This article if from the Archive of Aboutfacts.net

Strange Ancient Objects And Machines

Here is a strange find indeed. At a depth of 300 feet, a mortar for grinding gold ore was found. It was in a mine shaft. A pestle was also found. Both pestle and mortar weighed in at 30 pounds. There was also a granite dish found at the site, it weighed 40 pounds. Both beads and perforated stones were also found in the mine.

Another strange object found in a large lump of coal was an iron pot. In 1912 in a coal mine in Wiburton, Oklahoma, an iron pot fell out of a smashed lump of coal. It was found by two employees of the Municipal Electric Plant in Thomas, Oklahoma. Both employees signed affidavits attesting to the truth of this story. Although the pot was photographed, it was lost.

In a Cretaceous layer of earth near the Paluxy River, near the town of Glen Rose in Texas, a fossilized finger was found. A Cat Scan revealed bone, tissue and ligaments. The finger was identified as the fourth finger of a girl's left hand.

A human skull was found under five beds of lava at a depth of 130 feet.

A nail was found in a sandstone block from the Mesozoic Era by David Brewster. Another nail was found in a stone block from Kingoodie Quarry in Scotland, in 1895. The Mesozoic Era ran from 251 million B.C. to 65.5 million B.C. What was a nail doing in that period?

Why are scientists upset at the following find? Choppers and scrappers were found very deep in the earth. The reason scientists are upset is if this find is genuine, it upsets the time frame for the beginning of human life. The find was near Sudbury in Ontario, Canada

In 1851 Scientific American reported that a shaped metal vessel with inlaid floral designs in silver was found while workmen were blasting near Dorchester, Massachusetts.

Workers working hundreds of feet underground found worked stones weighing up to 800 pounds. Originally this site was an ancient river bed which dated long before the last ice age. The story was reported in a California newspaper.

In 1572 Spanish soldiers found a six inch long nail in a rock in a Peruvian mine, the Indians had no knowledge of iron. The Spanish Viceroy kept the nail as a souvenir and recorded the find by letter, where it is listed in the Madrid Archives.

In 1842, a human skull was found in brown coal. This item is now in the collection of the Freiberg Mining Academy, Germany.
In 1851 Hiram de Witt found a piece of gold-bearing quartz in California. He dropped it and a nail fell out.

The Meister Print was discovered in Cambrian slate in 1968 by the late William Meister near Antelope Springs, Utah. The artifact includes a positive and negative impression of a human sandal print with some of the stitching showing along the edges. In the heel and toe areas two trilobites are crushed. This suggests human habitation long before it was ever suspected. The Cambrian period lasted from 550 million years ago, to 485 million years ago.

A piece of coal from a mine in Scotland contained an instrument thought to be modern, yet there was no way it could have been encased in coal. Date of the discovery is unknown.

Here I go thinking about strange things again. I guess, I just can't help myself. I was just thinking about, how in ancient times, people did so much with so little and then I thought that maybe they had more to work with than we suspect. After all, in some areas they were not behind at all. The Romans used concrete and it was better than what we use today. They also had surgical tools for repairing wounds that any doctor today would recognize right away. So, what machines did they have?

The Romans actually used cranes when they worked on very large buildings. There was usually a height limit depending upon which Emperor was in power. The limit was usually 60 or 70 feet. This was because there were no elevators in the Roman apartment buildings, so they  couldn't be more than either 8 or 9 stories high. The way these were built was usually with a commercial space on the first floor than a couple of floors of luxury apartments and above those, smaller apartments. The machines I am talking about were wooden and used ropes and pulleys. Sometimes they were wooden cranes and other times they were a sort of frame with pulleys attached. With this they were able to lift blocks weighing many tons. Just as we have building codes today, the Romans had building codes thousands of years ago. Roman machines were also used to make war, here are some:
Scorpio - A large bow type machine. It was used as artillery, and fired an arrow at least 2 feet long. Some of these machines have been known to contain a mechanism that allowed another arrow to drop into place to be fired when the one before it was fired, creating an automatic type weapon.
Ballista - a machine that was similar to a catapult and fired like one. It was great for throwing boulders over the walls of cities.
Onager - a medium sized Ballista.
Catapult - a machine for lobbing rocks a long distance.

Moving on to the Egyptians we find many mysteries in their drawings and carvings. Did the Egyptians have flying machines? They certainly had model planes that actually flew. Some of these models have been found in drawings and in at least one tomb. Models have been constructed from the example and plans, and flown. And what about those famous reliefs that seem to show a jet plane, a helicopter and a UFO? Even aside from all this, were there machines that were used to construct projects like the pyramids? Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any record of machines being used. Is it possible that the record of the construction of the pyramids was destroyed when the great library at Alexandria burned?

We know the Ancient Greeks knew about gears. I am talking about metal gears as in clock gears. The reason we know this is the discovery of a mechanical computer found in the wreck of a Greek ship which was thousands of years old. We also know they built some wondrous machines for their time.