weighs over 30 tons.

- [Danny] It's also the largest sarcophagus

ever found in Alexandria.

- [Hugo] To put this thing into perspective,

the most famous sarcophagus ever found is that of King Tut.

That was three coffins together,

one nested inside the other, and it weighed one ton.

So the sheer size of this sarcophagus

means whoever this person was

must have been a person of immense power and status.

- [Danny] Even more incredible, it's still sealed

with its original mortar, never plundered by grave robbers.

It's a one-in-a-million find.

- [Nicola] Waziry and his team get into the position

of lifting this massive lid for the very first time,

and as they jar it a little bit aside,

all of a sudden they're hit with this overwhelming stench.

- [Hugo] Inside the sarcophagus is a murky, reddish-brown liquid

and an absolutely suffocating odor.

They keep it open for about an hour,

hoping the worst of the stench will clear out.

- [Don] Eventually, they brace themselves

and begin to carefully drain the fluid.

Soon, the outline of a body starts to take shape.

It's a mummy.

[mysterious dramatic music]

- [Dr. Hakeem] As they remove more liquid,

they see another mummy and then a third.

As amazing as it is to find one mummy,

here they found three in a single tomb.

- [Danny] To figure out who they're looking at,

the team scans the area around the sarcophagus for clues.

- [Don] Nearby, they find an alabaster bust of a man

and three thin sheets of gold etched with symbolic images

of snakes, stalks of grain, and opium poppies.

- [Hugo] These were all revered motifs from Greco-Roman Egypt.

Combined with the craftsmanship of the sarcophagus,

Waziry is able to date the burial

to the Ptolemaic era of Egypt.

So, sometime between 323 and 30 BC.

- [Danny] The mummies are then sent

to the Alexandria National Museum for further study.

- [Nicola] The CT scans show one of the mummies

is of a male who died in his 40s.

Another one is a male who died in his 30s,

and the third one is actually a mummy of a woman,

and she died in her 20s sometime.

And all three of them had obviously

been tremendously important people

because they were buried with a great deal of wealth

and ceremony around them.

- [Dr. Hakeem] They haven't determined yet exactly who these

people were, but they did figure out the origin

of that reddish-brown, nasty liquid: sewage.

- [Don] It turns out there was a leak in a nearby sewer

that at some point seeped into the tomb

and filled it with waste.

So whoever these three elite individuals were,

they probably never imagined spending the afterlife

soaking in filth.

- [Danny] On the outskirts of Pisa, Italy,

a construction crew digs into dry land

several miles from the sea.

What they uncover ignites a maritime mystery.

[somber thoughtful music] [computer keyboard clacking]

- [Andrew] It's the summer of 1998.

Bulldozers are digging behind

the San Rossore railway station,

preparing the foundations for a new service building.

They get about 20 feet down when one of the bulldozers

hits something that it can't break through.

[bulldozer slams]

- [Adam] Construction suddenly stops.

The workers all huddle around.

They brush away the dirt to find out what the obstacle is,

and they find a massive piece of wooden timber.

- They try to pull it out, but it won't budge.

So they begin to dig around it,

and soon they notice that the wood is smooth

and it's curved.

It's definitely been shaped by hand.

- [Danny] Unsure what they're dealing with,

they bring in archaeologist Stefano Bruni to investigate.

- [Andrew] Bruni inspects the wood,

and he sees that it's connected to another plank,

which is connected to another plank and another.

- [Adam] Each plank is curved, and it's fastened to a much

larger, deliberately shaped frame.

This is a hull.

[pounding dramatic music]

This is part of an ancient ship.

- [Danny] Construction is halted,

and Bruni assembles a team of archaeologists

to begin a formal excavation.

- [Austin] They uncover more of the hull,

and then they come across yet another length of timber,

but it's from a completely different vessel.

It's from a whole new ship.

- [Adam] Over the next 17 years, Bruni and his team

unearth roughly 30 different ships,

making it one of the largest

maritime archaeological finds in history.

- [Andrew] The ships range in age from the 2nd century BC

to the 7th century AD, and they also vary in size

from small ferries and riverboats

all the way up to large merchant vessels.

- [Austin] Many are still loaded with their cargo,

artifacts like fishing gear and ceramics,

and some even have human skeletons

remarkably well-preserved.

- [Danny] The site comes to be known

as the Pompeii of the sea.

But one question looms:

what is this ship graveyard doing five miles inland?

- Bruni finds a reference in a 16th-century manuscript

to a lost harbor known as the Port of Basins.

It connects to a canal off the Serchio River,

which flows several miles to the north.

- [Andrew] Bruni continues his research

and finds reference to a series of tsunamis

that began to hit the Pisa coast around the 6th century BC.

These tsunamis would strike about once every 100 years.

- [Adam] Each tsunami sent a massive,

fast-moving wall of water up the Serchio River,

flooding each canal and swallowing

and drowning every ship in its path.

- [Austin] Pisa sits on low coastal land between the Arno

and Serchio rivers.

And over the centuries, the flood waters from tsunamis

would bring in the mud and the silt

and the sediment that would fill that lowland.

The site of the Port of Basins.

- [Danny] Today, the collection is preserved

and showcased at the Museum of the Ancient Ships of Pisa.

- [Andrew] This is a remarkable find.

We have nine centuries' worth of vessels,

each offering up a snapshot

into the eras in which they sailed and sank.

[water bubbling]

- [Danny] Not every discovery takes years to excavate.

Sometimes all it takes is a seat at the bar and a sharp eye.

[tense thoughtful music] [computer keyboard clacking]

- [Don] It's 2024 in Varna, Bulgaria.

A police officer is enjoying his vacation

in this sunny resort town on the coast of the Black Sea.

He stops to grab a cold drink at a beach bar,

but when he takes his seat, something doesn't sit right.

- [Sami] The table he's sitting at isn't made of wood,

isn't made of plastic.

It's this massive stone slab.

As the police officer is looking at the base,

he's seeing some pretty intricate and ornate designs,

which is kind of weird for a table

that would just be at a beach bar.

- He contacts local officials who call in archaeologists.

They examine it, and they realize that this table

is, in fact, something that should be studied more closely,

and they haul it to the Varna Archaeological Museum.

- [Danny] Their experts further inspect

the delicate carvings.

- [Don] Garlands, rosettes, animal heads,

and a double-headed ax known as a labrys.

The imagery, the style, it's unmistakable.

- [Danny] This beach bar table

is actually a Roman sarcophagus dating to the 2nd

or 3rd century A.D.

- In Roman times, Varna was a thriving capital.

It was an important port city.

It was the center of trade and culture.

It had roads, it had aqueducts,

and it had some of the largest public baths

that we have in the Balkans.

- [Sami] Ancient artifacts do turn up here from time to time.

In fact, just a month later, archaeologists discover

a Roman chariot at a nearby necropolis.

But finding a sarcophagus sitting on a beach

being used as furniture, that's totally unheard of.

- [Danny] Whatever, or whoever,

was once in the sarcophagus is long gone.

But the bigger mystery is how it ended up here

in the first place.

- [Hugo] Maybe it was stolen from a forgotten tomb.

Maybe it was dragged from a protected site.

It probably didn't just wash up on the beach,

but how it got there remains a huge mystery.

- [Danny] An ordinary day at what should be

a run-of-the-mill job site takes a startling turn

with a discovery dating back thousands of years.

[computer keyboard clacking]

- [Adam] It's October 14th, 2010,

and a man by the name of Jesse Steele,

a third-generation bulldozer operator,

is carving out a reservoir expansion

near the town of Snowmass, Colorado,

and 9,000 feet up in the Rocky Mountains.

He notices something very strange.

- [Andrew] It looks like bones.

He's a seasoned hunter and immediately recognizes

that these are ribs, but they are much too large

to belong to any local animal like a deer or elk.

- [Sami] He calls over his foreman,

and they start digging and peeling away all the dirt.

They uncover a tusk, this massive vertebrae,

and a jawbone, as well as an eight-inch tooth.

- [Danny] Unsure of what they've discovered,

they do a little digging online

and realize they've come across something extraordinary.

- [Andrew] They've uncovered mammoth bones from the Ice Age.

They call the Denver Museum of Nature and Science,

and within days, a team of scientists descends on the site.

- [Adam] The paleontologists convince the water company

to halt construction on the reservoir so they can dig.

- In the end, after just 10 weeks of digging,

they pull out 4,826 bones

[pounding dramatic music]

from 26 different species.

- [Danny] That's a new fossil every five minutes.

And it's not just the quantity that's impressive,

it's the age.

- [Sami] These fossils date back to anywhere between 55,000

to 140,000 years ago, when these enormous Ice Age animals,

known as megafauna, roamed the earth.

They find things like Jefferson's ground sloth,

which is an ancient sloth, but it's the size of a horse

and as heavy as a grizzly bear.

- [Adam] They find giant longhorned bison

with a seven-foot horn span, and they find the Camelops,

similar to a modern camel,

except this one is 7 1/2 feet tall, and it weighs a ton.

- [Danny] It's one of the best-preserved

Ice Age graveyards ever uncovered in North America,

and buried within it, one giant stands out above the rest.

- [Adam] They find over 3,000 mastodon bones

from 35 different individual mastodons.

And this ancient relative of the elephant

was over 10 feet tall and weighed roughly six tons.

- [Andrew] They also find one of the most complete mastodon

skeletons ever recovered.

It's more than 85% complete,

and this is found

under the construction company's porta-potty

and is cheekily named Port-A-Loo,

after the spot where it's found.

- [Danny] But the real secret isn't just what they found.

It's how so many creatures end up preserved in one place.

- [Adam] The Scientists ultimately believed what created

this fossil treasure trove was an ancient lake,

an oasis that sat at about 9,000 feet above sea level.

When animals would go there to this watering hole

and when they would die by the water's edge,

sediment blown over time

would preserve their remains perfectly.

And that's why so many species were found there.

- [Danny] When the excavation is finished,

the site, now called the Snowmastodon Project,

earns its place in the record books.

- [Sami] It's the most extensive collection of Ice Age fossils

ever found at high elevation,

and the largest number of mastodon bones

ever found in one place.

- [Danny] Whether it is ancient bones, a lost car,

or the birthplace of humans,

buried secrets don't always stay that way.

I'm Danny Trejo.

Thanks for watching "Mysteries Unearthed."