In the summer of 1983, an explosive news suddenly came out of the Chengdu archaeological circle: in an ancient tomb of the Western Han Dynasty more than 2,000 years ago, some plant seeds were found.
The seeds of a thousand years ago actually sprouted and blossomed, and finally bore fruit - the "tomatoes from the Western Han Dynasty" appeared!
In the middle of summer and July of that year, workers at a horticultural farm on Phoenix Mountain in Chengdu's north gate were working on soil extraction and stumbled upon an ancient tomb.
After the municipal cultural management department led, the archaeologists entered the exploration and found that it was a wooden tomb in the Western Han Dynasty.
The tomb is located 3 meters below the surface and is filled with a mixture of green paste mud and yellow mud. The burial chamber is rectangular, sealed as two floors, the upper floor is the rafter chamber, and the lower floor is the bottom chamber. Above the rafter chamber there are 9 rafter covers, all 3.7 meters long, of which the sixth root has been broken and sunk into two sections.
The length of the chamber is 4.76 meters, the width is 2.8 meters and the height is 1.26 meters. There is also a bottom chamber in the lower part of the chamber, which is divided into four chambers. Almost all of the burial items are placed in the sub-chamber.
In the rafters are placed two wooden coffins, which have been mottled and peeled off due to their age.
The burial chamber should have been excavated several times, and the lids of the two wooden coffins were no longer in place, and there were traces of movement. The bones of the owner of the tomb have also been thrown outside the coffin, and it is a mess...
Finally, after the scientific identification of some of the bones by anthropological experts, the male of the two tomb owners is over 56 years old and about 1.64 meters tall, and the female is about 40 years old and about 1.51 meters tall.
After the identification of excavated lacquerware and other artifacts and half two coins, the age of the tomb is the tomb of the Han Wudi period of the Western Han Dynasty.
Originally, the archaeology of the tomb was not alarming, although it was old, but the stolen tomb thieves invaded many times, and there was no major archaeological harvest...
However, what happened next became an "explosion news" in the archaeological circle soon after...
Inside the bottom chamber, archaeologists found four rattan sì and five bamboo steaks, which were opened and contained some carbonized plant seeds.
Preliminary observations can see rice seeds, but what other plant seeds? This requires research to be carried out in a specific laboratory.
Since it was the height of summer, in the process of transporting these seeds to the laboratory, archaeologists deliberately covered the wetland regeneration cloth in order to prevent the vines and bamboo baskets from drying and cracking...
On August 4th and 5th, something strange happened! Someone found that there were actually a few young shoots in the vine and bamboo?
By the third day, all the people were not calm! Because, the number of young shoots has become dozens of plants - is it the seeds of plants that sprouted a thousand years ago?
As soon as this news came out, it immediately attracted the attention of the archaeological community!
Experts from the Horticulture Room of the Sichuan Academy of Agricultural Sciences were tasked with carefully cultivating these small shoots. People are desperate to find out, which plant seed has such "magic"? Can it be reborn after a thousand years of slumber?
A few months later, the mystery was finally revealed! These few seedlings blossomed and bore fruit, and actually produced small red fruits!
After the identification of experts from the Department of Biology of Sichuan University, this red fruit belongs to the solanaceae family and is a kind of tomato! That's right, it's the tomato that we modern people can eat every day...
This time, the archaeological circle is a frying pan! There are tomato seeds in the Western Han tombs, and it is miraculously resurrected more than two thousand years later? This is simply a "fantasy"...
Because, in China's historical records, tomatoes are not native species, but were introduced to China from the Americas during the Ming Dynasty in the eighteenth century.
If tomato seeds are found in this ancient tomb of the Western Han Dynasty, then the biological record that has been nailed for hundreds of years will be rewritten, which is a remarkable archaeological discovery...
For a time, the news of "Chengdu discovered the Western Han tomato" spread throughout the country...
However, there are still many experts who question this matter. They asked questions:
1. There is more than one kind of tomato found in the vine bamboo wat, why are the other seeds carbonized, but the tomato seeds can germinate and survive?
2, since the ancient tomb has been excavated several times, will it be a tomato seed inadvertently left by the tomb robbers in the later period?
What is more regrettable is that the relevant archaeological technology in China in the 1980s is still relatively backward, and there is no better scientific and technological means to identify the length of time for those plant seeds!
This archaeological controversy about the "Tomato of the Western Han Dynasty" continues because neither side has more conclusive evidence, which can be regarded as a rare "strange and interesting thing" in the archaeological circle for a thousand years...