All language subtitles for Mysteries.Unearthed.with.Danny.Trejo.S02E18.1080p.WEB.h264-EDITH_track3_[eng]

[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."