Melting Glaciers Reveal Hidden Worlds
Global warming, and the resulting glacier melt, may reveal lost secrets of our ancient past that have been hidden for hundreds and thousands of years. Smithsonian anthropologist William Fitzhugh discovered a 4,000-year-old basket in Siberia. “I was digging down through this stuff, it was literally like banging your hammer on a frozen cement floor,” he says, when he noticed yellow-colored fibers poking through the frozen dirt. “And gradually by squirting water and melting it a little more, what I realized that it was the top of a basket.” It was in near-perfect condition, so it revealed detailed information about the daily lives of the people who once lived there. If it hadn’t been frozen, it would have decayed long ago, due to exposure to air.
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