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If humanity's history were a block of cheese, it would be Swiss—full of holes. So much of our cultural past is gone, making it seem nearly impossible to piece together the full story. Over half of our silent films have vanished. Ancient writings have deteriorated into dust, enough to fill entire libraries. Many languages, ideas, and artworks are lost, likely forever.
However, not everything lost is beyond recovery. Thanks to the wonders of science, we're beginning to recover some of these treasures. Much like John Hammond's creation of Jurassic Park by using remnants of dinosaur DNA, we're bringing back ancient wonders we once thought were gone for good.
10. The Lost Artifacts of Mosul
One of the most horrific actions of the Islamic State has been its destruction of irreplaceable antiquities. In Mosul, the so-called capital of their caliphate, they have wreaked particular havoc. Jihadists have destroyed sites that are millennia old, ravaged the city's museum, and done everything possible to strip away the rich cultural heritage of Iraq.
Though the original objects looted by ISIS may be lost forever, European scientists have found a way to ensure their legacy lives on. By gathering numerous photos of each item, Chance Coughenour and Matthew Vincent at the EU-funded Initial Training Network for Digital Cultural Heritage have managed to digitally reconstruct the lost artifacts in a 3-D environment. This has resulted in a virtual museum where anyone with an internet connection can view these lost treasures from all perspectives, often with remarkable detail.
As impressive as this accomplishment is, it’s just the beginning. Speaking to the BBC, Vincent envisioned a future where 3-D printers could use these digital images to physically restore our lost heritage.
The project is already surpassing its initial goals. Along with Mosul's treasures, Vincent and Coughenour have also digitized artifacts from across Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Nepal, which was affected by an earthquake. The hope is that one day, no valuable artifact will ever be lost to history again.
9. Ancient Greek Music
Until recently, music was one of the most fleeting forms of art. Without recording technology, the great singers of the ancient world had no choice but to let their performances fade away into history.
As a result, interpreting ancient music today can feel like trying to understand the Beatles' entire discography by only reading the lyrics. You only grasp a fraction of what the original audience experienced. However, this is starting to change. Experts are now working diligently to recreate the music of ancient civilizations and breathe life into these long-lost melodies.
In ancient Greece, literature was often performed with music. Figures like Homer, Sappho, and Sophocles were not just read—they were sung. This is especially helpful today because their written works contain vital clues about the rhythms of the music. Using ancient texts that connect words to musical notation, scholars have been able to uncover the pitch and rhythm of these long-forgotten songs. They've even reconstructed ancient instruments, so now it’s a matter of piecing it all together.
Some pioneers have already begun this process. In 2013, Dr. David Creese from Newcastle University in the UK crafted his own ancient eight-string “canon” instrument and uploaded a recording of himself performing the “Seikilos Epitaph” using tunings suggested by Ptolemy. While the sound may not fully satisfy modern tastes, the fact that we now know what the song once sounded like is undeniably incredible.
8. Rediscovered Paintings in Full Color
Many of the world’s greatest masterpieces conceal other paintings beneath them. As early as the 1960s, scientists discovered through X-ray studies that renowned artists like Rembrandt, van Gogh, and Picasso had reused canvases, layering new works over older ones. Initially, we could only glimpse faint remnants of these “lost” artworks—ghostly imprints of the past, visible like monochrome shadows.
This changed in the summer of 2015. Using a method called “macro-X-ray fluorescence (macro-XRF) scanning,” researchers from the Getty Museum, University of Antwerp, and Delft University of Technology managed to partially recreate a hidden Rembrandt painting in color. Though the work, concealed beneath Rembrandt’s An Old Man in a Military Costume, had been detected in 1968, it wasn’t until 2015 that we could truly appreciate it. By analyzing the chemical composition of pigments, the macro-XRF scanner revealed color details in the concealed image, resulting in a vivid depiction of a seated figure.
While still in its early stages, the reconstructed image is far from flawless. In fact, it almost resembles something created with Microsoft Paint in 1999. But as a groundbreaking step toward recovering these lost artworks, it’s nothing short of awe-inspiring.
7. The Forgotten Colors of Ancient Statues
Ask anyone to envision ancient Greece, and their mind will immediately conjure images of white marble structures. This is similar to imagining T. rex as scaly rather than feathered—a common, but historically inaccurate, image. For years, scientists have known that nearly all statues and temples in ancient Greece were vividly painted in bold, bright colors. However, it’s only recently that we’ve begun to use this knowledge to restore these statues as they were originally meant to be seen.
Since 2004, the Copenhagen Polychromy Network has been meticulously analyzing traces of pigment on ancient sculptures. By employing techniques like multispectral imaging and X-ray diffraction spectroscopy, they’ve amassed an extensive database of color information from ancient statues. A few years ago, they began to breathe vibrant life into this data.
The outcome is a collection of replicas of ancient statues, colored to reflect how they would have appeared 2,500 years ago. In 2014, they even showcased these brightly colored versions alongside their original white marble counterparts. As art magazine Hyperallergic noted, the outdated colors “make them more human and, ironically, bring them closer to us.”
6. The Internet’s Vanishing Past
You’re reading this now, so you likely agree that the Internet stands as one of humanity's greatest inventions. In just 25 years, it has transformed the way we connect with one another.
Yet, despite its monumental value, we’ve been remarkably negligent in preserving it. The very first web page, created by Tim Berners-Lee, was thought to be lost forever until recently, and many websites from the 1990s and early 2000s are still missing. While the Web was designed to be ephemeral, the disappearance of these pages represents a significant gap in our history, akin to losing the Gutenberg Bible.
Fortunately, this loss might not be irreversible. For several years, digital archaeologist Jim Boulton has been dedicated to locating and restoring lost web pages from the Web’s early days. What distinguishes his work from that of the Internet Archive is that Boulton doesn’t simply want to recover these missing pages and display them on today’s Web. His goal is to ensure they are accessible using the same operating systems, hardware, plugins, and browsers that these early sites were originally designed for.
Though it may sound like a daunting task, Boulton has already achieved considerable success, attracting sponsorship from major companies like Google and exhibiting his efforts worldwide. His ultimate aim is to create an archaeological record of the Web’s early years, focusing on the everyday sites that played a significant role in shaping our modern Internet.
5. Extinct Languages
It’s estimated that up to 90 percent of all languages could vanish by the end of the next century. A large number of languages have already disappeared. However, their extinction may not be permanent. Since 2013, scientists have been working on methods to bring back the world’s lost languages.
A team of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, has developed a program capable of reconstructing protolanguages. Protolanguages are the foundational ancestors of modern languages, traces of which can be found by examining the etymology of current words. For instance, Spanish and Italian retain elements of Latin. By identifying these remnants in modern languages, we can work backward to reconstruct the original protolanguage. This program does this remarkably quickly.
When tested in 2013, the software successfully reconstructed an Austronesian protolanguage spoken 7,000 years ago. As the software evolves, we may eventually reach a point where no language truly disappears forever.
4. The Oldest Sounds Ever Recorded
At this point, it’s likely evident that preserving anything over long periods of time is incredibly challenging, especially when it comes to sound. Since the late 1800s, countless recordings have captured everything from jazz music to Yugoslavian folktales to songs sung by people from rural Vermont. Many of these recordings are now one-of-a-kind, with the circumstances that produced them now lost. We likely have less than 20 years before these recordings degrade beyond the point of being playable.
If it weren’t for physicist Carl Haber, much of our early recorded history would have been lost. In 2002, Haber heard an NPR program about severely damaged audio recordings that could not be played to create copies. He immediately set to work designing a machine capable of capturing sound through the digital analysis of records.
The result of his efforts was IRENE. This machine uses cameras to capture detailed 3-D images of the grooves on old records, which are then translated into sound by a computer program. This method allows sounds to be rerecorded without causing harm to the original recordings. It’s already preserving our auditory history.
Thanks to IRENE, we’ve recovered items ranging from the earliest voice recording (a French girl singing a song in 1860) to the only existing recording of Alexander Graham Bell’s voice (as seen in the video above). Interviews with people born in the early 19th century, folk music, and even Woody Guthrie’s jam sessions have all been saved from extinction. Now, IRENE is racing against time to preserve as many of our sounds as possible before they are lost forever.
3. The Ancient Art of Brewing Beer
Patrick McGovern, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, likely has the most unusual job in his field. As the world’s leading expert on ancient alcoholic beverages, he combs through pottery shards to find traces of beer from 7,000 years ago. But McGovern (or “Dr. Pat” as he’s known) doesn’t stop at identifying these ancient brews. He analyzes their chemical composition to determine their ingredients, then recreates these ancient beverages in modern times.
In collaboration with the Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Delaware, Dr. Pat has resurrected several long-lost beers from the annals of history. One such brew was crafted from beer dregs discovered in King Midas’s tomb. Another was based on possible beer residue from a site in Wadi Kubbaniya, Egypt, dating back 18,000 years. If these findings hold true, Dr. Pat’s experiments would allow us to taste beer that predates the invention of the wheel.
These are just a few of Dr. Pat’s many experiments. Over the years, he has worked to recreate ancient grog from China, wine from the Etruscan civilization, and beers from various cultures and eras. Through his work, he’s deepened our understanding of ourselves, our ancestors, and the evolution of drink, all while holding the most rock-and-roll position in archaeology.
2. Ancient Cures That Still Work
We often think of ancient medicine as absurd — full of bizarre remedies like using lamb’s eyeballs, sticking leeches on skin, or waving herbs about. However, when scientists reconstructed some of these ancient treatments, they uncovered a surprising truth: the remedies actually worked.
Consider this Anglo-Saxon recipe for treating styes from the ninth century. It may sound like a scene out of Harry Potter: “Take cropleek and garlic, of both equal quantities, pound them well together... take wine and bullocks gall, mix with the leek... let it stand nine days in the brass vessel.”
When Freya Harrison, a microbiologist from the University of Nottingham in the UK, recreated the ancient potion, she discovered that it was self-sterilizing. Even more remarkable, when tested on mice infected with the superbug MRSA, the potion eliminated 90 percent of the bacteria. This result is comparable to the effectiveness of modern antibiotics.
This isn’t the only instance of ancient remedies proving useful in the present day. Artemisinin, one of the most effective antimalarial drugs available today, was originally discovered in ancient Chinese medical texts.
1. Sounds That Date Back 165 Million Years Before Recording Equipment
Around 165 million years ago, the last Archaboilus musicus emitted its final chirp in the humid forests that would later become China. A species of ancient katydid, akin to a cricket, it used to fill the night with its distinctive, low call. After its extinction, it seemed as though that sound would never be heard again. But as it turns out, we were mistaken.
In an astonishing breakthrough, scientists managed to recreate the lost call of the Archaboilus musicus in 2013. This was made possible by a fortunate discovery and the advances of modern technology. While working in the fossil-rich Jiulongshan Formation in northeastern China, researchers found a perfectly preserved pair of Archaboilus musicus wings, which enabled the recreation of its call.
As an ancient katydid, this insect would have used its wings to produce its distinctive call. Since the sound-producing structures on the fossilized wings were still preserved, it became theoretically feasible to recreate the exact sound the insect once made.
With the expertise of Fernando Montealegre-Zapata, a leading authority on biological sounds, the team developed a program capable of recreating the sound most likely produced by Archaboilus musicus. As shown in the video above, this marks the first time in 165 million years that the insect's call has been heard again.
