When future archaeologists look back at our era thousands of years from now, they'll reach two major conclusions: 1) our subway system was very inefficient and bizarrely sandwich-centric, and 2) we were morons. Why? Because if it wasn't for some of our contemporaries (mostly tourists , to no one's surprise), those future people could have enjoyed recently ruined historical locales like ...

6 Thieves Try To Steal 5,000-Year-Old Cave Painting, Destroy It Instead

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If Indiana Jones has taught us anything, it's that it's easy to steal a historic artifact as long as you don't do anything stupid, like drink from it, look at it, or deliberately shatter it into a million pieces with a chisel. Oh, right: That last one wasn't fictional. Last year, visitors at Los Escolares Cave in Santa Elena, Spain, noticed some slight changes in a rock painting of a man-sparrow hybrid (our ancestors were freaks) that had remained undisturbed for five millennia:

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"On this site 5,000 years ago, The Ultimate Warrior was born."

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Cave paintings such as this are not usually regarded as the easiest targets for thievery, what with the whole "being attached to several million tons of rock" thing. You can't just slip the whole mountain into a bag and quietly walk away. However, the perpetrators had a plan with equals parts finesse and cunning: chiseling it off the wall. In a turn of events that anyone without forethought would call "surprising," this didn't work out, and the lower part of the painting self-destructed into dust, taking with it several millennia's worth of historic significance, the thieves' ability to deny being literally rock-fuck stupid, and civilization's earliest known furry art.

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Let's be fair to the numbnuts who did this: Everyone's sort of assuming they planned to sell the painting somewhere, but maybe they didn't. Maybe they were just enraptured by its beauty and didn't have a camera.

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"Honey, clear some space on the mantelpiece."

Of course, having a camera doesn't guarantee you won't cause destruction ...