01x03 - China's Pompeii

[bunniefuu]

Allan: 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 4,000 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 allan 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.

♪

300 miles west of beijing in

china's shaanxi province and

on the edge of barren desert,

are the hills of

the loess plateau.

I'm here to explore a

revolutionary new discovery

that's completely rewriting

the earliest history of china.

This is shimao.

A 4000-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.

Wow! 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 am in the presence

of something otherworldly.

Why, after 500 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 manmade,

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 2000 years

earlier than the earliest

phase of the great wall.

These walls are

incredibly well preserved,

yet they're

over 4,000 years old!

That means shimao is

built at the same time

as stonehenge in britain

and thrived more than 2000

years before the roman empire.

I've been to a lot of

ancient cities and you don't

actually feel like you are in

a city because they are ruins

but this, in this place

I feel like I am there.

This would be an

extraordinary discovery

anywhere but to understand why

this is so ground-breaking,

we need to see it, from space.

The stepped 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 walled

settlement is totally

unexpected at this time period

and this place but 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 shao jing,

one the lead

archaeologists at shimao.

Shao: This is the path up to

the giant central platform.

Allan: This is an

immense amount of labor here.

This is not rammed earth.

This is not mud brick.

This is stone that had to be

brought up here to the site.

It looks like

nothing I've ever seen.

Shao: It's the first time in the

history of chinese archaeology

we have found a 4000 year old

structure built this way.

Allan: I know that I had never

expected to see anything like

this but it's amazing to hear

that you all had never expected

to find anything 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.

Shao: This is the top of

the giant central platform.

The whole area covers

20,000 square meters.

In this prosperous city

the high-class people

would live here.

It included the king's palace,

his administration and large

scale artisan's workshops

allan: Okay, so all

of the elites were

here living, working.

The king was here.

From the latest excavation

data we can recreate what

shimao might've looked

like 4000 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.

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

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 kastner and drone pilot

william luo are going to

create a photogrammetry model

so I can understand just

how large this city was.

Ryan: Ideally what we want to

do is we want to pop it up.

William: Okay.

Ryan: And we want to try to

see where the wall's going.

Allan: My team engineer eric lo

combines thousands of images

to create a 3d

view of the terrain,

called a digital

elevation model or dem.

Ryan: So let's have

a look at the data.

Eric: So these are the three

multi spectral flights that

we did this morning.

Ryan: Mm-hmm.

Eric: 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.

Ryan: Yeah. It's a lot

easier to see on this, huh?

So we can see the wall

we were focusing on.

Right on the ridge which

makes a whole lot of sense.

Allan: The 3d reconstruction

clearly brings

out the remains of a city wall

that follows the ridgeline.

In all, 6 miles of these

walls have been identified

hidden in this landscape.

They mark out an enclosed inner

city and an additional ring

of outer wall surrounds

1,000 acre site,

an area the size of about

200 new york city blocks.

That means that 4000 years

ago this could've 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.

Ahh, 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 shimao.

It's very light,

it's very light weight!

It would sit on

a staff, right?

It's amazing to me how

thin they could cut it.

I mean, you can see you

can see my hand behind

here in the light.

Shao: Only the son 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.

Allan: This is the

earliest example of a

jade scepter ever found.

Even the most ordinary looking

objects are ground-breaking.

These burn holes show that

these are what's known as

oracle bones, a 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.

Shao: This is a knife.

Allan: This would

have been the edge.

Shao: Huh. We have

only a few dozen.

These date to around 2000 bc.

They are some of the

earliest bronzes ever found.

Allan: Wow this is incredible.

All these amazing finds are

revealing that many of the

foundations of chinese

civilization appear

here at shimao,

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.

Shao: This is a very

important discovery.

The people of shimao have left

us a gift from 4000 years ago

allan: Wow!

Allan: Archaeologists

excavating the ancient megacity

at shimao have just

discovered incredible

4000 year-old carvings in

the central palace area.

Congratulations!

This is unbelievable.

This looks like like

the ancient mayan city

of copan in honduras

from the 6th century

a.D., 2500 years later.

As an archaeologist, does

it get better than this?

Shao: Not that I know of.

Allan: 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.

Shao: These aren't

images of people.

They are all

representations of gods.

Allan: This is amazing and that

there is also such variety,

so for example

what is this?

I mean, it almost looks

like maybe some kind of

a sea creature.

Shao: This is similar

to a find called the

green pine dragon

from erlitou city, the home

of a later dynasty, the xia.

Allan: This later dynasty of

the central yellow river plains

was thought to have founded

chinese civilization,

but shimao 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

this is 4,000 years ago.

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 shimao

is more advanced,

much earlier and far bigger

than anyone thought possible.

And all in this

unlikeliest of places.

Yet there's a huge mystery here.

Archaeologists have dated

artifacts found here

to between 4,300 and

3,800 years ago

But after that, there's nothing.

This means that after

500 years of occupation,

the entire city of shimao

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 shimao.

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 3,900 years ago.

But being here and

seeing it myself,

there's an immediacy

like this just happened.

The village of lajia was home to

a thriving early bronze-age

community that developed at

the same time as shimao.

There's at least 14

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 lajia,

this adult protecting

the child from harm while

seemingly looking up.

What happened here?

Archaeologist,

ye maolin 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.

Ye: Look at the

big crack here.

It's from an earthquake.

A crack this big shows how

powerful the earthquake was.

Allan: Ok wow, so this whole,

this whole thing was 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.

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 4000 years.

My team's

satellite archaeologist,

sarah klassen, is looking at

data from a mountainous gorge

25 miles upstream from lajia.

She's been told about a

mysterious gap in a mountain

ridge overlooking

the yellow river.

Sarah: There is this one

large area that looks

like it's been erased.

It's almost as though someone

has come through and wiped it

off the landscape.

What we are looking at

here is actually a landslide.

Allan: The devastating

earthquake that hit lajia

would have set off landslides

across a huge area.

Some experts believe

one of them buried the

people of lajia in mud.

But 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.

Geoarchaeologist, wu qinglong

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.

Wu: The landslide

happened over there.

We can see there is a huge

part missing from the ridge.

At the end of the

neolithic period,

there was a terrible

earthquake here,

it was so destructive that

this entire ridge fell down.

And the rocks blocked

the yellow river.

Allan: The massive

shockwaves send an

entire mountain tumbling

into the gorge.

Creating a 200 meter

tall dam across the river,

its remains are still visible

nearly 4000 years later.

The dammed river begins to

form one of the biggest

"quake lakes" ever discovered.

Dr wu calculates that after

several months it would have

stretched 50 miles upstream,

holding over 12 billion

cubic meters of water.

The pressure builds as the

waters continue to rise

Until the dam Breaks.

Wu: Within 12 hours 90%

of the water burst out.

Allan: That's insanely fast.

Wu: That's catastrophic.

Allan: No question.

If dr 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 wrought

devastation for hundreds

of miles downstream.

So, back at shimao, might

this city have been hit by a

similar cataclysmic

natural disaster?

The city is surrounded

on 2 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 500 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 600 miles

southwest in guanghan

in sichuan province.

30 years ago, a

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 shimao?

An amazing relic of an ancient

chinese civilization that

I hope could hold clues to

the abandonment of shimao.

When I see this, when

I'm confronted with this,

I feel like I'm in the presence

of something other-worldly.

This astonishing bronze mask is

evidence that there was

another completely unknown

chinese civilization

that existed about

500 years after shimao.

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 sanxingdui.

There are scores

of giant faces,

striking bronze heads

with golden masks,

and humanlike 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

sanxingdui believes the

giant masks depict gods,

and the bronze heads represent

the rulers of the city.

Sun: We've found many

bronze heads in sanxingdui.

But we can divide

them into two types.

Some of them have long braided

hair and some of them don't,

they tie their

hair up instead.

Allan: Professor sun

believes these masks,

with two distinctive

hair styles,

represent the two different

clans who ruled the city.

And his theory could

help answer sanxingdui's

most puzzling question.

Just like at shimao, the city

seemed to suddenly disappear.

The clue to what happened lies

30 miles south in chengdu,

the site of another ancient

city, called jinsha.

It emerged around the same

time as sanxingdui's demise

and archaeologists have found

hundreds of objects here,

evidence that the two cities

belonged 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.

Sun: The people who had braids

became the rulers of jinsha.

Allan: So what happened to

the people that had no braid?

The people with

their hair pinned up?

Sun: My theory is that

at the end of sanxingdui,

there was a great conflict

between the clan without braids

and those with braids and the

whole city was destroyed.

Allan: Professor sun's theory,

of a city torn apart when

one clan destroys another in a

violent civil w*r, would

explain why sanxingdui was

suddenly abandoned.

So could something similar

have happened at shimao?

It seems possible.

Because excavations are

uncovering grizzly evidence

of brutal k*lling.

Look at this. It's just heads.

Shao: Yeah.

Allan: Looking at the skulls, I

can tell that some of the bones

are not yet fused,

so they're very young.

Shao: Teenager.

Allan: Teenagers.

Shao: Yeah.

Allan: Ok.

Shao: We can tell that these

heads were cut off because on

many we found

incision marks here.

Allan: But these are not the

victims of a power-struggle

within the city.

Examination of the skulls

shows they are all young women

and chemical analysis of their

teeth reveals they're not from

here, but from more than 100

miles away to the northwest.

So, how did their

remains end up here?

Shao: It could be because

shimao was involved in

some violence.

Like wars with

other territories.

Allan: 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 w*r?

Allan: I'm investigating

the abandonment

of the colossal

ancient city of shimao.

There's no evidence here

for the natural disasters and

internal conflict that destroyed

other ancient civilizations.

I want to know, could w*r 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 kastner

and eric lo are using laser

scanning, called lidar,

to reveal its structure.

Eric: So what the lidar is

going to produce is a 3d 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.

Allan: Hey guys.

Ryan: Hey al, we've got some

good stuff to show you man.

Allan: Alright, east gate?

Ryan: Yeah so we've been

lidaring round the east gate

the past couple of days,

we were able to scan the

entire thing

allan: Wow.

Ryan: Yeah this is a combination

of about 100 different scans.

Allan: 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

are confronted first by this

u shaped structure which means

they are 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 guardhouses

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 shimao.

The city was prepared for an

attack on a massive scale.

But archaeologists have found

no evidence of destruction or

any sign that these magnificent

defenses were ever breached.

So w*r did not

destroy this city.

But perhaps, there's just

one more possibility

That might finally

explain shimao's downfall.

My team archaeologist sarah

klassen is heading 800 miles

southeast of shimao, to

the yangtze river delta.

She's investigating some

recently discovered ancient

structures that succumbed to

a final destructive force.

She starts by examining a

digital elevation model or dem,

a relief map, made from

multiple satellite images.

Sarah: With the dem, 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.

Allan: Archaeologist wang

ningyuan leads a team

revealing that these banks are

ancient manmade earthworks

Sarah: 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.

Wang: From there to there

it's about 100 meters across.

Allan: This massive earth wall

is built between two hills

to create an ancient

man-made dam and reservoir.

And from the satellite data,

wang ningyuan'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 5000 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 30,000 people to

flourish in these flood prone

coastal lowlands.

That means that

this new discovery,

called liangzhu, is the oldest

city ever found in china!

But like shimao, this

city was also abandoned

after 800 years.

And here, the latest

excavation is finding

evidence of why.

Uest

to find out why the

ancient stone city at shimao

vanished 3800 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 ningyuan and his

team are finding evidence that

the city's agriculture was

hit by an unstoppable force,

climate change.

Wang: The layers below

here belong to the final

period of liangzhu.

This is all manmade.

The thick layer here on

top has accumulated from

repeated seawater floods.

Allan: 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.

Wang: It's amazing that liangzhu

could support such a big city.

But when the climate

changed and big floods came,

this city was helpless

in the face of nature.

So the environment forged this

civilization but also somehow,

decided its end.

Allan: If a dramatic

shift in the climate

could destroy a city the

size of liangzhu could

something similar have

happened at shimao?

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 3800 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.

If you look at the landscape,

look at the soils,

it just doesn't seem that

this area could have sustained

such large numbers of

people in ancient times.

This is the best

explanation so far

for the demise of shimao.

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 shimao deserted

their once great city,

leaving it to disappear

beneath the windblown 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.

I'm amazed to learn how

these lost cultures struggled

to survive in the face of

earthquakes and landslides,

floods and w*r, 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.

The new beliefs, architecture,

art, and hierarchies

that would lead to thousands of

years of civilization in china.