Drone-Dabbling Desert Diggers Detect Dated Dead-Sea Documents, Deliver Dashing Deceased Discovery

Israeli archaeologists on Tuesday revealed their latest monumental findings after years of excavations of the Judean Desert caves, which over 60 years ago yielded the epic Dead Sea Scrolls. The three-year effort, sparked by new parchment pieces appearing on the black market, yielded a handful of incredible discoveries, including 2,000-year-old fragments of biblical verse, a 6,000-year-old skeleton and a preserved 10,500-year-old woven basket thought to be the oldest ever found. The artifacts were unearthed with the aid of advanced drones, high-tech mapping techniques and archaeologists rappelling down cliffs and ancient caves. The original trove of scrolls, first discovered in 1947 by local Bedouin tribes, contains one of the earliest manuscripts of Jewish and Hebrew texts that were later incorporated in the Hebrew Bible, and is considered one of the most valuable, cherished archaeological findings in the world.