Out-of-place artifacts (OOPArts) are artifacts that are seemingly impossible due to their time or place. While some are hoaxes or instances of pareidolia, others have been verified as genuine, such as the Baghdad Battery and the Maine Penny. Other examples include the Antikythera Mechanism and the Iron Pillar in India. Proponents of OOPArts often see them as proof of antediluvian human artifacts, but experts are skeptical.
An out-of-place artifact (OOPArt) is an artifact that is radically out of time or place, often to a seemingly impossible extent. An example would be an alleged human sandalwood footprint found in the Wheeler Formation, which dates to the Middle Cambrian, about 500 million years ago. In the “print” there are two apparently crushed trilobites. Another famous misplaced artifact is the Coso artifact, a 1920s candle found encased in a lump of hard clay or rock that one of the discoverers claimed must have been 500,000 years old. A more recent example is the Kensington Runestone, a Norse artifact assumed to be from the 14th century, found in Minnesota, USA.
The misplaced artifacts are loved by fans of anomalous (Fortean) phenomena and creationists, who see antediluvian human artifacts as proof that humans actually existed in the earliest days of Earth’s existence, as Genesis claims. The problem with most OOPArts is that they can easily be identified as hoaxes or instances of pareidolia (seeing what we want to see) rather than being verified as genuine. For example, the Coso artifact is clearly a candle made in the 1920s, and it is far more likely that it simply existed in conditions for the rapid accretion of hard clay around it than a time traveler went back 500,000 years. into the past and threw a candle to the ground.
Proponents of misplaced artifacts are often impossible to convince of the false nature of even the most superficial hoaxes, such as the Acambaro figures, fresh-looking, unbroken carvings of dinosaurs purportedly dating back thousands of years. But what complicates matters is that some misplaced artifacts have been verified as genuine, although they are not as radical as those mentioned in the first paragraph of this article. Others, like the Kensington Runestone, have swung back and forth between considered by experts to be hoax or genuine.
One verified misplaced artifact is the Baghdad Battery, a common name for several artifacts dated to around AD 100 that consist of a copper cylinder and an iron rod inside an earthenware vessel. These batteries could have been used to plate gold onto silver items, and if they were indeed used as batteries, they would have predated Alessandro Volta’s 1,700 invention of the electrochemical cell by 1,800 years. Another is the Maine Penny, an 11th-century Norse coin found in a pile of Native American shells. Through a series of exchanges, this Norse coin arrived from 11th century Viking settlements in Newfoundland hundreds of miles south in Maine.
Other verified misplaced artifacts include the Antikythera Mechanism, a mechanical computer used to calculate the position of the Sun, Moon and planets, and the Iron Pillar in India, dated to 300 BC, which withstood corrosion for 2,300 years a due to a number of unusual material factors.
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