Three of the 20th century's greatest finds were made by non-archaeologists: Lascaux by teenagers and a dog in 1940, the Dead Sea Scrolls by Bedouin shepherds in 1947, the Terracotta Army by farmers digging a well in 1974.

1940 · 1947 · 1974 · apart: 34 years

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The events

• The paintings of Lascauxc. 17,000 BC · Montignac, France. The hundreds of bulls, horses and deer at Lascaux were painted 17,000–22,000 years ago, partly from scaffolds. The cave was found in 1940 by 18-year-old Marcel Ravidat, whose dog nosed into a hole under an uprooted tree; since 1963 visitors see only replicas.
• Shepherds find the Dead Sea Scrolls1947 · Qumran, by the Dead Sea. In the winter of 1946–1947 the Bedouin shepherd Muhammed edh-Dhib and his cousins found jars of scrolls about 2,000 years old in a cave by the Dead Sea, the oldest manuscripts of biblical books. Some of the scrolls were later sold through an advert in The Wall Street Journal.
• Terracotta Army210 BC · Mount Li. Qin Shi Huang died in 210 BC and was buried in a vast mausoleum at Mount Li. It is guarded by thousands of life-size clay warriors with horses and chariots, discovered by farmers in 1974.

20th century

More amazing facts

• 1938 Three months after the Munich Agreement, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin discovered the fission of uranium.
• 1938 Saudi Arabia struck oil only on its seventh try. Six wells at Dammam yielded nothing commercial; on 3 March 1938 the seventh gushed from about 1,440 m down, and it kept pumping until 1982.
• 1938 Teflon was found by sawing open an 'empty' cylinder.
• 1938 The coelacanth is more closely related to you than to a tuna.
• 1938 · 1943 The ballpoint pen was invented by a Hungarian and launched in Argentina.
• 1941 Velcro was invented after a walk with a dog. In 1941 Swiss engineer George de Mestral came back from a hunt in the Alps covered in burrs and saw hundreds of tiny hooks under the microscope.

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