Where to See the Oldest Artifacts in the World

National Museum of Slovenia; Ljubljana, Slovenia

In 1995, a man exploring the Divje Babe cave in northwestern Slovenia came upon a tiny—but monumental—find: a portion of a juvenile cave bear's femur, pierced with what appeared to be handmade holes. Though broken on both ends, the bone also shows the remnants of two other holes, accounting for at least four holes, in total, on the original bone structure. Archeologists examined the bone, wondering whether the holes were indeed handmade, and if so, what they might have been used for. Some archeologists came to a surprising hypothesis: the bone had been used by Neanderthals as an instrument—evidence of music in culture more than 40,000 years ago.

Whether or not the bone fragment was actually used as a prehistoric instrument is the subject of debate, but musicologists have shown that the wind through the holes creates a musical scale, and the odds that naturally created, randomly spaced holes (as opposed to holes deliberately placed by humans) would create the same effect are one in several million.

Pfalz Historical Museum; Speyer, Germany

Fine wines are supposed to get better with age, but historians aren't so sure that the world's oldest bottle of wine, which has been on display for more than a century at Germany's Pfalz Historical Museum, adheres to that rule.

The wine was bottled 1,650 years ago and buried with a Roman nobleman. Because the bottle was topped with a slick of olive oil and sealed with hot wax, a tiny portion of wine has remained in a liquid state (the rest of the bottle is filled with a hard resin-like mixture). The Pfalz region of Germany is known as one of the country's best wine-producing regions, leading historians to believe that the wine contained in the bottle was produced nearby.

The bottle was discovered in 1867 during a grave excavation in Speyer, but remains unopened—and historians believe it should stay that way, since the fragile liquid might not survive exposure to the air.

National Museum of Epigraphy; Athens, Greece

Before the calculator, there was the abacus—and before the abacus, there were counting boards, early versions of the abacus that used painted lines or grooves and stones or pebbles to count large numbers. 

The oldest surviving version of a counting board is known as the Salamis tablet, used by Babylonians around 300 BC. The tablet was discovered in 1846 on the island of Salamis. The tablet is made of white marble, and measures almost five feet in length.

Note: An earlier version incorrectly stated that Salamis Island is located off the eastern coast of Cyprus. The sentence has been changed to reflect that.

Dover Museum; Dover, United Kingdom

In 1992, construction workers in Kent, England, were working on building a road between Dover and Folkestone when they discovered something that would shake the archeological community: the remains of a large, well-preserved prehistoric boat, which tests dated back to roughly 3,500 years ago, making it the oldest known seafaring boat ever discovered (the oldest intact boat, however, is the Khufu ship, built in ancient Egypt and used in burial rituals). 

The Dover Bronze Age Boat, as it came to be named, attracted the attention of the archeological community, which clamored to excavate and preserve it. Learning from past excavation attempts on other Bronze Age boats, archeologists decided to cut the vessel—made from oak and held together with little more than wedges and flexible plant stems—into pieces, and reassemble it after it was removed from the ground, a technique that proved very successful. After seven years of research and conservation, the boat went on display at the Dover Museum.

The British Library; London, England

Made in the late seventh century, the St. Cuthbert Gospel is the oldest European book still in existence. The book was stored in the coffin of St. Cuthbert, an early Christian leader and one of the most important medieval saints, who was buried on the island of Lindisfarne around 698 AD. When Viking raiders came to the island, the coffin was moved to Durham, England. In 1104, the coffin was opened in the Durham Cathedral—and the book, still preserved in its original red leather cover, was rediscovered. The book is a copy of the Gospel of St. John, and is extremely well-preserved, from the cover to the binding. 

In 2012, the British Library in London mounted a massive fundraising campaign to purchase the book. It has toured throughout England—making stops in Durham and Newcastle—but is usually on display at the British Library.