6 In 1987, while digging down in a cave in Mount Owen in New Zealand, a group of archaeologists found a claw of a bird with flesh and muscles still attached to it. It was later confirmed that the foot was of the extinct Moa bird, which vanished from Earth some 700 to 800 years ago.

The group that was fortunate to find the claw of the extinct creature was the Speleological Society of New Zealand. The foot belonged to an extinct Moa bird of which a total of eight species used to exist in the past.

Some of these birds were about the size of a turkey and some were larger like ostriches, growing up to 12 feet in height and weighing as much as 500 pounds.

The claw of the Moa found in New Zealand was dated to be 3,300 years old and suggested that the animal was a native to New Zealand.

The flesh-covered claw of the extinct bird when presented online became social media buzz. People went so far as to comment on it as something out of science fiction. (1, 2)

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7 In a cave in Cheddar, England, a 9,000-year-old skeleton was found in 1903. To everyone’s surprise, years later, a history teacher living just half a mile away was recognized as the deceased’s relative, tracing back to 300 generations. The skeleton is now the world’s most distant confirmed relative.

Adrian Targett, a 42-year-old history teacher’s DNA by his mother’s line matched with the 9,000-year-old Cheddar Man. It was the oldest complete skeleton ever found in England. The hunter-gatherer lived in 7000 BCE before even agriculture was introduced.

A television series Once Upon a Time in West on archaeology in Somerset conducted the DNA test, and that’s when the revelation came forth. They conducted the test of 20 local people whose relatives were known to have lived in the area for generations. The Oxford University’s Institute of Molar Medicine performed the DNA testing. 

The skeleton was first discovered 20 meters deep in the Gough’s Cave in Cheddar Gorge, which is England’s prime site for Paleolithic human findings. The discovery enabled us to fetch some data about the onset of the agricultural life of early humans.

The remains strongly indicate that farming spread through the population contrary to the idea that farmers traveled into Western Europe from Eastern Europe. (Source)

8 Dating back to some 48,000 years, the ancient technology of bow-and-arrow has been discovered in a cave in Sri Lanka. It is the oldest piece of evidence of archery ever found in this part of the world. Along with the archery tools, excavators also found decorative beads made from mineral ochre and marine snail shells.

Fa-Hien Lena is a cave in southwest Sri Lanka where the beads, tools for fashion clothes, and projectile points for arrows were found. It was surely the oldest evidence of bow-and-arrow in South Asia but also possibly the oldest across all Eurasia.

One of the researchers claimed that the discovery suggests that the earliest modern humans in Southeast Asia adapted to different environments using a diverse toolkit.

The projectile points, made up of animal bones, were definitely 48,000 years old, but the stratigraphic layer inside which they were discovered was younger by around 14 years.

A total of 130 of such small beads were found in the cave. The notches and exhibit patterns on them lead the archaeologists to conclude that they were attached to the thin shafts associated with the bow-and-arrow technique. In other words, the beads were used as arrowheads to hunt rainforest prey like squirrels and monkeys. (1, 2)

9 In one of the world’s deepest cave systems of Lukina Jama-Trojama, Croatia, a beautiful, new, tiny species of translucent snails was discovered. It was found and only lives in a depth of 3,200 feet. The little creature belongs to the genus Zospeum and is completely blind.

The cave where the discovery was made in 2012 is one of the 20 deepest caves in the world. Only one specimen of the species was found in the depths of the cave. The animal was formally recognized as a new species the following year by the German taxonomist Dr. Alexander M. Weigand.

The expedition originally only intended to find the depth of the cave. However, along their way, the team collected all animal specimens since such depths of caves often promise a chance to find some new species. They collected nine shells of which eight of them were empty. Only one had the novel Zospeum tholussum.

It is a small, two-millimeter-long snail with about a millimeter-wide shell and belongs to the group of air-breathing land snails that are exclusively cave-dwellers. It has an intriguing dome-like translucent shell.

The snail and its relatives are slow, even relative to other snails. They only creep a few millimeters or centimeters per week, and that too is often in circles. (1, 2, 3)

10 In a cave in Sicily, researchers found what could be the world’s oldest wine at the bottom of some terracotta jars. The discovery suggests that the fermented drink was being made and consumed in Italy more than 6,000 years ago.

Before the discovery, the scientists were sure that winemaking developed in Italy in 1200 BCE. However, that notion changed, and it was dated further back by at least three millennia.

The most remarkable element of the discovery was that it didn’t reveal the farming of grapes, but the actual residue of wine was found. It didn’t just explain viticulture but was evidence of the actual production of wine.

In 2012, there were five organic residues of wine from the Copper Age in storage jars when they were found in a limestone cave in Monte Kronio on Sicily’s southwest coast. They were dated to the fourth millennium BCE.  

The cream of tartar or the salt of tartaric acid is the main acidic component in grapes that develop during winemaking. The presence of this component assured that it was wine, and the container was the vessel used to prepare it. (Source)