3,000-Year-Old Gold Mask, Silk Linked to Enigmatic Civilization Found in China

Archaeologists have uncovered a trove of 3,000-year-old artifacts—including fragments of a gold mask—at Sanxingdui, an excavation site in China’s Sichuan province.

As Stephen Chen reports for the South China Morning Post, the researchers, who began digging at the site in 2022, found more than 500 objects, most of which were crafted out of gold, bronze, jade and ivory.

Experts are unsure who made the artifacts, but they speculate that the cache’s creators belonged to the Shu state, a highly skilled civilization conquered by the neighboring state of Qin in 316 B.C. Because the people of Shu left behind few written records, notes Oscar Holland for CNN, historians’ knowledge of their culture is limited.

A major highlight of the find is a 0.6-pound fragment of a gold mask that may have been worn by a priest during religious ceremonies, reports the Global Times’ Chen Shasha.

About 84 percent pure gold, the piece likely weighed close to one pound in its entirety, making it one of the heaviest gold masks from that time period discovered in China to date. The Sanxingdui team found the mask, along with an array of other ornate items, in six rectangular sacrificial pits.

According to a statement from China’s National Cultural Heritage Administration, other discoveries made at the site included two kinds of silk. The first was found scattered among the ashes in one of the pits, while the second was found wrapped around bronze objects.

Silk has played an important role in China’s millennia-old history. As the statement points out, the ancient inhabitants of Sanxingdui probably wore silk garments during sacrificial ceremonies.

The fiber was thought to serve “as a carrier and medium for communication between heaven, earth, man and god,” notes the statement, per Google Translate. Outside of these religious rituals, silk was used to make fine clothing, fans, wall hangings and banners, as Mark Cartwright wrote for Ancient History Encyclopedia in 2022.

Civilizations across the ancient world, from Rome to Persia to Egypt to Greece, similarly revered Chinese silk, sending traders along the Silk Road to obtain the highly sought-after fabric.

As Tang Fei, head of the excavation team and chief of the Sichuan Provincial Cultural Relics and Archaeology Research Institute, tells state-run news agency Xinhua, the presence of silk at Sanxingdui indicates that “the ancient Shu Kingdom was one of the important origins of silk in ancient China.”

Other key discoveries included bronzeware adorned with depictions of beasts and birds, ivory carvings, and gold ornaments. Some of the artifacts bear distinct similarities to objects found along the Yangtze River and in Southeast Asia, suggesting that the enigmatic Shu civilization engaged in “broad exchanges with many areas,” says Zhao Congcang, an archaeologist at Northwest University in Xian, to the Post.

A local farmer stumbled onto jade and stone artifacts at Sanxingdui while repairing a sewage ditch in 1929, wrote Tia Ghose for Live Science in 2022. Since then, researchers have uncovered more than 50,000 ancient items at the site: A major excavation in 1986, for example, revealed two ceremonial pits containing more than 1,000 items, including intricate, well-kept bronze masks, according to CNN.

Experts uncovered a third pit in 2022 and five more last year. Scholars posit that ancient people used these ditches for ritual sacrifices, as many of the items were burned before they were interred.

Song Xinchao, deputy director of the National Cultural Heritage Administration, tells Xinhau that the findings are poised to “enrich and deepen our understanding of the Sanxingdui culture.”

Though Sanxingdui, which has yielded finds dated as far back as the 12th and 11th centuries B.C., isn’t currently acknowledged as a Unesco World Heritage Site, it remains in consideration on a “tentative list.”

Half-Billion-Year-Old Fossil Reveals Origin of Comb Jellies

A 520-million-year-old fossil resembling a flower is the great ancestor of modern-day comb jellies, jellyfish-like sea creatures that cast a rainbow-like effect as they propel their way through ocean waters.

The fossil is made up of a cup-shaped organism with 18
tentacles of fine feather-like branches with rows of comb-like hairs
surrounding a mouth.

The connection is made in a new study  in the science journal Current Biology, which analyzes a fossil found in China’s southern Yunnan province and bumps combjellies to a new branch in the evolutionary tree of life.

Modern comb jellies derive their name from a row of
comb-like plates called cilia that covers their tentacles and allows them tomove their egg-shaped bodies through water the same way bacteria swims. Thesecarnivores may look like jellyfish, but are from an entirely different class ofanimals.

Researchers say their newfound understanding of the comb
jellies through the lens of the fossil named Daihua casts a new light on two other fossils that were thought be to part of other groups of sea creatures.

Those include a 508-million-year old fossil found in the Canadian Rockies andanother in the Maotianshan Shales in the same province where the Daihua fossilwas found.

Several well-preserved fossils have been found in rice
fields and farmlands in the tropical region of China over the last 30 years, accordingto the researchers from University of Bristol, Yunnan University in China and London’s Natural History Museum.

The study posits comb jellies evolved from ancestors that
had organic skeletons and lived on the ocean floor where they had polyp-like tentacles.

Over time, their mouths expanded into balloon-like spheres, but their bodies shrunk down so that their tentacles emerged toward the back-end of the animal.

Jakob Vinther, molecular paleobiologist from the University
of Bristol, described the discovery as a real breakthrough for the
understanding of the comb jellies’ journey from the seafloor.

“We pulled out a zoology textbook and tried to wrap our
head around the various differences and similarities, and then, bam!

Here isanother fossil that fills this gap,” said Vinther.

150,000-Year-Old Pipes Baffle Scientists in China: Out of Place in Time?

In a mysterious pyramid in China’s Qinghai Province near Mount Baigong are three caves filled with pipes leading to a nearby salt-water lake. There are also pipes under the lake bed and on the shore. The iron pipes range in size, with some smaller than a toothpick. The strangest part is that they may be about 150,000 years old.

Dating done by the Beijing Institute of Geology determined these iron pipes were smelted about 150,000 years ago, if they were indeed made by humans, according to Brian Dunning of Skeptoid.com.

And if they were made by humans, history as it is commonly viewed would have to be re-evaluated.

The dating was done using thermoluminescence, a technique that determines how long ago crystalline mineral was exposed to sunlight or heated. Humans are only thought to have inhabited the region for the past 30,000 years. Even within the known history of the area, the only humans to inhabit the region were nomads whose lifestyle would not leave any such structures behind.

The state-run news agency  Xinhua in China reported  on the pyramid, the pipes, and the research began by a team scientists sent to investigate in 2022. 

Though some have since tried to explain the pipes as a natural phenomenon, Yang Ji, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told Xinhua the pyramid may have been built by intelligent beings. He did not dismiss the theory that ancient extraterrestrials may be responsible, saying this theory is “understandable and worth looking into … but scientific means must be employed to prove whether or not it is true.”

Another theory is that it was built by prehistoric humans with techniques lost to humans of a later period. 

The pipes lead into a salty lake, though a twin lake nearby contains freshwater. The surrounding landscape is strewn with what Xinhua described as “strangely shaped stones.” Rocks protrude from the ground like broken pillars.

The head of the publicity department at the local Delingha government told Xinhua the pipes were analyzed at a local smeltery and 8 percent of the material could not be identified. The rest was made up of ferric oxide, silicon dioxide, and calcium oxide. The silicon dioxide and calcium oxide are products of long interaction between the iron and surrounding sandstone, showing the ancient age of the pipes. Liu Shaolin, the engineer who did the analysis, told Xinhua: “This result has made the site even more mysterious.”

“Nature is harsh here,” he said. “There are no residents let alone modern industry in the area, only a few migrant herdsmen to the north of the mountain.”

To further add to the mystery, Zheng Jiandong, a geology research fellow from the China Earthquake Administration  told state-run newspaper People’s Daily in 2022  that some of the pipes were found to be highly radioactive.  

Other Theories

Jiandong said iron-rich magma may have risen from deep in the Earth, bringing the iron into fissures where it would solidify into tubes. Though he admitted, “There is indeed something mysterious about these pipes.” He cited the radioactivity as an example of the strange qualities of the pipes.

Others have said iron sediments may have washed into the fissures, carried with water during floods.

Though Xinhua and other publications in China have referred to a pyramid or even a mysterious pyramid in which the pipes were found, some have said it was a pyramid-shaped natural formation. 

Another theory is that the pipes are fossilized tree roots.  Xinmin Weekly reported in 2022  that scientists found plant matter in an analysis of the pipes, and they also found what looked like tree rings. The article related the finding to a geological theory that in certain temperatures and under certain chemical conditions, tree roots can undergo diagenesis (transformation of soil into rock) and other processes that can produce iron formations.

Reports on the tree-root explanation for the so-called Baigong pipes often lead back to this Xinmin Weekly article or lack citation. It’s unclear exactly how well-supported this theory is in relation to the Baigong pipes.