DIVERS FIND 4,700-YEAR-OLD SHIPWRECK, POTENTIALLY OLDEST EVER DISCOVERED

Turkish divers working off Kekova Island in Antalya have brought up more than 30 ceramic jars and three big stone anchors from a wreck sitting about 100 feet down, and the culture minister announced on X that it is the oldest shipwreck ever found. Mehmet Nuri Ersoy put the jars at 4,700 years old, which means this boat went under while crews in Egypt were still stacking the Great Pyramid. The ship itself is gone. Every plank rotted off, so there is nothing organic left to radiocarbon test, and the entire claim rests on pottery shape. Two handles, a ridge at the middle of the body, a flat base. Hakan Öniz of Akdeniz University says his team got there by spotting the same jar forms in a publication on Egyptian archaeology and going back to the site, and he puts his confidence in the date at 100%. Bold number for a man whose evidence is handles. Karin Sowada of Macquarie University examined the pots once they hit the surface and found a viscous, glossy residue inside some of them. Her words to the BBC: "I looked inside and nearly fainted." Olive oil, wine and tree resin are all on the table. Clay analysis points to workshops in the Jordan Valley, and Öniz figures the ship was hauling the stuff west, maybe toward Troy or Minoan Crete. It never got there.

Why you should give a shit: The oldest ship humanity has ever found was a 33-foot boat full of cooking oil that never made its delivery, so some Turk has been waiting over 4,000 years for his oil that never came.