2,000-year-old tomb discovered, living creatures inside crawl out

In the past, tomb robbers often told each other that when the door of an ancient tomb opens, they must wait a while before entering to avoid traps or poisonous gas, otherwise they may be seriously injured or lose their lives. But in an ancient tomb over 2,000 years old in Hubei, China, experts discovered something much more strange.

According to KK News, when excavating an ancient tomb from the Western Han Dynasty that was more than 2,000 years old, archaeologists felt that the structure of the entire ancient tomb was very complicated, combined with geographical, climatic, and location factors, so there was a lot of water inside the ancient tomb. This made it very difficult for them to excavate this tomb.

Accordingly, to clean and dry the tomb, experts must first drain the water and then carefully sift the mud.

However, while sifting the mud, the experts were startled to see something moving. Although surprised, everyone was very curious and quickly scooped up the mud to clean the ancient tomb. Afterwards, everyone was extremely surprised to discover a giant, very old turtle crawling out of the ancient tomb. This was the first time this group of experts had dug up a living creature from an ancient tomb over 2,000 years old.

Nowadays, many people like to keep a small turtle as a pet because turtles are gentle creatures, quiet and easy to care for. The Chinese believe that turtles are related to longevity and they also bring good luck, so it is not surprising that keeping turtles as pets has become popular.

Since ancient times, there have been many Chinese people who kept turtles. So is it possible that the owner of the ancient tomb was buried with his pet turtle?

Giant turtles were discovered in ancient tombs in Hubei. (Illustration: KK News).

In fact, this is not unprecedented. Many documents say that in ancient times, the Chinese used tortoise shells for divination, so this animal was always considered a sacred animal, able to move and know many things in the world of the living and the dead. Some ancient tombs also recorded the custom of burying turtles with the dead in ancient China. Accordingly, when burying the dead, people often buried a small turtle under the coffin with the belief that the dead could "ride" this turtle to travel in the underworld.

Thinking about this, some people may shudder. If the giant turtle above was really buried with the owner of the ancient tomb, it would have lived for thousands of years. Because this ancient tomb has existed for more than 2,000 years. However, experts found that the tomb was quite sealed, seemingly never destroyed, so the possibility of the turtle surviving for thousands of years inside the ancient tomb is extremely low.

However, the giant old turtle is clearly still alive inside the ancient tomb. Theory and reality are so contradictory that experts are rushing to find a way to decode the mystery.

Finally, a small detail that was not noticed at first became the key to help them solve the mystery. It turned out that this ancient tomb had been visited by tomb robbers . The evidence was that some relics that should have been inside the ancient tomb were lost, although archaeologists still found many other valuable artifacts. Therefore, experts believe that the turtle accidentally crawled into the ancient tomb and luckily survived the robbery .

According to KK News, not only the ancient tombs in Hubei, in fact, there have been several cases of living turtles discovered in other ancient tombs.

For example, in the case of the discovery of four ancient tombs at the construction site of a power station in Beijing, during the excavation, a live turtle weighing 3 kg crawled out, surprising many people. Initially, some people also thought that the turtle was buried with the owner of the ancient tomb and estimated that it was more than a thousand years old. But in fact, this was just an ordinary turtle that accidentally crawled into the ancient tomb after the tomb was dug up by grave robbers looking for artifacts.