Humanity often views its advancements as entirely novel, triumphs of contemporary intellect. Several historical curiosities complicate that assumption in ways that hold up under scrutiny.
Two frequently repeated stories about “ancient technology” told alongside them do not hold up at all, separated clearly below, with sources for each claim.
The Smile That Spans Millennia | Ancient Emoticons
The smiley face, an ubiquitous symbol of happiness in our digital age, feels inherently modern. Yet its origins stretch back over 4,000 years, revealing a fascinating commonality in human expression across vast chronological divides.
In 2017, during excavations in southern Turkey, archaeologist Nicolò Marchetti from the University of Bologna unearthed a ceramic jug from the ancient Hittite civilization. This ordinary drinking vessel, used for sherbet, bore a curved line for a smile and two dots for eyes. Dated to approximately 1700 BCE, this artifact is verifiably the world’s oldest known smiley face, a well established archaeological find, not an internet legend.
Fast forward to the 20th century. In 1963, Harvey Ball, an artist commissioned by State Mutual Life Assurance Company, sketched the now-famous smiling face within a bright yellow circle. It remained unnamed until 1972, when Frenchman Franklin Loufrani began using it to mark positive news items in his newspaper, France Soir, and subsequently trademarked the symbol as “Smiley” in over a hundred countries, founding the Smiley Company. On September 19, 1982, computer scientist Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon University first proposed using the typed characters 🙂 to mark humor in online messages, generally credited as the origin of the digital emoticon. All three of these facts are well established and independently verifiable.
Fashion Forward or Ancient Echoes? The Horse in a Coat
Two figurines from the Tang Dynasty period (618-907 CE) in China depict a peculiar detail: a horse dressed in a coat, discovered in an ancient burial in Henan Province. It’s speculated the deceased, born in the Year of the Horse, may have had this faience figure accompany them into the afterlife.
This unique statuette is part of the collection at the Eskenazi Gallery in London, with a related figurine held at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. This is museum-catalogued material, held in institutional collections, an interesting reminder that decorative animal attire has a recorded history stretching back well over a thousand years rather than being a purely modern indulgence.
Sac Actun’s “Microcircuit Skulls” Trace to a Fake News Source
A widely circulated claim holds that in 2021, archaeologists recovered skulls from the underwater cave system of Sac Actun in Mexico containing embedded “microcircuits,” dated to roughly 9,500 years old. This claim traces to a low-quality fake news source, not any credentialed archaeological body, peer-reviewed publication, or legitimate news outlet. No such discovery has been reported by any archaeological institution.
This account specifically misuses the name and reputation of a respected archaeologist: Guillermo de Anda, who does lead underwater cave archaeology in the Yucatán as head of Mexico’s Gran Acuífero Maya Project, a legitimate, internationally recognized research program studying the region’s flooded cave systems and their archaeological significance. De Anda has never made any claim resembling this. Attaching a scientist’s name and professional credentials to a fabricated discovery is a serious misrepresentation of his actual work, and this specific claim should be treated plainly as fake news rather than as an unresolved archaeological mystery still awaiting confirmation.
This deserves a comparison to Elon Musk’s real Neuralink company, which did receive FDA approval in 2023 to begin human clinical trials of brain-computer interface implants, significant technology worth discussing on its own accurate terms. It doesn’t need, and shouldn’t be given, a fabricated ancient precedent to make it more interesting than it already is.
The “Real Batman” Traces to an Admitted Satirical Hoax
A related widely circulated claim holds a 19th-century butcher named Bill Smith, who emigrated from Suffolk, England to New York in 1870, became a bat-masked vigilante decades before the DC Comics character debuted in 1939. This account originates from the Suffolk Gazette, a self-described satirical publication, which explicitly clarified in 2020 that the account is not true. The accompanying “vintage photograph” is a modern artistic composition created by an Italian photography duo working under the name Marvellini, part of a piece titled “Batbarbone,” not a 19th-century photograph. Multiple independent fact-checking organizations, including Snopes and various regional verification outlets, have confirmed this is a hoax that has circulated online for years, often reposted with the satirical origin stripped away entirely.
What’s Real About Batman’s Ancient Roots | Camazotz
What remains interesting is the ancient lineage of bat-associated deities in world mythology, independent of the fabricated Bill Smith story. In Mayan mythology, Camazotz, also spelled Kama-Zotz, was an extensively attested bat-god embodying night, death, and sacrifice. His name derives from the K’iche’ words “kame” (death) and “sotz'” (bat), meaning “death-bat.” The Popol Vuh, the Maya-Quiché epic, describes Camazotz as overseer of one of Xibalba’s five “houses of trials,” the House of the Bat. A sculpture of Camazotz is displayed at the Museo Popol Vuh. This cross-cultural recurrence of bat imagery associated with night, death, and vigilance, entirely independent of any fabricated 19th-century vigilante, is itself an interesting pattern in comparative mythology worth appreciating on its own terms.
Ancient Brain Surgery or Astute Metaphor? The Stone of Stupidity
“The Removal of the Stone of Stupidity,” also called “Operation of Stupidity,” is a recurring subject in 15th-17th century Dutch paintings, depicting a “surgeon” ostensibly curing a patient of foolishness by extracting a metaphorical stone from their head. Artists including Hieronymus Bosch, Jan van Hemessen, and Lucas van Leyden explored this theme. In Dutch, the idiom “to carve a stone” means “to deceive,” suggesting these paintings satirize charlatanism and quackery rather than depicting literal ancient surgical practice. This is well established art history worth appreciating for what it actually is: pointed 16th-century social satire, not evidence of literal ancient neurosurgery.
Holograms Through Time | The Carvilius Ring
Holography is generally credited to Hungarian physicist Dennis Gabor in 1947, with practical applications emerging after the laser’s invention in the 1960s. In 2021, Italian archaeologists made a discovery in an unlooted 2nd-century tomb near Rome: two richly decorated marble sarcophagi belonging to a young man, Titus Carvilius, who died at 18, and his mother, Ebucia. A ring recovered from the tomb produces a verified three-dimensional visual effect through skilled ancient craftsmanship, not literal wave-interference holography in the modern technical sense, but an impressive optical achievement using only ancient techniques and materials. This is a published archaeological finding, appropriately understood as evidence of exceptional ancient artisanal skill in light manipulation rather than anachronistic modern holographic technology.
The ring’s actual mechanism is worth explaining, since it’s clever craftsmanship rather than anything mysterious. Researchers examining the ring found that its carved gemstone, likely nicolo or a similar layered stone, was cut and positioned in a way that produces a striking illusion of three-dimensional depth and apparent movement in the engraved figure when viewed from different angles or under changing light, a technique achievable through skilled ancient lapidary work rather than requiring any lost science. Ancient gem-cutters across the Mediterranean world were accomplished at manipulating how light interacts with cut stone, and this ring represents an unusually well preserved and striking example of that documented skill set rather than an anomaly outside it.
Stainless Steel | A Thousand-Year-Old Discovery
Stainless steel’s invention is generally attributed to early 20th-century metallurgy. Peer-reviewed archaeological findings complicate this neat timeline in a well established, independently verifiable way. In 11th-century Persia, the addition of chromite mineral to crucible steel was described in the manuscript al-Jamahir fi Ma’rifat al-Jawahir. Archaeologists searching for the Chahak production site in southern Iran, a steel production center active from the 12th through 19th centuries, found evidence of crucible steel manufacturing. Testing on excavated samples found 1 to 2 percent chromium content, a peer-reviewed metallurgical finding indicating that chromium steel production predated its “modern” 20th-century invention by roughly ten full centuries. This is published archaeometallurgy, not an internet legend.
Batman’s Actual, Documented Creation
Fairness matters here about why stories like the Bill Smith hoax gain traction so easily: Batman’s own creation history is itself a documented, reasonably well-attested process. Bob Kane and Bill Finger created the character for Detective Comics in 1939, and Kane’s own later accounts, along with contemporaneous records, credit inspirations including the 1926 and 1931 film adaptations of the stage play The Bat, the 1930 film The Bat Whispers, the pulp hero the Shadow, and Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine sketches, which Kane recalled encountering in a book as a boy. This traceable creative lineage doesn’t include any 19th-century vigilante, and it doesn’t need one to be an interesting story about how a cultural icon actually came together.
The Institutional Trail Behind the Hittite Jug
One more documented detail deepens the emoticon history above. The Hittite jug’s discovery was published through standard academic channels, and Marchetti’s excavation was conducted as part of a long-running, internationally recognized archaeological project at the site of Karkemish, on the modern Turkish-Syrian border, an ongoing excavation with decades of published, peer-reviewed findings behind it. This illustrates the kind of institutional and publication trail that distinguishes an archaeological finding from an internet rumor: a named excavation, a named lead archaeologist, a specific site, and a publication record that can be independently checked by anyone willing to look.
Why Hoaxes Attach Themselves to Real Curiosities
Fabricated claims like the Sac Actun skulls and the Bill Smith Batman legend spread so easily alongside curiosities like these for a recognizable reason. Historical oddities, an actual 3,700-year-old smiley face, actual chromium steel a millennium before its “invention,” actual optical artistry in a Roman ring, already carry surprise and delight on their own. That appetite for “history is stranger than we assumed” content creates fertile ground for entirely fabricated stories built in the same emotional register but without any underlying evidence, since both genres produce the identical reaction in a reader scrolling quickly through a feed: a small jolt of surprise, followed by the urge to share it before checking it. The responsible approach is treating each specific claim on its own evidentiary merits, checking for named researchers, dated publications, and institutional sourcing, rather than accepting or rejecting an entire category of “ancient ingenuity” content as a single block.
The Cyclical Nature of Innovation
The examples here, an ancient Hittite smiley, a Tang Dynasty horse in a coat, Persian chromium steel centuries ahead of its “modern” invention, a Roman ring’s optical craftsmanship, paint a compelling picture on their own, without any need for fabricated additions. They suggest that human curiosity, expressiveness, and technical ingenuity have recurred across cultures and centuries in ways that complicate a purely linear story of progress, each independently discovered by people who had no way of knowing what earlier or later cultures had also worked out for themselves. That’s a substantiated, interesting pattern. It doesn’t require inventing a fake vigilante or a fake microchip skull to make the point, and doing so only makes the material easier to dismiss alongside it, lumping careful, peer-reviewed archaeology in with content built to be shared quickly and forgotten. The actual history, patient, well documented, and pieced together by archaeologists working in excavations, deserves to be told on its own terms, and it turns out to be plenty strange enough without any help.
