This is an incredible scene.
There's really no other way to describe it than
to say it's a scene of mass death .
A single family frozen in time.
Buried in seconds, almost four,
zero years ago.
A lot of people refer
to this as China's pompeii .
Could this tragedy hold clues to the collapse
of one of China's very earliest ancient kingdoms ?
I'm Alan maca,
an archaeologist and expert in ancient civilizations,
and I'm investigating China's distant past
from a whole new perspective space .
Today,
state of the art satellites see the world
in stunning detail and reveal hidden archaeology .
Enabling us to recreate a lost ancient
world invisible to the naked eye .
Working alongside leading Chinese experts,
my team and I are traveling to some
of the country's most remote and incredible landscapes .
And with cutting edge science investigating previously unknown cultures,
lost cities and devastating cataclysms.
This is ancient China as
you'VE never seen it before .
Three hundred miles west of Beijing in China's Shanxi province
and on the edge of barren desert are the hills
of the lus plateau .
I'm here to explore a revolutionary new discovery
that's completely rewriting the earliest history of china .
This is shiimauo.
A four zero year old citadel at
the heart of a lost ancient kingdom .
Nothing prepares you to see this place in person.
This is one of the greatest new
discoveries in the archaeology of the world .
This was clearly a massive, massive city.
The significance of this discovery became
clear just a few years ago .
Shimao may have been the biggest city of
its time anywhere on the entire planet .
And Chinese archaeologists are only just
beginning to reveal its secrets .
Now,
with new technology,
I want to explore this
extraordinary ancient society who congratulations ,
what's behind its most chilling discoveries?
I can tell that some of
the bones are very young ,
and can the fate of China's other lost civilizations help
me solve one of the greatest mysteries of all ?
I feel like I'm in
the presence of something otherworldly .
WHY,
after five hundred years of living here,
did the people of this great city?
Seemingly.
Just vanish.
Before this discovery,
this was just a grassy hill.
The only sign of anything man made
was a simple line of rocks .
When they first found this,
they thought it was a
part of the Great Wall .
You can see why.
So they began some excavations around
here and they found no ,
this is two zero years earlier than
the earliest phase of the Great Wall .
These walls are incredibly well preserved,
yet they're over four,
zero years old.
That means s.
shemau is built at the same time as stonehenge in
Britain and thrived more than two zero years before the
Roman empire .
I'VE been to a lot of ancient cities,
you don't actually feel like you're
in a city because they're ruins ,
but this and this place,
feel like I am there.
This would be an extraordinary discovery anywhere but
to understand why this is so groundbreaking .
We need to see it from space.
The steps structure at the center of the city is
built into a hillside high above the meeting point of
two rivers .
It's in dusty,
rugged terrain that borders the sparsely populated ordos desert.
Experts never expected to find
a major ancient city here .
It was long thought that Chinese civilization began much later
and hundreds of miles to the south in the fertile
plains of the yellow river .
A stone walllled settlement is totally unexpected
at this time period in this place .
Now I want to know what kind of
society built something so large and so sophisticated .
I'm lucky to have been invited to
explore the latest discoveries with Xiao jing .
One of the lead archaeologists at shemal.
This is the path up
to the giant central platform .
This is an immense amount of labor here.
This is not rammed earthth,
this is not mud brick,
this is stone that had to be brought up here
to the site it it looks like nothing I'VE ever
seen because it's the first time in the history of
a Chinese archaeology weve found a four thousand year old
structure built this way .
I know that I had never
expected to see anything like this ,
but it's, uh,
it's amazing to hear that you all
had never expected to find anything ,
uh,
this far north at this time.
This vast stepped structure is at
the center of the city .
The team is currently excavating the remains of
buildings that once stood at the top .
They're trying to figure out how this society worked.
This is the top of the giant central platform.
The whole area covers twenty thousand square meters.
In this prosperous city.
The high class people would live here.
It included the king's palace, his administration,
and large scale artisans workshops.
Okay,
so all of the elites were here living, working.
The king was here.
음.
From the latest excavation data,
we can recreate what s shemal might
have looked like four thousand years ago .
A series of stone platforms with
restricted access to each higher level .
Right at the top,
the palaces of the city's rulers.
There's clearly a well defined hierarchy
here in this huge structure .
This palace dominates the entire area,
it's visible for miles,
so this thing is a constant reminder of
the power of the people who governed here .
One of the crazy things is is that
archaeologists have only excavated a fraction of this ,
which makes me wonder how much is
out there in the surrounding area .
Chinese researchers are discovering ruins spread all over the
rugged terrain by combining drone sensing with excavations .
now my Tech specialist Ryan kasner and drone pilot William
Luo are going to create a photogrammetry model so I
can understand just how large this city was .
ideally what we want to do is we want to
pop it up okay and we want to try to
see where the wall is going .
My team engineer Eric Lowe combines thousands of images to
create a three d view of the terrain called a
digital elevation model or deem .
So let's have a look at the data.
So these are the three multi spectral
flights that we did this morning .
And then we can see
hints of the wall here ,
but let's switch over to the dem so
we have a bit of clearer view .
It's a lot easier to see on this home.
So we can see the wall we
were focusing on right on the ridge ,
which makes a whole lot of sense.
The three d reconstruction clearly brings out the remains
of a city wall that follows the ridge line .
In all,
six miles of these walls have
been identified hidden in this landscape .
They mark out an enclosed inner city,
and an additional ring of outer
walls surrounds a thousand acre site ,
an area the size of about
two hundred new York city blocks .
That means that four,
zero years ago,
this could have been the
biggest city on the planet .
The scale of this place is unprecedented,
but even the smallest artifacts being found here are transforming
our understanding of how civilization develops in China oh ,
this is a lot of material here,
you guys have been busy!
This incredibly fragile jade scepter is a symbol
of power carried by rulers of shimu ah ,
it's very light,
it's very lightweight.
It would sit on a stuff, right?
It' it's amazing to me how thin.
They could cut it.
Mean you can see,
you can see my hand behind here in the
light PAR only the song of the god ,
the emperor held this.
He held this to pray to the god,
to tell the god that
he was the rightful ruler .
This is the earliest example of
a jade scepter ever found .
Even the most ordinary looking objects are groundbreaking.
These burn holes show that these
are what's known as auracle bones ,
means of divining the future.
The very first Chinese writing will later appear
on just this kind of fortune telling device ,
and one crucial find gives its name to
an entire age of human development bronze .
This is a knife.
This would have been the edge!
Oh,
so should we only have a few dodges?
Yeah, go ahead!
These dated to around the two thousand bc!
Sure,
they are some of the earliest bronzes ever found!
Wow!
This is incredible!
all these amazing fives are revealing that many of the
foundations of Chinese civilization appear here at shemao centuries earlier
than anyone ever expected .
But the team has just made an astonishing
discovery like nothing ever seen in China before .
I'm one of the first
outsiders allowed to see it .
This is a very important discovery.
The people of shima have left us
a gift from four thousand years ago .
Wow.
Archaeologists excavating the ancient megga city at shamal.
Have just discovered incredible four zero year
old carvings in the central palace area .
Congratulations!
This is unbelievable!
This looks like like the ancient Maya city of
copan in Honduras from the sixth century ad ,
two thousand five hundred years later,
as an archaeologist,
does it get better than this?
What not that I know of.
There are faces that look half human, half animal.
Strange hybrids and familiar creatures are all carved
into the walls of the giant platform .
It's a unique insight into the beliefs
of the people who built this city .
These sound the images of people,
they are all representations of gods.
This is amazing and that there's and that there's
also such variety so for example like what ,
what is this.
Mean it almost looks like maybe
some kind of a sea creature .
This is similar to a find called the
green pine dragon from a to city ,
the home of a later dynasty, the shah.
This later dynasty of the central yellow river
plains was thought to have founded Chinese civilization ,
but s.
Shemao is rewriting history.
So far,
the team here have excavated just one
side of the giant central platform .
Much still remains buried.
But already the skill and complexity of
this lost society is vividly emerging .
The carved stone facades of this building are incredible.
I mean this is four thousand years ago
and and you'VE got images of gods ,
images of animals like snakes,
you even have a dragon which becomes
a formative symbol in Chinese dynasties .
Everything about s.
Shemau is more advanced,
much earlier and far bigger than anyone thought possible.
And all in this unlikeliest of places
yet there is a huge mystery here .
Archaeologists have dated artifacts found here to between four thousand
three hundred and three thousand eight hundred years ago ,
but after that there's nothing.
This means that after five hundred years of occupation,
the entire city of shemu seems to be abandoned.
Something happened here that forced these people
to relocate or wiped them out entirely .
The question is what?
I'm heading across China to see if the latest discoveries
about the collapse of other ancient societies can offer clues
to what happened at shamal .
First I'm heading to the mountainous
upper reaches of the yellow river ,
to the site of an ancient apocalypse.
This horrible event took place three
thousand nine hundred years ago ,
but being here and seeing it myself,
there's an immediacy like this just happened.
The village of lagja was home to a thriving early
bronze age community that developed at the same time as
shimal .
There's at least fourteen individuals here.
They all died at once.
You can see women with their children as young as
perhaps two or three or four years old huddled together
around the cooking fire ,
and clearly this was a family.
It's clear to me that the people here
had no time whatsoever to get out .
All they could do was huddle the young together
and hope and pray that they would survive .
This frozen,
cataclysmic moment has been compared
to pompeii near ancient rome .
But this family is not entombed in volcanic ash,
but thick mud.
This is such a striking moment
of death here at logja .
This adult protecting the child from harm
while seemingly looking up what happened here .
Archaeologist yeim mao Lin and his
team first discovered the bodies ,
and they'VE spent years trying to
piece together how this tragedy unfolded .
And they'VE found a vital clue.
Look at the big crack here.
It's from an earthquake.
A crack this big shows how
powerful the earthquake was either .
Okay, wow,
so this whole,
this whole thing is just completely cracked open.
The massive earthquake demolished these houses,
trapping the families,
but these people are buried in mud.
Where did it come from?
The latest Chinese research suggests the earthquake
triggered a cataclysmic chain of events .
I'm investigating what happened to an ancient village known as
China's pompeii that left its people buried in mud and
frozen in time .
The answer could be visible from space.
Even after almost four, zero years.
My team's satellite archaeologist Sarah klassen,
is looking at data from a mountainous
gorge twenty five miles upstream from lachja .
She's been told about a mysterious GAP in
a mountain ridge overlooking the yellow river .
There's this one large area that
looks like it's been erased ,
it's almost as though someone's come through
and wiped it off the landscape .
What we're looking at here is actually a landslide.
The devastating earthquake that hit logja would have
set off landslides across a huge area .
Some experts believe one of them buried
the people of laja in mud .
What the latest research suggests a new theory that this
landslide further upstream was so massive that it set off
a chain reaction that led to disaster on a biblical
scale .
To understand what happened,
I'm heading high above the gorge geo archaeologist Wu Ching
long believes the landslide caused one of the biggest disasters
ever to hit China and that it's linked to a
phenomenon known as a quake lake .
The landslide happened over there.
We can see there is a
huge part missing from the bridge .
At the end of the neolithic period,
there was a terrible earthquake here.
It was so destructive that this entire ridge fell
down panha and the rocks blocked the yellow river .
The massive shockwaves send an entire
mountain tumbling into the gorge ,
creating a two hundred meter
tall dam across the river .
Its remains are still visible
nearly four zero years later .
The dammed river begins to form one
of the biggest quake lakes ever discovered .
Doctor Wu calculates that after several months
it would have stretched fifty miles upstream .
Holding over twelve billion cubic meters of water.
The pressure builds as the waters continue to rise.
Until the dam breaks.
Within twelve hours,
ninety percent of the water burst out.
That's insanely fastst as a catastrophe, no question,
yeah.
If doctor Wu is right,
this is one of the biggest freshwater floods ever
studied and bigger than any in China's recorded history .
It would have broughtught devastation
for hundreds of miles downstream .
So back at shamal,
might this city have been hit
by a similar cataclysmic natural disaster ?
The city is surrounded on two sides by rivers,
but it's hundreds of feet above the valley floor,
which rules out catastrophic flood.
What about an earthquake?
Devastating quakes have struck China throughout its history.
One of the deadliest of all time ravaged
this part of China five hundred years ago .
But shimao's amazingly preserved walls show
no sign of earthquake damage .
So what did happen here?
I'm heading to investigate the disappearance of another remarkable ancient
civilization six hundred miles southwest in Guang Han in Sichuan
province .
Thirty years ago,
discovery was made here that stunned the world.
I'VE been given special access to one
of China's most extraordinary archaeological treasures .
Incredible.
Could this amazing find help answer the
mystery of what happened at shamau ?
I'VE been allowed privileged access to an amazing relic of
an ancient Chinese civilization that I hope could hold clues
to the abandonment of shamau .
When I see this,
when I'm confronted with this,
I feel like I'm in
the presence of something otherworldly .
this astonishing bronze mask is evidence that there was another
completely unknown Chinese civilization that existed about five hundred years
after shemo .
This is like nothing else
I have seen in China ,
and when this was found,
this was like nothing anyone had
ever seen in the world .
It's just one of a treasure trove of precious objects
found at the site of an ancient city called sanang
shunwe .
There are scores of giant faces,
striking bronze heads with golden masks.
And human like sculptures performing mysterious rituals.
I just can't believe how many bronze objects
there are and the variety is extraordinary .
The world's leading expert on sang shin de believes the
giant mass depict gods and the bronze heads represent the
rulers of the city .
Indu we found many bronze heads in Sha xindui,
but we can divide them into two types yo some
of them have long braided head yo and some of
them don't .
The.
Professor sun believes these masks,
with two distinctive hairstyles represent the two
different clans who ruled the city ,
and his theory could help answer
sung Shun Di's most puzzling question .
Just like at chimao,
the city seemed to suddenly disappear.
The clue to what happened lies
thirty miles south in Chengdu ,
the site of another ancient city called jinsha.
It emerged around the same
time as sunang shue's demise .
And archaeologists have found hundreds of objects here,
evidence that the two cities
belong to the same culture .
But professor sun believes there's one crucial thing missing archaeologists
here have only found figures from one of the two
clans ,
those with braided hair.
De the people who had braided became the rulers of
Jin Sha so what happened to the people that had
no braid ?
The people with their hair pinned up?
Jee what a twitterdu!
my theory is that at the end of sshdu there
was a great conflict between the clan without bras and
those with bras fastened ,
and the whole city was destroyed.
Professor sun's theory of a city torn apart when one
clan destroys another in a violent civil war would explain
why sun shunhei was suddenly abandoned .
So could something similar have happened at shemal?
It seems possible because excavations are
uncovering grisly evidence of brutal killing .
Wow,
look at this.
It's just heads.
Yeah,
looking at the skulls,
I can tell that some of the bones are not
yet fused so it they're very young teenager teenagers .
Yeah, okay.
You can tell these heads were cut off because
on many we found the incision marks here ,
but these are not the victims of a power struggle
within the city examination of the skulls shows they're all
young women .
And chemical analysis of their teeth
reveals they're not from here ,
but from more than a hundred
miles away to the north .
So how did their remains end up here?
It could be because shima
was involved in some violence ,
like wars with other territories.
It seems these young women were captives,
victims of human sacrifice.
It appears to be gruesome evidence of
conflict with a rival enemy kingdom .
So could shimao's downfall have been caused by war?
I'm investigating the abandonment of the
colossal ancient city of shemau .
There's no evidence here for the natural disasters
and internal conflict that destroyed other ancient civilizations .
I want to know could war with
undiscovered rival kingdoms have caused its downfall ?
To find out,
I'm going to analyze the city's defenses
and investigate if they were ever breached .
Starting with the main gateway
through the city's outer wall ,
the formidable east gate,
my Tech experts Ryan kasner and Eric Lowe are
using laser scanning called lidar to reveal its structure .
So what the lidar is going to produce is
a three d model that we can move around ,
look at from different angles and take measurements of
as if we had it in real life ,
but we can do it
on the computer you guys ?
Yeah,
got some good stuff to show you ben.
All right, uh,
east gate.
Yeah,
so we'VE been lightering uh,
around the east gate past couple days.
We're able to scan the entire thing.
Wow.
Yeah,
this is a combination of
about one hundred different scans .
The scans reveal advanced defenses.
The outer walls include bastions,
protrusions at regular intervals that allow archers to
fire on the flanks of an enemy attack .
And the gateway itself is also ingeniously designed.
This is the main entrance to the gate here,
but the entire structure is built on
the edge of a steep cliff .
Now,
if an invading army had managed to climb all
the way to the top of the cliff ,
they're confronted first by this u shaped structure,
which means they're going to have to divide their
force to get in through the gate entrance .
And what would be waiting for them here?
Probably hundreds of soldiers as
the first line of defense ,
the main gateway is protected by guard houses and
two massive towers overlooking an l shaped passageway .
It forces attackers through a right angled
turn and into more concealed defensive positions .
And these fortifications are just protecting the outer city.
There's a further inner wall and a
mile of jagged terrain to cross ,
even to reach the towering walls
of the palace area itself .
There's something fundamentally important about the
idea of defense at tremont .
The city was prepared for an
attack on a massive scale .
Ừ.
But archaeologists have found no evidence of destruction or
any sign that these magnificent defenses were ever breached ,
so war did not destroy this city.
But perhaps there's just one more possibility
that might finally explain shimal's downfall .
My team archaeologist Sarah klassen is heading eight hundred
miles southeast of shimu to the Yangtze river delta .
She's investigating some recently discovered ancient structures
that succumb to a final destructive force .
She starts by examining a digital elevation model, or dem,
relief map made from multiple satellite images.
With the DM,
I'm looking for things that you wouldn't necessarily
expect to see in nature because it's too ,
too perfect or too engineered
to the north up here ,
this is really interesting.
There are two kind of linear embankments
with a depressed area in the middle .
Archaeologist Wang Ning Yuen leads a team revealing
that these banks are ancient man madede earthworks .
Oh wow,
you can really get a sense of how big this
feature was and how many people would have been necessary
to build it .
From there to there,
it's about a hundred meters across.
This massive earth wall is built between two hills
to create an ancient man madede dam and reservoir ,
and from the satellite data Wang Ning Yuan's team have
discovered this is just one tiny part of a massive
water control system .
Miles of artificial waterways that provided transport and control of
agriculture over an area nearly twice the size of Manhattan
island .
Amazingly,
the ongoing excavations here have dated this
to over five zero years ago .
It's the oldest evidence of
humans harnessing water ever discovered .
Chinese experts believe it allowed an earth walled city of
more than thirty zero people to flourish in these flood
prone coastal lowlands .
That means that this new discovery, called liangqu,
is the oldest city ever found in china.
But like shimo,
this city was also abandoned after eight hundred years,
and here the latest excavation
is finding evidence of why .
In my quest to find out why the ancient stone
city at shemal vanished three thousand eight hundred years ago ,
I'VE ruled out the earthquakes,
floods and wars that destroyed other ancient civilizations.
But Sarah's investigating one more possibility.
She's looking for answers in the demise of
the oldest city ever found in china .
Here,
Wang Ning Yuan and his team are finding evidence that
the city's agriculture was hit by an unstoppable force climate
change .
So the layers below here belong
to the final period of Liang .
This is all man made.
The thick layer on top has
accumulated from repeated seawater floods .
The team's evidence suggests that prolonged
heavy rains destroyed the city's agriculture .
Dwindling food supplies forced the population to move away,
and then silt,
left by centuries of rising sea levels,
buried what remained.
It's amazing that yangchu could
support such a big city .
But when the climate changed and big floods came,
the city was helpless in the face of nature.
So the environment forged this civilization,
but also somehow decided its end.
If a dramatic shift in the climate could
destroy a city the size of liangchu ,
could something similar have happened at shemo?
Recent analysis of ancient pollen grains found across northern
China reveals that when shimao was at its peak ,
it was much warmer and wetter.
But three thousand eight hundred years ago,
just when the city declined,
the monsoon weather patterns changed abruptly.
This area became drier and colder.
The climate change evidence makes perfect sense,
and if you look at the
landscape and look at the soils ,
it just doesn't seem like this area could have
sustained such large numbers of people in ancient times .
This is the best explanation so
far for the demise of shemal .
That sudden climate change transformed this
region into a cold semi desert ,
ravaging the civilization with famine and drought.
All the things that sustained
life were no longer possible .
And when you'VE got people that aren't satisfied,
you get flight and you get abandonment.
The people of shamau deserted their once great city,
leaving it to disappear beneath the wind blowlown silt.
Lost for millennia until now.
It's so exciting.
These discoveries are changing everything.
The where and when of how it all began
has typically been lost to the mists of time ,
but now we have real evidence.
Right now,
all across China,
cutting edge archaeology is uncovering an entirely new
chapter in the story of human civilization .
Now I'm amazed to learn how these lost cultures have
struggled to survive in the face of earthquakes and landslides ,
floods and war like catastrophes
with the power to destroy .
It's a reminder that great empires rise and can be
wiped out again in the blink of an eye .
But what they'VE left behind has laid the
foundations for all the wonders to come .
New beliefs, architecture,
art and hierarchies that would lead to
thousands of years of civilization in china .