A generation of students found out the hard way that archaeology isn't anywhere near as much fun as Indiana Jones made it look. Still, experts in the field do have their exciting, and even shocking, days at the office. Mainly, these occur when they discover baffling artifacts that are half a planet away from where they should be, proving that a whole lot of what we thought about history was dead wrong. Like ...

5 Cocaine Discovered in Egyptian Mummies

Getty

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

When Columbus and his buddies made it to the New World, aka not India, they found more than just future smallpox sufferers waiting for them. There was a whole cornucopia of never-before-seen plants and animals growing in the Americas, not to mention new and interesting ways to use beads. So while the natives came away from their first European encounter with raging infectious diseases and honeybees, Europeans were introduced to the glories of tobacco, narcotics made from the coca leaf and a whole mess of open-air nudity. If you've ever needed evidence that history is unfair, there it is.

Wikipedia

"This is great, we'll take it. These guys don't have squatters' rights, do they?"

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

At least that's the story we know. And if that's true, then how did some Egyptian mummies wind up with traces of cocaine in their bodies?

The Finds:

In 1992, German scientists were testing their mummies when they found remnants of hashish, tobacco and cocaine in their hair, skin and bones. Now, hashish comes from Asia, so it's not unfathomable that a royal Egyptian would know a guy who could get him the hook-up. But tobacco and cocaine were strictly New World plants at the time of the mummification. It'd be like if some celebrity today tested positive for heroin that could only have been grown on Venus.

Getty

"I've been nodding for the last two millenniums. This shit is incredible."

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

So how did it happen? All we have are theories. Maybe the sites were contaminated by hard-partying archaeologists (although you'd think that if somebody had old pics of themselves snorting coke off of a mummy's ass, they'd have uploaded that shit to Facebook by now). Or maybe the mummies themselves were fake, like maybe they were disco-era archaeologists who just took their love of mummification too far.