Science: Bounty from the Oldest Shipwreck

The Mediterranean yields a vessel sunk perhaps 3,400 years ago

"Metal biscuits with ears."

That surreal image, which might have come from a Magritte painting, was how a young Turkish sponge diver from a small Mediterranean village described some curious objects he had spotted lying near a sunken shipwreck. When George Bass, a nautical archaeologist who had been rummaging around the floors of the Mediterranean coast for 25 years, heard that description in the summer of 1982, he thought-he hoped-that he might be on to something.

That something turned out to be the earliest intact shipwreck ever recovered, a fully laden cargo vessel that...

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