There is a mystery in South Africa. For years, the miners in the Transvaal West, near the town of Ottosdal, continue to find metal balls in a sedimentary layer of the Precambrian. The balls are of two types. The first is represented by simple metal balls of mottled bluish white. The second type of balls are hollow, and inside is a white spongy material. Most of the balls the size of a baseball and the similarity in one of these spheres, is marked by three parallel lines that run through the surface. Up to now, have been unearthed hundreds of these spheres. For their appearance it seems the work of man, but their location makes them go back at least 2.8 billion years ago. Professor A. Bisschoff, a noted geologist at the University of Potchefstroom, believes that it is limonite concretions, but this theory has several weaknesses. The limonite is a kind of iron that is formed by oxidation of different iron minerals. E 'common in swamps and in some types of sedimentary rock, especially in the limestone. The artists know it as a source of pigments ocher and umber. And 'well-founded its tendency to form concretions (the geological term for hard rock masses that form over time around a central core), but the concretions of limonite are yellow, brown or black; certainly not blue with white specks. Is not as isolated spheres, but in clusters, usually welded to each other, and never found on them any channel. Their hardness, according to the Mohs scale, ranging from 4 to 5.5, are thus relatively soft. The metal balls in South Africa are so hard that steel will not scalfisce.Se is not limonite, are made of what substance? According to Roelf Marx, curator of the Klerksdorp Museum where they collected several of these balls, were found in a layer of pyrophyllite. Could therefore be of acidic mineral concretions that? Again, the answer seems to be the right one. If under pressure, the mineral crystals give rise to acidic, non-metallic balls. The pyrophyllite is very similar to talc and is used more or less for the same purposes. Can form granular masses, which are However, greasy to the touch and are very pale. The question of toughness is the final topic: the values \u200b\u200bof the Mohs scale for pyrophyllite ranging from 1 to 2, the lowest ever. But if they are not natural formations, which 'is the origin of the spheres? Their appearance is that of an artifact created in foundries using a special steel hardness for a particular purpose. In spite of everything, can not be man-made. According to experts, the first appearance of modern humanity, Homo sapiens sapiens, dating back about 100,000 years ago, in southern Africa. The place is right, but the time and level of technological development are completely wrong. These early humans lived l'esistenza semplice dei cacciatori-raccoglitori. Utilizzavano rocce, ossa e legno, ma non conoscevano l'uso dei metalli. Anche il più semplice manufatto in ferro era ben al di là delle loro possibilità, per non parlare poi dell'acciaio temprato. Anche volendo ignorare il problema dell'abilità tecnica, la datazione resta inconciliabile. Il predecessore dell'uomo moderno, l'Homo erectus, costruiva i propri ripari nella gola di Olduvai 1,8 milioni di anni fa, molto prima della comparsa dei sapiens ma di gran lunga dopo la comparsa delle sfere nel Transvaal occidentale. Anche il più antico Homo abilis costruiva primitivi attrezzi di pietra (ma non sfere metalliche) tra i 2,5 e i 3 milioni di anni fa: sempre troppo tardi per render conto the mysterious discoveries. In fact, the balls were already in place when the earliest hominids diverged from the apes, in an undefined time between five and eight million years ago! The Precambrian period includes the long span of geological history, ranging from training on the planet, 4.6 billion years ago, early Paleozoic era, about 600 million years ago. The fossil record dating back to this period are rare, but geologists have been able to reconstruct a possible scenario. The atmosphere, first of all, it was probably similar to today: a mixture of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, water vapor and oxygen. There were seas and continents, but their boundaries were totally different from today. The World was dominated by what scientists call the supercontinent, primeval land masses that eventually shattered to form the current continents. Life was already on the planet. Algae and bacteria fossils have been found in South African rocks dating back more than 3 billion years ago. Further confirmation comes from the presence of stromatolites, rock structures that form in shallow water, in the grasslands of algae. there was no trace of the presence of life on land and even sea shells - an indication of marine life as we know it today - were still missing. The traces of life more advanced, geologists have found are those of multicellular organisms invertebrates, which are classified as animals, but they are on the evolutionary ladder, a rung below the jellyfish. It is obvious that none of the living creatures of the Precambrian may have fabricated the ball Transvaal.Ma these are not the only strange artifacts that require explanation. Maximilien Melleville, vice president of the Société Académique of Laon, France, reported in the Geologist of April 1862 the discovery of a perfect ball of chalk on a bed of lignite of the Eocene, near his home. the ball and showed the immediate environment of strange signs of careful work. From a larger block was retrieved the ball, which was subsequently released with a clean cut. In other words, an artifact. Be ruled out, as reported by the same Melleville, the ball was placed in the layer in a later period. Once again we find ourselves in the presence of an object that looks man-made, but the ball position in the layer of lignite assigns an age between 45 and 55 million years, well before the appearance of man on the planet. An even greater mystery surrounds the reporting of more recent discovery. In 1928 some Atlas Almond Mathis, a miner, was working deep in a mine two miles north of Heavener, Okla., when an explosion unearthed some cubic blocks, very smooth, with sides measuring approximately 30 cm and that seemed made of some type of cement. An excavation revealed that the next block belonged to a wall along more than 130 meters. The fact that they had been found in a vein of coal in the area gave them an age of at least 286 million years. The obvious question was: who had built the wall? Perhaps the same people who had put the gold chain "of ancient and characteristic bill" in what had become over the millennia the coal vein of Taylorville and Pana mines in southern Illinois. It was discovered by Mrs. SW Culp in a big lump of coal that had broken to turn on his stove.
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